Overwatch’s next season is coming next week, and like all seasons since the game’s soft reboot earlier this year, it’s bringing a new hero to the roster. This time it’s Shion, an Omnic damage hero and leader of the Hashimoto clan Mizuki belongs to. Before she was revealed, fans were excited at the prospect of a new synthetic Omnic hero, as there are only a handful of them in Overwatch’s roster. Now that we’ve seen her in action, however, it seems she is, somehow, another victim of the “same face syndrome” the hero shooter cannot shake.
To start off with the positive, Shion’s looks pretty rad. She wields two pistols and can ride and launch a motorcycle into her foes. The hero’s got a stylish gunslinger thing going on, and her distorted Omnic voice is intimidating and a bit sultry. It’s clear that Shion is a different kind of Omnic compared to some of the more stoic and robotic ones we’ve met up to this point, but those stylistic distinctions open her up to the same criticism that plagued Anran earlier this year for looking too much like other heroes. (Fans have often speculated that Blizzard gives multiple female characters similar conventionally attractive faces in an effort to sell more skins of those heroes.)
Shion has a human-like face, rather than the overtly robotic, somewhat featureless ones characters like Zenyatta and Ramattra do. She still has the signature dots on her head that other robots do in the Overwatch universe, but they’re on her forehead as the rest of her face is made to look human. There are some interesting potential lore questions here, such as why an Omnic who clearly has no reservations making her presence known would want to look human, especially in a world that has illustrated a lot of division between humans and Omnics over the years, an element that was most prominent in the canceled campaign’s storyline.
Perhaps we’ll learn more as the season progresses, as she is being set up as a major player in the events of season 3, but even so, it’s clear that there’s been real effort to create a character that looks similar to the “attractive East Asian woman” character archetype Overwatch has been leaning on for years, much to the chagrin of players who main anyone else and want cosmetics for their preferred heroes. Fans have even compared her human face to that of Anran, whose resemblance to characters like Kiriko and Juno drew criticism from players. Obviously in Shion’s case the Omnic details are different, but her facial structure does appear pretty similar.
I’ll just leave it here pic.twitter.com/dO2n5G51Lz
— Just Pink Azure (@JustPinkAzure) June 10, 2026
Fans aren’t as unanimous in making this observation as they were about Anran earlier this year, though. As some have pointed out she doesn’t have the same button nose as Juno and Kiriko do, or as was featured in Anran’s original design.
Shion actually has a different nose for once omg pic.twitter.com/lXf202qfpu
— NOXI ⭐ (@NOXIBLOOD) June 11, 2026
Blizzard has been cooking with Overwatch’s story as of late, so if Shion has some kind of self-hating complex that’s driving her to try to become more human, that would be a pretty compelling hook for a character in this world and I’d be interested to learn more. It’s just hard not to look at her design and feel like a braver, less skin-sale-friendly design was lost in the process.
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