Overwatch’s next music collaboration is with the J-pop duo YAOSOBI. It will bring new skins and music to the game next month. But there’s more to this crossover than just in-game cosmetics. It also includes a short story that has teased Blizzard’s next hero and maybe done a lot of heavy lifting to appease folks who have been calling the game out on some of its continuity errors.
Experience signature storytelling and new music with our upcoming Overwatch x @YOASOBI_staff collab ✨
📚 Original Short Story
🦊 Skins for Kiriko, Genji, Hanzo & More
💿 New Collab Song
📺 Animated Music VideoArriving in-game on June 30. pic.twitter.com/LzMslchCFu
— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) May 28, 2026
The YAOSOBI event will begin on June 30, and it will bring new skins for Overwatch’s Japanese heroes Genji, Hanzo, and Kiriko (no word on if newcomer Mizuki is getting any love as well just yet). The group is also releasing an Overwatch edition of their next EP, The Book For, that will include a track called “Orion” inspired by Genji. Down the line, there will also be an animated music video by storied anime team A-1 Studio, known for its work on series like Sword Art Online and the Nier Automata anime.
But the one part of this content drop that’s available now is a short story called The Fall of a Sparrow, and it serves as not only a long-awaited reunion for brothers Genji and Hanzo, but also teases what fans believe to be Overwatch’s next hero.
The story follows the latest issue of Overwatch: Undivided, after Genji left the group to head back to Japan and investigate the rival Hashimoto clan and any ties they might have to the Talon terrorist organization waging war against Overwatch. As Genji pursues a lead, he has a lengthy flashback to many years prior when he nearly abandoned his family to pursue his own ambitions. Here, we see Genji and Hanzo as young men dealing with the burden of living under their father’s harsh rule as Shimada clan leader. But they also have a little tike following them around during all the family drama: Kiriko.
Kiriko is a contentious character in the Overwatch community because Blizzard seems to love showering her with skins, but she’s also been an odd figure in the game’s timeline. She was introduced initially at the launch of Overwatch 2 as someone who “grew up” training alongside Hanzo and Genji, though the official Overwatch ages say Hanzo is nearly twice as old as her. The whole thing felt like Kiriko was a square peg being shoved into a round hole. And given that we never actually saw those relationships play out, it has always been hard to envision how this spunky youth was supposed to fit into the lives of two guys with enough war wounds to fill multiple tragic back stories.
The Fall of a Sparrow is the first time we’ve gotten a substantial look at this relationship, and while the way it eventually maths out is still kind of iffy, Kiriko is portrayed as an honest-to-god child clinging to Genji and Hanzo like they’re her cool older cousins, rather than someone who trained alongside them like an equal as initially presented. I saw someone say that they liked the idea of Kiriko remembering tagging along as “training” with the brothers as a very childlike recollection. She was just swinging a sword around while the brothers were actually doing real combat training.
The dynamic we see in this new backstory story supports that reading. There’s surely still timeline stuff to nitpick, but it at least makes it clear Kiri was a very young child when the boys were training, rather than a contemporary. Will it be enough to make people less mad that she keeps getting skins? Absolutely not.
But those are the old heroes. What about the new one Blizzard teased? Well, Overwatch’s next season will begin on June 17, and like all seasons this year, it will include a new playable character alongside new seasonal events. We still haven’t seen the next hero, but given the focus on the Hashimoto clan and the silhouette Blizzard used to promote the third season this year, fans have long expected that someone from the organization would be joining the roster.
At the very end of The Fall of a Sparrow, Genji is captured and taken to the Hashimoto clan’s base, where he is offered up to an elder, who speaks with a “mechanical, robotic tinge.” Though Genji is blindfolded and cannot describe her to the reader, she takes interest when she finds out he appears to be a member of the Shimada clan. The silhouette Blizzard has released for the next hero seems to have a Hashimoto’s Oni-style mask, and the season’s new map is set in Japan, so it seems like Blizzard is leaning heavily into this side of the Overwatch universe next season. Perhaps we’ll learn more about Genji’s captor in the coming weeks.
