Bakumatsu Rouman: The Last Blade: Ichijo Akari

Akari is the cute little girl character type who normally drives me nuts in these games.. but for some reason I like her. ^_^ She's cute, yeah, but she's also got style. She plays at being innocent, but then she blithely kicks serious butt. She has attitude that rocks, especially when matched with her innocent look. Oh, and I like her Kansai accent, too.

Akari also has some of the weirdest, and coolest moves in the game. Her weapon is the same kind of stick that shinto priests use to purify things, and she whacks pretty good with it. But she also does the strangest things.. she calls on a demon who swallows her up, then spits her back out to wham into her opponent. She calls a demon to clank a bell over her opponent and then shoot them in a whirling spiral around the outside of it and bam! out the top. And one of her specials involves her summoning one hundred weird and wonderful Japanese demons who rush across the screen in a huge stampede, completely flattening her opponent. Yup, she's cool.

In the second game, Akari has been improved somewhat. (As if she wasn't deadly enough already!) She's a little faster, a little stronger, and some of her moves have been added to. Gods, this little 13 year old is hard to beat!

Last Blade 1 Story: The Ichijo family works in the security business, although they mostly just observe. Even though she is only 13, Akari can summon spirits just as well as anyone else, and she has an attitude to go with it. One day Akari's father sent her off to observe the Gates of Hell and report to him about it. However Akari, determined to give her job 200%, goes not only to find out what is going on but to put everything to right again while she's at it. Easy enough, ne?

Last Blade 2 Story: When her beloved sister, Hikari, fell ill, Akari became restless and worried. Soon, her father called for her, his expression grim. He started to tell her that Hell's Gate had.. but before he could so much as say what it had done, or might be doing, Akari was on her feet and headed for the door; her reckless mind suddenly sure that Hell's Gate was the reason for her sister's illness, she was determined to cure Hikari, and get revenge at the same time. Her father was left to shout curses after her disappearing figure.

Useless but fun facts: Akari's birthdate is September 26th, 1850, making her 13 years old at the time of the first game. The kanji for Ichijo means something like one block, as in a town, and since Akari is in hiragana, it doesn't really mean anything special.