NAKORURU

Nakoruru (ナコルル) is a character from the fighting game series Samurai Showdown, by SNK. She's a priestess in an Ainu village (a tribe in Japan), where people have very strong connections with nature. In most games, the evil forces always threat something against nature, so Nakoruru fights to get everything back to normal. She has a strong sense of duty, and practically lives for preserving the natural balance. Her main weapon is a knife, and she has a pet hawk who helps her. Nakoruru also has a younger sister, called Rimururu, and a evil alterego, who dresses in violet (in contrast to her dressing in pink or yellow)

Nakoruru is the most popular character in the game:  many artists have published fanarts and doujinshis (amateur mangas) based on her, and she even has her own game (for PC and Dreamcast) called Nakoruru: Ano Hito Kara no Okurimono, which has been adapted to an OVA.

Apart from the scary list of SS games, there is a series of 2 OVAs, with the same name as the original game.

samurai spirits

Samurai Spirits (Samurai Showdown in western versions) is a fighting game series, developed by SNK (King of Fighters, Fatal Fury) since 1993 for multiple consoles (NeoGeo, Sega Genesis, Playstation, Gameboy, etc.) There are many different plots and timelines, but the most popular one is the story of the first games: the menace is a man called Amakusa (who wants to rule the world...), and our duty is... to defeat him, of course. xD The most popular characters (apart from Nakoruru :D)  are Haohmaru, the main character in the whole game, a strong and wild ronin; Ukyo, Haohmaru's silent rival, Charlotte, a French woman who dresses as a man; and Hanzo, an expert ninja. The curious fact is that, apart from Ukyo, none of the other characters are samurais.