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So after the big/huge/gigantic news of Nana-chan’s performance on Kouhaku, you have to admit that everything else is not that news worthy, and even downright boring. So after turning my nose up at the other pieces for a few weeks, here are some things which are finally worth posting.

Mizuki Nana stars as lead in new Pretty Cure
Well had to begin with Nana-chan now that she’s on after burner towards mainstream stardom and recognition. As all Nanatards will know, Nana-chan has the tendency to star in either shitty throw away side characters of good shows, or good characters in shitty throw away shows, with very little exceptions. So now that she finally gets to be the heroine of the biggest anime franchise in Japan watched by little girls AND lolicons “big adult friends” alike for a full year, it’s time to celebrate that she’s going to actually live up to the voice acting part of her seiyuu career (probably). Oh, and Nanoha fanboys should be happy to see that Nana-chan gets to play more ass-kicking, brutal fist-fighting magical girls that would make most modern day shounen heros look like pussies.

Mizuki Nana sings for new Metal Gear Solid game
Just can’t stop the big news once you’ve gone to ultra-celebrity status can you? As revealed in her blog, Nana-chan just recorded an insert song titled “恋の抑止力” (Koi no Yokushiryoku, Love’s Deterrance) for the latest Metal Gear game. Kojima Hideo is a pretty big seiyuu fan (some may say even an otaku?), so it’s not too surprising that he would create an opportunity for Nana-chan to show off her vocals in his game. Perhaps he even went out of his way to make this happen to satisfy his inner seiyuu-ota, who knows. Now whether the English version of the game would have this song though is a different story, but I would recommend people to play the J-dub anyway as I’ve found the franchise had always felt too Japanese in its presentation style and writing thus fairly incompatible with an English track (it’s like dubbing a Kung-fu movie you know? no matter how good you do it, it just doesn’t work), Nana-chan being in there or not.

Tomatsu Haruka’s new photo book sample photos
The title is “Pi Touch! High Touch!” (sorry for the lame Idolmaster breast-touching event joke), and as promised, there’s the bikini shot! They seem to have toned down her approachable cutesy girl-next-door image for something a little more young adult. Want or Do Not Want? That’s for you to decide.

Takahashi Chiaki to release photo book and DVD
As she wrote in her blog here, while this is not anything new and hardly news worthy, I liked how she gave her motivation for doing these things in a recent Famitsu interview (thanks for pointing it out Dom! Would’ve been too lazy to read it otherwise) – “Because those celebrities and gravue idols are coming here [into the voice acting world], so I’d thought I’ll go over there too.” – a strange yet great display of her pride in voice acting in doing what is, as she sees it, as essentially the same thing (rookies light-heartingly entering into another profression’s world). The full interview is fairly interesting too, like how when she told her parents she was going to become a seiyuu instead of going to university, her father kicked her out of the house hoping she would be deterred in her quest and come back to her senses, but he still gave her a million yen anyway as living expense before doing so.

IM@S Christmas Live
Looks AWSME, all those bitching about the commercialisation of Christmas can die in imaginary hell fire because it gave us Santa Girl costumes (probably the only thing worth celebrating on Christmas for an atheist like me, LOL). Now when are those Blu-ray/DVDs coming out, pretty please?

Long leg idol seiyuu Tomatsu Haruka announced in her blog a few days ago that she will be releasing her second photo album as well as her first solo album Feburary next year. She also mentioned that this time there will be swimsuit shots (!). The sound you just heard is a combination of a thousand fanboys (and fangirls) falling to the ground due to blood lost from picturing her in a swimsuit while the album weeps quietly in the dark corner for being ignored.

The im@s girls and Shimoda Asami made the cut to this years Animelo Blu-ray and DVD, but somehow Shoko-tan didn’t make the cut (nobody cares though, right?) yet GACKT did. Proving yet again that the Elevens suck at negotiating rights. The days till they release a full concert is nowhere in sight.

Kawakami Tomoko apparently had a role in the second season of DARKER THAN BLACK, prompting fans to speculate that she came out of hiatus. She went into hiatus due to health problems around July/August of 2008.

