Wayward Wing (2016) - Late Contest Entry

A long overdue for 's contest.
I forgot when was the contest actually, probably about a year ago or something?
The objective of the contest, themed after 'Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep' was to come up with potential upgrades for Ventus's default Wayward Wind.
For those that played the game, while the Lost Memory is mandatory for Ventus's story campaign it wasn't considered as an actual upgrade like Terra's Ends of the Earth and
Aqua's Stormfall.
So that's where the contest swoops in, us AKA the artisans are challenged to design concepts for Wayward Wind's upgrade.
Unfortunately my busy year in university has somewhat prevented me for joining it sooner.

For this upgraded concept, I decided to go for a rather different approach. It's still resembles Wayward Wind in aesthetics but while others
chose the theme of him being a counterpart to Vanitas, I decided to go for Ventus's elemental forte.
Like the Wayward Wing's namesake (that's the upgrade's name), the asymmetrical shaft is repurposed to resemble a large gear-like wing and the teeth being a bronze
lightning bolt (a referrence to Master Gula's Leopardis Keyblade).
The handle guard is drasically redesigned with a single feathered bronze wing and two green gems.

The purpose of this choice is to show Ventus's association with Holy and Wind attributes (thus the wing motives).
Like any of the previous upgrades I've worked on (oddly enough ever since revamping the designs, there were a lot of upgrades for the base Keyblades), this design
retains the asymmetrical form to compliment Ventus's reverse-grip fighting style.
No other explanation I can think of whatsoever for the plot-purpose of this one.

Kingdom Hearts belongs to Tetsuya Nomura, a joint franchise between Disney and Square-Enix.
Contest was conducted by .