I've entertained the idea of cosplaying Kohran Li of Sakura Wars several times, starting when I started wearing large circular glasses in 2020. I finally managed to assemble a viable cosplay on January 17, 2025, with local help. This was in fact the endgame of the glasses, which I always told everyone was for the purpose of "being more anime". The "proper" cosplay would be her most recognizable outfit, in cheongsam. However, my only opportunity to cosplay regularly is currently MAGFest, which is held in January. Sakura Wars 2 introduces alternate outfits for each character, and Kohran's is a tangzhuang more appropriate for the autumn and winter months that the second half takes place in. I put so much work into this cosplay that I feel compelled to write commentary on each photo.

This cosplay was made possible by @through_anothers_eye on Instagram, a local specialist in costuming and photographer who did the bulk of the costume production, and Starblade86 on Discord, for consultation on some details on the costume. It was in mid-2024 that I started to seriously prepare for the cosplay. I first attempted to find a cheongsam that would fit me but came up short. Last autumn, @through_anothers_eye posted photos of another cosplay she had made for another local anime convention and offered to assist with costumes for anyone else in the area, and I took her up on it immediately. It was around that time when I came to the realization that since my main stage for cosplay is in the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center for MAGFest, it would need to stand up to winter wind chill. In that light, the tang suit is the only practical choice, even if it is the path of least resistance since it isn't her most iconic outfit. It wouldn't be until December that we would be able to start collaborating on it in earnest.

Some research eventually got me the correct search term, and surprisingly, I was able to find everything I needed from Amazon and Walmart. The tang suit I found on Amazon is 100% cotton. Amazon also sold the green knot buttons, purple wig, pink wrap-around sash, and kung fu shoes. For some reason, every other cosplay I've found of Kohran to date uses high-heel shoes, when Kohran herself never wears anything other than flat shoes. The tang suit already had the correct style of knot buttons in red, so the first major modification needed would be to replace them with green knots of the same style. The other changes would be to add gold trim and green cuffs, and after failing to find fabrics for either of those at my local craft supply stores, I went to Walmart as a last resort and found both. @through_anothers_eye then did all of the alterations needed over the course of a week including the wig, and the results were well beyond expectations.

Most of the Sakura Wars games include minigames, and in the first game, the first minigame is Koi-Koi with Kohran. As a result, she is strongly associated with hanafuda cards, mostly because players are very likely to lose their first game of Koi-Koi. Some cosplayers incorporate hanafuda cards, so I did the same, with the high-value "Five Hikari" yaku. The savvy will recognize the hanafuda cards in the second photo as the black-backed Nintendo set. I recognize it is probably sacrilege to use Nintendo products for a Sega cosplay, but I got them from Club Nintendo around 15 years ago and finally found a practical use for them.

One of the shots I planned early in this project is a recreation of the shot in the intro video of Sakura Wars at 0:15, where Kohran mixes chemicals to explosive results[a]. These two photos were the most complicated, so they were first we took. We used a green screen for them, which turned out to be an ideal background to quickly change into a chalkboard with some added texturing and color correction.

Explosions happen frequently when Kohran conducts science. Even then, I didn't originally plan on recreating the frame in the intro in which the chemical mixture explodes because the result is comical damage to Kohran's face, hair, and clothing. I then reasoned that none of this will be necessary if I just recreate the instant before with a flashbang effect with the beaker as the epicenter, but the effect would be more complicated than a simple white overlay on a photo. After some experimentation, I realized the only thing needed to sell the effect is to keep the frame of the glasses visible, being one of Kohran's most defining visual traits. (Multiple pieces of fanart including cosplay gets the glasses shape incorrect, which I take as an irreconcilable error.) After shaping the "explosion" to be contained within the glass to create a kind of mushroom cloud-like blast and masking what's left to occlude it where applicable, along with a soft shadow along my body, the effect was good enough, if exaggerated. To achieve this effect, I used the Yu-Gi-Oh card "Overworked" as a model, specifically the Japanese artwork.

Since I tend to go way too far on ideas I plan for too long, and because I needed to one-up all of the other Kohran cosplays I've seen to justify the effort, I got the idea to incorporate other aspects of her character in ways that others haven't done yet. In combat, she's assisted by many smaller robots of her own design, one of which is the "Chibi-Robo", a spherical robot with claw hands and a pointed top that attacks enemies in swarms. This robot has the simplest design, so I hastily recreated it in Blender for a 3D print.