So apparently Takahashi Chiaki aka Chiaking is going to Sydney to perform the im@s song “Tonari ni..” with the famous Australian symphoney orchestra Eminence as part of their “A Night in Fantasia 2009” performance on the 26th September. This is an extremely rare treat – as far as I know us Aussies never had a seiyuu come down to show case their singing abilities, let alone one which seems to be promising something much more epic than what the Japanese fans had ever gotten – im@s hasn’t even had a live band in its concerts thus far, so having a live orchestra to go with the symphonicially arranged song that is “Tonari ni…” performed by one of the top singers of im@s is something not to be missed. I know there are other Aussies here that aren’t away (unlike me), and some of you are already im@s fans *cough*danie*cough* so you should go and get your im@s stuff signed or something. Oh and tape the performance to share *wink wink*.

As listed by Animate. There’s a DVD version too but who cares about that when we have glorious HD legs.

While there’re no details yet, chances are good that it will be Tokyo session of the 4th Anniversary Concert with some clips from the other sessions thrown in for good measure. I knew not having Kugyuu meant the chances of us getting something this time will be high, and we get HD straight away, boo yeah!

Saw it on the Nicodouga live stream. The seiyuu for the 3 new characters are:

Hidaka Ai: Tomatsu Haruka
Mizutani Eri: Hanazawa Kana
Akizuki Ryo: Sanpei Yuuko

The addition of Toma-chan and Kana-chan is a bit from the left field, since the im@s franchise haven’t been known to get established seiyuu, let alone the freshest and hottest idol seiyuu currently around (Kugimiya Rie was grabbed before her big break FWIW). Potentially this could be a negative thing, as these hot idols will be much harder to book for events and such (refer to Kugyu), so I’m thinking the direction of the DS game and its new characters might be slightly different than the current batch of idols we have so far. Also the singing skills of the seiyuu are a little on the average side, but either way I’ll still be looking forward to Toma-chan and Kana-chan covering the famous im@s songs such as Shiny Smile and Go My Way! because to me one of the most fascinating aspect of the im@s franchise is listening to the seiyuu with different voice qualities and abilities singing the same songs.

Both Toma-chan and Kana-chan made an appearance at the concert today and performed the theme song for the game “Hello!”. Follow the link below if you have a Nico account.

EDIT: For those without Nico accounts:

Official PoRk sauce.

I know that a lot of Japanese guests and companies planned attendance for overseas anime and game cons/events had been heavily affected by the swine flu, and understandably fans aren’t happy. Just thought that I’ll throw in a balancer so that people can know that the Japanese domestic fans are getting hit too (well they should, considering that Japan’s confirmed cases of swine flu is so high and still going up by the day).

FWIW, the Fukuoka session is still a go, while the Tokyo session is under review.

Animelo 2009 RE:Bridge

I missed the livecast, but thanks to everyone’s live-spamming of this site (lol), I got to know the initial line-up for Animelo 2009 without even having to check the official site! User-generated content FTW? Anyway, with them going to the lengths of setting up an English site, I guess keeping up with this year’s line-up will be much simplier. Now just a summary of what artist we have thus far:

22nd August: Ayane, Ishikawa Chiaki, ELISA, JAM Project, Chihara Minori
23rd August: Sakakibara Yui, Savage Genius, Hirano Aya, Mizuki Nana, Yonekura Chihiro

It seems to me that Saturday currently lacks the 萌え idol seiyuu singers while Sunday is lacking the 燃え GAR/male singers. So I’m predicting that they will probably do something about that to balance the two days up in the upcoming annoucements. With Nana-chan and Hirano Aya both on Sunday (FWIW, they have gone head-to-head on the same day before when Aya appeared as special guest in 2007, though I guess most people had sealed that memory away due to that horrendous punk version of Bouken Desho Desho) it’s going to be a sell out for all the rabid fanboys and it would probably be just short of a riot when it comes to them fighting over tickets. If it is up to me I would think that they would do a temporary reunion of Yamato Nadeshiko (Yukarin and Hoc-chan) on Saturday to get the fanboys to step and craw over each others’ smelly bodies for Saturday’s session too. For GAR singers, well, I’m not that knowledgible in those, but I wouldn’t mind if they bring back GRANRODEO or something along that line. Oh and if m.o.v.e makes another appearance, please sing something else besides Gamble Rumble. You have an entire catalog of good Initial D theme songs, use them!

