Leo Kliesen (Japanese: レオ・クリーゼン, Hepburn: Reo Kurīzen) is a character from the Tekken fighting game franchise by Bandai Namco Entertainment.

Created by series producer Katsuhiro Harada, Leo's gender is officially unknown, and the character was intended to appeal to both male and female audiences.

According to game director Yuichi Yonemori, this caused some difficulties, particularly for the voice actors for Leo as they had to try and appeal to male and female players.

[5] Things were further confused when a video surfaced of a 2011 Namco Bandai event, where it appeared the character was stated to be female and that their first name was "Eleonore".

Harada in turn noted that localizations of the games sometimes made expressing this difficult, as details would sometimes get lost in translation between regions.

[4][13][14] In terms of gameplay, the character was intended to be easy to use by both new and experienced players,[15] utilizing short-ranged attacks as well as various elbow and shoulder strikes.

Some attacks allow for a variety of combos, such as the "Rising Bei Zhe Kao", while others allow Leo to change to stances such as the "Jin Ji Du Li".

They further praised the fact that Leo's presentation was never "problematic", something uncommon in Japanese media in their eyes, where they felt such characters were typically used mainly for comic relief.

[22] Clemson University lecturer D. Leland Fecher shared similar observations in a paper for Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, examining the handling of gender in the Tekken franchise.

However, Fecher noticed that this also caused uncertainty in players, leaving them uncomfortable rather than embracing it as a progressive move on the part of the developers.

He stated his observations were not meant to paint players in a negative light, but instead observe how they reacted when an anomaly such as an ambiguous character was inserted in a game series that had to that point defined clear gender identifiers amongst the cast, and hoped developers could learn from such reactions when implementing such characters in future games.

[6] Ruchi Kher Jaggi, in a paper for the Mass Communicator, wrote that Leo was rarely used in mature content and that there were complaints due to the perception that they may be transgender.