design was inspired by the main character of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga and film Akira, Shotaro Kaneda. Late in production, his name was changed to Kyo Kusanagi, as a means of relating the character to the Yamata no Orochi legend, which was the basis of the story arc of the game. The name Syo would later be used for Kyo's Another Striker in The King of Fighters 2000. Another planned name before Syo was but no design was elaborated from it. However, in the end SNK chose the name Kyo as they felt it more fitting. While in charge of designing the character, Yuichiro Hiraki sought to contrast Kyo with Street Fighter character Ryu, as he believed the latter was a popular character in international markets and that Kyo's characterization and design could benefit from appealing to as broad a demographic as possible. Despite Kyo originally being depicted as a lazy young adult, he shows a notable character arc across the games: he develops a new fighting style on his own which contrasts his original concept of being born with talent. In contrast to Terry and Ryo, Kyo was given a natural life in his debut. However, the death of his father Saisyu at the hands of Rugal Bernstein was executed to make him more tragic and serious when it came to his training, leaving Japan in his ending to become stronger in future battles. When making The King of Fighters '94, developers thought Kyo would appeal to audiences by contrasting starkly with characters from Fatal Fury, whose characters were much older and had more muscular bodies than Kyo's. Kyo's girlfriend Yuki was also created by Morioka. By the next game, SNK introduced Iori Yagami as Kyo's rival; in contrast to Kyo, SNK decided to keep Iori's life as private as possible in order to differentiate the two characters. The rivalry between these two men was noted to stand out across the franchise with Ogura claiming despite having the two characters having differences, they still have respect towards each other, making their team ups with Chizuru Kagura to defeat a common enemy feel natural. According to the scenario writer, while Kyo and Benimaru's relationship was initially that of rivals to, it eventually became a case of siblings with Benimaru acting like the older ones. Ureshino also finds that the romance between Kyo and Yuki ended up being nicely written to the