First iDOLM@STER Concert Tour

On other concert news, the iM@S girls are going to have their first ever concert tour in 4 major cities in May. The cities they are visiting are in the order of Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka and final stop at Tokyo. Appearance of the seiyuu are all over the place though from the initial announcements – like Takahashi Chiaki “Chiaking” only appearing at the Tokyo session and Shimoda Asami “Asapon” at Fukuoka only, plus the usual absence of Ochiai Yurika “Yurishii” and Kugimiya Rie “Kugyuu~”. Unless they change the line up it just means that it would be impossible to see to all the performances in one session. Someone made a reference guide for the line-up and I’ve just PS the English bits myself. While Tokyo looks the most delicious (as expected, and competition for tickets will be fierce), the lack of Asapon is going to be a real let down for me.

Nana-chan New Album on 20th May

So we now have a date, apparently it will contain 15 tracks, and the first press comes with a DVD of the secret event for Trickster which had Nana roping in a bunch of her other seiyuu friends such as Sugita Tomokazu, Suzumura Kenichi, Sawashiro Miyuki, and Kuwatani Natsuko and TEH Wakamoto (even though only as narration) did a play. I wonder if the epicness of the DVD will boost the sales even more by getting a few more sales from the fans of the other seiyuu?

Hopping onto the bandwagon. Categories not in any particular order, I’m just writing it as they come to my mind.

Most Memoriable Seiyuu Moment – I killed Ueda Kana in Halo 3

It wasn’t memoriable just because I fragged her, but because she was actually a competent player. While I am not so shallow as to think that there are no female gamers (some of my friends are quite heavy gamers), but you have to admit that a certain amount of skepticism is in need about the way Ueda Kana professing her addiction to typically very male orientated games like FPS and Monster Hunter that I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see for myself if it was just an act or was she for real. It turns out she is the real deal and all the more respect from me to her.

Oh and sorry about the video, I’ll probably never get around to it. *runs*

Most Memoriable News Announcement – Brief Return of the Sakamoto/Kanno Golden Team

When they announced that Sakamoto Maaya and Kanno Yoko were going to work together again for Macross Frontier, I was ecstatic – I’m the old schooler that thinks everything non-Kanno Yoko by Maaya is crap (yep I’ve said it). While opinions on Triangler seems to be leaning towards the negative side, personally I much prefer it to the more popular Lion. Only Maaya can screech and still sound sort of good.

Best Concert/Event I Attended – (tie) THE IDOLM@STER 3rd Anniversary Live and Animelo 2008

A lot of the other concerts/events I went to seems to suffer from little things which keeps me from enjoying them to the fullest – such as Nana’s horrible wardrobe in Live Fighter or the unsatisfying Minorin Fanclub event. In the end, it is only for the IDOLM@STER concert and Animelo 2008 where I can say I was completely and totally pumped and excited for the entire duration of the concert. Too bad neither seems to be coming out on DVD anytime soon.

LULZ Award – “Aya Style”

Hirano Aya’s bikini screw-up leading to the coining of the new term “Aya Style”. It was even funnier because it was a female friend who pinged me about it in the first place and said, quote – if she wasn’t flat as a board, that would hurt. It made me laughed so hard that I had a stomach cramp.

Best New Personal Seiyuu Discovery – (Tie) Imai Asami and Shimoda Asami

It seems that not only do they share the same given name, but also some other similiarties too – similarities which also happens to be what made me like them.

One is their singing abilities. They are both really really good singers with distinctive voices. Imai Asami has a deep powerful mature voice while Shimoda Asami can sing in both her normal voice and her nasal character voice which is quite a rare talent even amongst great seiyuu singers. The second are their quirky personality. Imai Asami “Mingosu” is a gamer-erojiji-lolicon-otaku with a chest complex, while Shimoda Asami “Asapon” is a multi-facet character (which includes her normal female self, a cute/dumb/wtf elementary school loli personality as well as a, you guessed it, lesbian side where she likes to claim fellow cute seiyuu as her waifu under her male personality named “Asao”) with a talent for voice imitations and writing original lyrics to songs and performing them live on her radio show. Sounds too good to be true? Think it’s all a marketing gimmick? That’s probably true, but that’s what makes seiyuu idol personalities interesting and warrants closer examination, right?