It took five days to create and prototype the design. The first iteration was a single sphere squashed slightly and the bottom cut so it can sit upright, with a vertical seam indent. Spherical shapes are notoriously difficult to print, and I was using silk silver PLA for the metallic finish, so it was impossible to print a sphere without supports that will destroy the surface quality. In the second iteration, I realized that since the Chibi-Robo's design is symmetrical, I can cut it in half vertically and print each side as a hemisphere, which will create an even more pronounced seam when glued together, just as I wanted. The most difficult aspect then proved to be the black area for the eyes, which I first wanted to paint black. I then thought it would be cheaper to print this as a part in black PLA and glue it onto the body in an indentation, but shaping it to fit a curved inset was even more difficult. I resorted to using negative volumes in OrcaSlicer to overcompensate for the curve and using a large amount of hot glue to mate the body and the eyepiece across the large gap between them. It's a lazy solution but I was limited on time. I also wanted to have the rivets separated from the body instead of integrated in the body, but it didn't have the striking effect I was hoping for—I would have been better off keeping the rivets as part of the main model, as I did with the claw hands.

Part of what made this design so challenging is the lack of reference material for the Chibi-Robo. They appear infrequently and their designs change between games, yet it feels like an important part of Kohran's character to me for some reason. I was unable to find any detailed illustrations of them in artbooks or even any gameplay footage where they appeared for more than a few moments at a time. For all of the hassle I went through to make just one of them for a one-off photo, I made a second one because these things are always seen in groups, and had all of the same assembly issues I did the first time. @through_anothers_eye came up with the idea for a photo of Kohran performing electronic work on the Chibi-Robo units, and I provided a lab coat I happened to own to complete the shot.

The STLs can be downloaded here. Due to all of the shortcuts I took to construct the model for a photoshoot, they are rather sloppy. Therefore, I'm releasing them in the public domain (CC0) and providing no support for anyone who chooses to print them. If you do print it, use at least 2 wall perimeters and 50% Lightning infill if your slicer supports it, otherwise use the light support infill of your choice. The claw hands require supports for the rivets and the inner hole bridge. The two halves of the body and the cap are affixed to each other with cyanoacrylate super glue, as are the rivets on the body halves and the eye piece, and the eyes in the indentations of the eye piece. The arms and hands are assembled with hot glue. Depending on the print orientation of the arms, it may be necessary to mirror one or both of them if they do not assemble at the angle shown in the photo. I recommend printing the arms and hands with the seam in the back to minimize their appearance.

The last spur-of-the-moment shoot involved a previous Kohran commission: Playing as Kohran in Sakura Wars Columns 2 for the Dreamcast (with the English translation released 2022). In October 2022, I commissioned Sarracenian to create custom artwork for my Hori Fighting Edge arcade controller, which was the only stick I had at the time that I hadn't modified. My goal was to expand on the few times Kohran strikes martial arts poses, which she ceased entirely by the time of the remake of the first game, Sakura Wars: In Hot Blood. Below is a closeup of the result. I complemented it with a green metal battop to allude to the color of her Kobu.

The Sakura Wars Columns games have exclusive art of each character for the well backdrops, loosely based on scenes from the first two Sakura Wars games, and they reflect the state of your well. The single-player endless puzzle mode repurposes the images for attacking the opponent in the versus mode as feedback for chains, so for the photo, I deliberately chose one of the few images of Kohran in an aggressive hand-to-hand fighting stance to complement my stick's art. All of this is in service of making my own photoshoot unique in ways only I can do, along with my 3D print.

In conclusion, the most pressing thing I would do again would be to take all of these photos with circular glasses with the lenses removed. The reflections in the lenses were a tremendous burden, and it would not have made any difference for cosplay purposes if the frame was empty. Somehow I failed to notice in my research that a lot of the Kohran cosplayers who came before me don't use lenses in their glasses, and those who did used great restraint in their poses. Doing this may have also helped to emphasize my natural freckles (another Kohran hallmark), rather than subdue them as the lenses did. Additionally, as a side effect of the tang suit being suitable as year-round attire, if I really needed to, I can wear it without the wig or sash and no one would be the wiser about it being components of a video game cosplay. Perhaps someday I can take this to the logical conclusion.