Hello Kitty is coming to Overwatch in Blizzard and Sanrio's first collab

Blizzard and Sanrio team up for the cutest collection

Out of all the surprises happening in Overwatch next season, a collaboration with Sanrio may be the most unexpected — but also the most welcome, particularly for fans of cute and cuddly things. Hello Kitty and friends are coming to Overwatch with a batch of new cosmetics that will be available in the game from Feb. 10-23, Blizzard revealed Tuesday.

Included in the Overwatch Hello Kitty and Friends collaboration are six heroes cosplaying as famous Sanrio mascots, including Juno as Hello Kitty, Kiriko as Cinnamoroll, Mercy as Pompompurin, D.Va as My Melody, Widowmaker as Kuromi, and Luico as Keroppi. In addition to Legendary skins, the collection will also include a variety of cosmetics like emotes, voice lines, and player icons.

Overwatch's latest collaboration follows similar in-depth crossovers with properties like Hasbro's Transformers and G.I. Joe, Capcom’s Street Fighter, K-pop group Le Sserafim, and anime series One-Punch Man, My Hero Academia, and Cowboy Bebop.

Here's a look at the full collection of Hello Kitty and Friends skins:

Overwatch art director Dion Rogers said that the game's latest crossover event was born out of a "mutual thing" with Sanrio.

"[For] this one, we reached out [to Sanrio], they reached back, and we've been working on it for a while," Rogers said during a press conference at Blizzard headquarters attended by Polygon. "There's a ton of fans on the team, and the world, that love Sanrio, and as we've done more collabs with groups, I think there was a mutual conversation between the two to see if we could actually make it work."

With regard to character selection, Rogers noted that "Hello Kitty has no mouth because she speaks from the heart, and we felt that Juno fits this very well. She's from Mars, and she has this vision of the world that no one else can see, in a way. We were surprised at how well things were fitting together when we actually tried to do this collab."

"Pompompurin, [his] color palette actually works really well with Mercy," Rogers said in a separate interview. "So some of [the decisions] come down to the color palette. Widowmaker as well [works well with Kurimo's] color palette."

The more challenging thing, said 3D character artist Melissa Kelly, was designing Sanrio brand-appropriate guns.

"[Widowmaker's] weapon was, I think, the hardest thing to design because she has a sniper rifle and... it's Sanrio, so... it's a little complicated," Kelly said with a laugh. "Lucio's gun is already nice and round and cutey looking, so that's easier. But they designed a sniper rifle that looks adorable!"

As any Sanrio fan knows, Pompompurin's defining design element is his very visible butthole. I asked Rogers and Kelly about that feature and how it factors into Mercy's Pompompurin skin. Both artists were coy about the subject, but confirmed that, yes, the Pompompurin butthole will be visible on Mercy, just not where you think it is. So, keep an eye peeled for the Sanrio collab to drop on Feb. 10 to find the mystery placement for yourself.