MVP – Tomatsu Haruka

Tomatsu Haruka without a doubt is the new rising star that dominated this year with a very strong list of memorable characters and roles. Nakajima Megumi may have gotten better limelight, but she hasn’t demonstrated the same versitility and range that Tomatsu Haruka had shown. Ever since Polyphonica last year it was pretty clear to me that Tomatsu Haruka has that something in her to make it big, this year was the year that she capitalised on it to make her mark on everyone’s radar. Even though I’m not found of Kannagi, it’s hard to argue that Tomatsu Haruka’s Nagi was quite a vital attraction of the show.

It also helps that she has very nice legs.

Best Seiyuu Gaming Moment – Senjou no Valkyria

It was an all-star cast for an incredible game (though not my Game of the Year though, that would actually be Fallout 3). You can read about what I had to say about the game here. While the presence of Fukuyama Jun did add a big LOL factor, it was Inoue Marina that made Valkyria for me. I really like Inoue Marina’s protrayal of the down-to-earth girl that is Alicia, it’s distinctive yet subtle, it catches your attention without being loud. It would be nice to hear Marina repraising the role of Alicia in the upcoming anime version.

Favourite Song – Shiny Smile from THE IDOLM@STER Live For You!

As it was my most played song which was released in 2008 according to my iTunes log it takes the crown of Favourite Song of 2008. To be honest 2008 was a pretty rough year for me, and Shiny Smile was one of the songs I went to for a pick-me-up. It’s a very simple catchy tune that gets you to sing along instantly, plus it has the right lyrics and attitude – the never give up, never stop moving forward and to just go for the goal with a bright smile was really what I needed when I’m feeling a bit down and just don’t want think too much while helping me to keep a positive attitude.

Someone went to the trouble of subbing the song and post it on Youtube. The translation is stiff but it gets the jist of it.

Most Disturbing Seiyuu Related News – Crazy People Making Death Threats to Seiyuu

Mizuki Nana and Chihara Minori both recieved death threats this year which made it to headline news. While they both seem to turn out to be nothing more than pathetic pranks when the police caught the ones responsible, it is still disturbing that people would use such things for fun, especially for the fact that they seem to be inspired by the tragic incident in Akiba.

“About f#@king time” moment – Area 11 Discovers the Rest of ZA WAARUDO!

In the form of half-heartedly setting up the “Overseas Fan Choice Award” in the Seiyuu Award. Doesn’t change the fact that the award itself is still a joke though.

“I can’t believe he/she did that!” Seiyuu Moment – Miyano Mamoru’s Shotgun Marriage Announcement

I will not claim knowledge on how fangirl logic would work (though I’m guessing it is probably not that different to how fanboy logic works), and I know that the entertainment industry here are generally pretty harsh when it comes to idols coming out with “shameful” and image damaging news such as these – and sure enough they pretty much cleanse the usual sources of his video message announcing his marriage, including his own official page, and tried to pretend that nothing happened (but the internet being the internet, you can still find the video if you spend 10 seconds on teh googles). That’s some gutsy thing Miyano did, but ultimately foolish with how the industry here works and I wish him luck and hope that he’s not going to be regretting this decision of his anytime soon.

Bandai Namco’s upcoming Wii game “Happy Dance Collection” – or more likely to be remembered as “that dancing game with Nana-chan and iM@S songs in it” amongst us seiyuu otaku – is a game that I’ve wrote about before. Suddenly out of the blue the game was announced just a few weeks ago to be coming out on the 23rd this month, and thanks to last week’s Tokyo Game Show Bandai Namco had decided that this game should get some promotion. What we have here is a short video of seiyuu Imai Asami (long hair) – who plays Kisaragi Chihaya in the Idolmaster games, and Hasegawa Akiko (short hair) – who plays Hoshii Miki, trying out the famous Idolmaster song “Go My Way” in the game. (The original video also had them talking about and playing the PSP Idolmaster game before this, but for the interest of the dance game I’ve edited that out).

