Naoto Kurogane

**Naoto Kurogane** (黒鉄ナオト *Kurogane Naoto*) is the main protagonist of the *BlazBlue: Bloodedge Experience*series. He is gifted with the Eye of the Hunter and is the servant of Raquel Alucard. His life-force value hovered around 9,810 until he became Raquel’s servant. He became a playable character in *BlazBlue: Centralfiction.*

## Appearance

Naoto has brown eyes, a pale complexion and eye-length, styled brown hair with an ahoge poking out of the top. He wears the uniform of New Kawahama First High School; a black jacket and accompanying black jeans.
When he uses Bloodedge, his hair turns a shocking white and his eyes change to a fierce deep red, making him resemble the other Bloodedge – Ragna. Additionally, strange, red, glowing, rune-like symbols appear on his hand when utilizing the Bloodedge.

In *Centralfiction,*he now wears a modified black collar skintight jacket with short sleeves and cross emblems, black fingerless gloves with red guards, with his right arm tightly covered by a material, black trouser with a red belt, and black-red boots with metal guards. A red cross with white outlines appears on the back of his jacket and on his trousers, it is identical to the one that Rachel and Raquel bear on their own clothes. Additionally there is another big, yellow, strange symbol on the back of his jacket, right above the cross symbol. He has a similar marking as Ragna, but it has writing a cross his chest. When using Bloodedge, his marking changed differently.

## Personality

Naoto is a caring individual who seemingly rushes into situations without thinking much about the consequences. Despite initially being thought of as rather cowardly by Raquel, he later reveals himself to be extremely courageous when the odds are stacked against him.

His relationship with Haruka Hayami is complicated, in Chapter 3 of *BlazBlue: Bloodedge Experience – Part 1*, the two teenagers nearly kiss until they were interrupted and throughout the novel, the two are highly implied to have strong romantic feelings for one another, yet Naoto’s own stubbornness and oblivious nature tends to get in the way of the feelings blossoming. Eventually, they do kiss, however.

Naoto is also shown to not be fond of tightly packed places or just people in general, lending reason as to why he avoids getting on the bus to school and instead walks the 30 minute distance.

## Powers and Abilities

While not physically powerful at first, after his death he gained more strength and speed as well as the ability Regeneration that heals any wounds at the cost of Raquel’s life-value. And much like Ragna, his arm that was severed became replaced by an arm made from Raquel’s blood and enhanced by Clavis Alucard, which was more powerful than his real right arm.

Naoto possesses the Eye of the Hunter in his right eye; an ability which allows him to clearly see the value of someones life-force. The lower the life-force, the seemingly closer they are to death.

In terms of physical ability, Naoto fights with a fighting style that is akin to brawling due to a majority of swinging blows with active movement, but also has shades of boxing due to his focused fighting stance. Compared to Ragna, Naoto’s fighting style is more fluid with a heavier focus on defensive-bypassing combat as well as having slightly more durability than him; these foils cause Naoto to somewhat be a force that unknowingly threatens to override Ragna’s existence during the events of *Centralfiction*, even to the point of forcibly establishing a life-link with Rachel albeit beyond his control.

Thus, Naoto has several abilities that emulate Ragna in many ways as shown in *Centralfiction*, such as an anti-air attack with an **Inferno**-naming motif, a fang-motif based attack with followups, and more. Naoto even has both his Exceed Accel and Astral Heat emulate Ragna’s scythe motif as well in a similar fashion.

Naoto’s Drive is **Bloodedge (ブラッドエッジ *Buraddoejji*)**, which allows him to control his blood. In novels he gave it the shape of various weapons, and in the game he creates temporary blades of blood. These blades can be charged to crush his opponent’s guard.

He also possesses an ability called **Enhancer**, which changes properties of his special moves and drive attacks if he performs them while running; this is akin to certain attacks in other fighting games that can only be done mid-run/dash.

His Overdrive, **Blood Repulsor (ブラッドリパルサー *Buraddo Riparusā*)**, causes his hair to turn white and eyes red (making him the only character to undergo a physical-appearance change when Overdrive is activated), while shortening the startup of Bloodedge attacks and strengthening effects of Enhancer.

## TMNT X Pokemon

Naoto works with Medaka during battles. Since she has The End Abnormality, she can copy his Bloodegde Drive and helps him with the final blow

## Trivia

* “Naoto” (直人) is a Japanese masculine name meaning “one who is honest”, and “Kurogane” (黒鉄) literally means “black iron” in Japanese; the latter is a coincidental nod to his **Bloodedge** ability due to iron being a component of blood.
* Naoto’s leitmotif, “Jaeger”, is German for “Hunter”, nod to his gifted ability Eye of the Hunter, but without the umlaut normally used for the “ae” portion.
* Naoto’s naming-motif seem to nod to divinity and/or mythology (almost akin to Ragna’s), as witnessed in techniques such as **Grim of Phantom**, **Divine Smasher**, **Divine Reaper** and **Edge of Eternity**. Furthermore, Naoto also names some of these said techniques with acronyms.
	+ This once again, also paints him as a foil to Ragna due to Naoto only having around half of his techniques being named with hell-based motifs like the former; the latter half of Naoto’s moveset is named with a divinity motif and/or light-sided motif in mind.