Here is a fan art of my favorite character from the old 2D fight game The Last Blade 2 released by SNK in 1998 when I was 17 years old. Her name is Hibiki Takane: daughter of a famed swordsmith and I painted her holding her saber draped into a fabric while walking into a garden. The Last Blade series art-direction, beautiful design, flat colors saturated, dynamic animation, polished painterly backgrounds and musics had certainly a strong influence on my general taste for art because I kept playing it and thinking about it through the years. That's probably because I can feel in it the love for a high quality anime 2D art style. Maybe this specific art-direction was even a survival choice for the series at a period in time when 3D fight games started to be the new standard and 2D was called to disappear. Twenty years later, I'm glad this had never really happened and 2D is still around! You can still play this old title on one of the many adaptations it has for consoles (even modern) or via on Steam.