It’s a shame that thus far I haven’t been able to find any info on the 4 original songs by Nana-chan – the stage they did for this game at TGS which was shown on TV live didn’t demo any of the Nana-chan songs as they were more interested in showing the mainstream Jpop songs, and the official website is still quite bare. At least from the videos I’ve seen the game actually looks a bit more promising than I had previously thought – yes I was expecting this game to be shovelware, despite the fact that I was going to fork over yens just for the Nana-chan and iM@S song anyway. At least now I can buy it with just a bit more confidence, I think.

Famitsu is on their game again so official track listing can be found here.  As predicted, today was Niconico Douga Meme Song day, if you are a fan of nicodouga, especially of the Nicodouga Kumikyoku, you’ll no doubt get a massive kick from hearing the meme songs being performed full live – we definitely did.   Anyway again some highlights:

*  Omoide wa Okusenman performed by JAM Project as an opener.  What a starter!  Hang on, Makkun isn’t in there but replaced by Misato Aki.  Hmm what happened?

*   After the song, Kageyama Hironobu announced that Makkun fell sick, and her condition worsen because she forced herself to perform yesterday and the doctor gave her the order to not to perform today.  DAMN.

*  Misato Aki sang nicely – taking over Makkun’s role in such short notice and as the first performer, great effort on her part.

*  Elisa’s voice is simply beautiful.  After 2 acts the bar for the night is set pretty damn high.

*  After two slow songs from Elisa, angela Domestic Love Band started the night’s long run of goth-metal music.  It’s quite a departure of her old stuff.  Yeah, even Shangri-La was pretty out there.

* Sound Horizon had some interesting sounds, and lots of members and vocalists. My favourite part though has to be the electric violin in their music. Might check them out later.

* Yui’s goth band is a good gag act. I like how they made fun of themselves with the whole “toilet break act” gag, even though they were far from that level of terrible.

* Momoi Halko did a real-life Idolm@ster-style “performance accident” – she literally tripped and fell on all four after missing a landing from a jump. She recovered from it straight away though, that’s a pro performer right there.

* Mosaic.wav’s Gacha Gacha Kyu~~~ I was waiting for this piece and the fun metre explodes when everyone in the stadium does the hand gestures.

* Everyone sang true my heart – the call for “Kishimen!” was insane, Lelouch by the power of the Code Geass MAD meme orders you all to obey and sing!

*  Sakura Saori’s talking voice scares me since it sounds just like when she sings.  It’s like she’s constantly on helium or something.

*  No Kiss My Lips.  That is just not right. :(

*  miko (IOSYS) for Marisa – complete with the original flash movie on the big screen.  There’s something magical about everyone yelling “yi er san yi er san one two three one two three ichi ni san” at the same time.

*  Tori no Uta, another totally expected piece.  It’s a nice song except that for all of the 2 to 3 times I’ve seen it live Lia can never perform it well in a live situation and this time was no exception, which is a pity.

*  iM@S performed a medley of their most famous songs, which is awesome because there is just no way they can get through all their cool songs any other way.  Asapon was the most in character, Mingosu did well with her solo Aoi Tori section, and even Nakamura Eriko managed to sing pretty well too.

*  Makka na Chikai was sooooo intense.  I’ve never seen so many people get so psyched up, except for JAM Project’s SKILL.

*  May’n does her Macross Frontier Sheryl act.  That’s all there is to say about it.

*  Psychic Lover does a ballad, wow.  It’s so not their usual image.

*  Hirano Aya improved her singing – it is no longer as painful as last year’s because she stopped trying so damn hard to do her weak attempt at a vibreto (thank god).

*  anisong Uninstall was another piece that I really want to hear live, and Ishikawa Chiaki delivers it in spades.

*  Woo, another new unreleased song in full – Gundam 00 second season’s ending Prototype.

*  Gundam-gasum continues with a medley by a Ishikawa Chiakii/Yonekura Chihiro duet doing their most famous Gundam themes.

*  I can fly!  You can fly!  We can fly! Motto motto! 

Today’s concert was enjoyable in a completely different way compared with yesterdays.  While yesterday’s – as expected by such a strong line up of strong singers – wins purely by the sheer high quality of the performers at performing live, today’s was exciting for the concentrated bursts of pure FUN as meme songs and recent cult hits gets performed live on stage and how everyone joins in with the acts at the same time to create an unbelievable live atmosphere.  So both days were awesome in their own rights.

Also it looks like they’re already planning for next years Animelo, so see you next AniSummer!