Mizuki Nana to star in Wild Arms 5, plus sings theme song.
Mizuki Nana will be playing the heroine Rebecca Straison, and from the character description Mizuki Nana won’t be playing the dizzy type but rather the thinker in the group, though there’s still going to be a bit of tsundere in there, which seems to be the current fad.
Anyway I’m not that familiar with the Wild Arms series. I’ve played the very first Wild Arms on the PS but never gotten very far, other than that I’ve watched my friend played 3 on the PS2 for about half an hour and that’s about it. I’ve never gotten interested in the psuedo-Wildwest theme of the series so I’m not entirely sure whether I want to play this one or not, even though that Nana-chan is going to be in it.
The game is currently scheduled for a winter release in Japan. So I guess the single for the theme song won’t be out until after the game goes on sale. One thing that I am surprised though is that Nana-chan was chosen to do the theme song, as the Wild Arms franchise is a fairly well known property of Sony Computer Entertainment, I would’ve though they would look into their own talent pool from Sony Music Entertainment or even get more 15 year old idol-wannabes off the street to prompt the hell out of. But hey, I’m definitely not going to be the one to complain about this decision, plus with Nana-chan’s reputation for upbeat songs I’m sure she’s more than capable of handling this job.
July 24th, 2006 at 12:50
It seems that you have a hard time pinning down Nana Mizuki’s bundle deals, that her managers are either sending her in like any other voice actor, or going in as the seiyuu-idol? You’re always surprised!
Here goes hoping for an English-language port with the same song :3
July 24th, 2006 at 14:29
It’s because the market IS getting unpredictable. I remember the days when hiring a famous seiyuu-idol automatically means that such seiyuu will sing either the op or the ed for that series (remember Megumi?). But now it’s not the case anymore. Case in point, Nana for Tsuyokisu, Yui for Scuran2 etc. And also as I pointed out in my post already, Wild Arms is a famous mainstream SCE RPG so I’d expect them to go inside and grab more well-known Jpop artists like Tamaki Nami or something like that rather than use a seiyuu-idol. Also big name RPGs had never been seiyuu-idol friendly, take the Tales series which had hired numerous seiyuu in the past but never had a seiyuu-idol sing the theme songs, FF had resisted hiring seiyuu until very resently etc. So you can see why I’m surprised when they decide to use Nana for Wild Arms 5.
July 28th, 2006 at 06:18
I definitely see what you’re talking about, but at the same time it feels very natural for Nana Mizuki to do a song for a video game. On one hand it is a relatively rare thing, and something that is just catching on lately, but on the other hand if you do a honest-to-goodness market analysis, the demographics of Wild Arms player would overlap somewhat those who did buy a copy of Eternal Blaze, or something like that. It makes sense.
July 28th, 2006 at 16:06
Well Nana had sang OPs for a lot of bishoujo games, plus also for the RPG Generation of Chaos, so it doesn’t seem like a weird thing to me speaking in the general videogame scene sense. The only thing which threw me off really was just that Sony is willing to not go in-house and not use this opportunity to promote their own talents.