Momiji (Dead or Alive)

Momiji is a character from the Dead or Alive games.

Momiji is the last shrine maiden of the Hayabusa village. She got into this role after her older sister, Kureha, got killed. However, she was trained as a kunoichi by Ryu himself, and although she had a rough start, she quickly became much stronger and now is a full-fledged Kunoichi whose abilities never cease to impress her mentor.

Appearance
Momiji is a young Japanese lady with amber eyes and long black hair tied in a topknot style ponytail. She is mostly seen in a relatively modest outfit with a white kunoichi top with red ribboned edges and red kunoichi styled pants that have tassels hanging in the back with black Japanese style heel boots worn at the bottom over the pant sleeves.

Her other outfits consist of several ones she wears from Ninja Gaiden, including her secondary jumpsuit outfit and leather variant of her main costume, as well as other ones added as DLC. In Last Round, she is able to wear her hair cut into a short blunt bob cut, and in Xtreme 3, she gains the option to wear her hair down, although it falls to bottom length and is somewhat shorter than what her hair should realistically be when worn down. She can also be seen with her hair down in Last Round in the Fairy Tail DLC, where she dresses as Kagura.

Personality
Momiji is a very gentle and caring young woman who is seen by the Hayabusa Village children as an older sister figure, whom they look up to.

Like her mentor, Ryu Hayabusa, Momiji has a strong will and refuses to accept any vulnerabilities and trains extensively to become one of the deadliest warriors in the Hayabusa Village. Her extreme dedication to her training was such that she at times has a tendency to over-train herself, as can be inferred with her ending in Xtreme 3. Likewise, she's also versatile enough to include other aspects as part of her training, which is best demonstrated in Xtreme Venus Vacation where she participated in the Venus Festival largely because it was an alternate method of training, as well as her giving a similar reason for providing healing softening beauty treatments to girls.

She is very polite, even to her opponents, saying to them before a match that it is an honor to meet and combat them. After a match she will thank her opponent or even wish them better luck next time, rather than gloating like many other fighters. However, a slightly mischievous side of her is revealed in her taunts, which have her yawning cutely or sarcastically gasping and complimenting her foe's performance.

Largely because she grew up in the mountains, she's fairly unfamiliar with standard hygiene products such as soaps and lotion treatments, as demonstrated in Xtreme Venus Vacation.

Abilities
Despite borrowing a few moves from the other ninja characters, Momiji's play style is quite different and distinctive, particularly for her ability to double-jump and perform airborne attacks. Her move set is less diverse than the other ninja, but she compensates with good speed, easy execution, and a wide range of safe moves, making her one of the easiest characters for beginners to pick up and deadly in the hands of experts. She is also a good character to attack from mid to long range distances.

She has single-jump and double-jump stances that can be entered from certain strikes, throws and holds to give more options, and has a weaker but easier variant of Hayabusa's Shoho-Izuna throw, called the Junyo-Izuna, which can form her most damaging juggle if used in an area with a ceiling following a critical burst. She also has two ways to perform her power blow: one from her neutral stance and one while double-jumping.

Trivia

 * Despite being a ninjutsu practitioner like all the shinobi in the series, Momiji also uses principles of aiki-jūjutsu as well, making her the only shinobi in the series to use a different fighting style.
 * Even though she was added to Dead or Alive 5 Ultimate, it is unknown whether she participated in the tournament or not. Her profile on the official game website, however, states that she does enter in order to test all that she has learned.
 * Several of Momiji's techniques, such as double jumping and air-charged attacks, come directly from her gameplay in Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge. The air-power blow is taken from her ultimate technique and her prayer beads can be used in combat.
 * Momiji's English voice actor is also the current English voice of Tina Armstrong.
 * Momiji is the first Ninja Gaiden character to appear in the Dead or Alive Xtreme sub-series.
 * In Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, she sometimes mentions Sanji.
 * Rachel and Momiji were initially excluded from Dead or Alive 6, with Shimbori stating that his reason for this was because they hailed from Ninja Gaiden. However, both were later added as DLC characters.
 * Unlike prior DLC characters in the game, however, they do not appear in story mode.