seiyuu3

Mizuki Nana tops this week’s Oricon charts

Mizuki Nana’s concert DVD Live Formula sold some 16000+ copies in its first week, beating old-school famous Jpop duo CHAGE and ASAKA’s Live concert DVD released on the same week to claim first spot on the Oricon Music DVD Weekly, as well as ranking in 4th on the Overal DVD sales ranking. Note this is actually not the first time that Mizuki Nana had claimed top spot on the Oricon Music DVD ranking - her PV collection NANA CLIPS 3 was the first to do so. NANA CLIPS 3 was also the first ever seiyuu music DVD to rank first on the Oricon Music DVD Weekly charts. The result of Live Formula proves yet again that when it comes to seiyuu artists, Mizuki Nana is in a league of her own.

Following on, supporters of anisong singers and seiyuu artists has a lot to talk about in the past week when it comes to Oricon rankings. We first have Sakamoto Maaya/Kanno Yoko making a bit of history with the Macross Frontier opening theme song “Triangler” staying in the top 10s for 3 consecutive weeks, then you have May’n’s Sheryl songs ranking in 3rd on its debuting week. The power of Culture ™ is not to be under-estimated. Now when Nakajima Megumi releases her debuting CD as Ranaka Lee we will know for sure the branding power of Macross.

Kugimiya Rie’s appearance on NHK’s Anigiga

Now usually I have issues with NHK’s reporting (long story), but Kugimiya Rie’s recent TV appearance on Anigiga on the 14th May was actually a very nice piece of interview that is worth watching if you have even a remote passing interest in her. Her mentioning about how she was not much of an anime fan early in childhood due to her being raised in Kumamoto and how she utilise her interest in books to help her get into the voice acting was surprising, seeing how that there is an increase tendency for seiyuu to be huge anime fans as of recent. The other interesting thing was how her parents, wanting her to stay close to home, suggested her to be an announcer instead. I can’t picture this myself because her current vocal image is too deeply ingrained into my brain. For those who’s not fluent enough to watch the video raw, I still suggest you to watch the live adlib in the studio. The video file is now floating around on the Intertubes at the usual places.

I know it’s not a particularly flattering picture, but I like what she said there.

Chihara Minori loves Chinese dresses

Just an excuse for me to talk about Minorin, she posted a picture of herself in yet another Chinese dress (her fourth time). The dress (shown on the far right below) is a gift given to her by Inoue Marina. Let’s all give a big “Thank You” to Inoue Marina! Thank you Marina for indirectly giving us Minorin eye-candy!

Nobody beats her when it comes to “dressing up” though:

Can you tell who that is? (no clues in the tags, har har)

Some of you might have noticed the buttons on the side for awhile now, Sega is again running a campagin for one of their games Senjou no Valkyria (I want those signed prizes!). Thanks to Senjou no Valkyria (I refuse to call it by the English name), my Playstation 3 had got dusted off for reasons other than playing Blu-ray disks.

A brief background on the game - Senjou no Valkyria is a strategy game developed by Sega. The game quickly caught the attention of the gaming world due to its unique graphic style and Sega themselves drummed up this point - that despite being fully rendered in 3D polygons, it has a hand-drawn, water-coloured like quality which the industry had never seen before. Coupled with the fact that the game was handled by the team that brought us the infamous Sakura Taisen series, this game seems to have the ingredients to be a winner. So the big question is - did it manage to deliver on the premise and live up to the expectations?

Set in a fictional alternate 1930s Europe where war broke out between the Atlantic Federation and the East European Imperial Alliance, the game focuses on a small independent country named Gallia confronted with invasion by the East European Imperial Alliance for Gallia’s rich deposit of a mineral called Ragnite - which is your typical miracle energy source in works of fiction. The hero of the story is Welkin Gunther, a 22-year old university biology student aiming to become a teacher that just happened to be caught in the heat when his hometown was invaded and he ended up enlisting in the militia in order to bring his hometown back to peace. It’s your overused cliché heroic war story setting, but just like the Sakura Taisen series, where the story lacks originality it more than makes up for the deficit in its near flawless presentation.

Hero and heroine - Welkin and Alicia

The story is unfolded in a retrospective story book fashion - the narration told the player straight up that this is a chronology of the miraculous triumph of Gallia over the evil invaders and how the militia fought a brave war over a 7 month period, so immediately they subtly conditions you to the right mindset - to expect a straight forward good triumph over evil storyline. The main characters are easy to like - Welkin is a bright young man with a love for nature and peace, Alicia Melchiott - the heroine who is strong, caring, capable and responsible, Largo Potter - your typical big guy with a big heart, Brigotte “Rosie” Stark - flamboyant with both her looks and personality, and Isara Guther - Welkin’s adopted sister who’s a gentle and intelligent engineer. All these presented in the unique graphic style and you can’t help but be immediately sucked into the illustrated children book like atmosphere. The story of Senjou no Valkyria is totally linear and there is no renai element to it - unlike the Sakura Taisen series, and nothing in the story is ground breaking and is quite predictable - but again, because of the way they presented the overall package, you can just let go of your inner cynical side for a bit and let yourself be immersed in the simple story.

It really does look like this.

On the gameplay side, the semi-realtime battle engine lends itself to some pretty in-depth strategic, though in times frustrating, battles. Borrowing heavily from Sakura Taisen 3’s ARMS gridless, action point-based system, Welkin has at his disposal a small platoon of infantry of 5 different functions - fast moving and far reaching scouts, assault troops carrying machine gun, bazooka wielding anti-tank troops, fix-it-all engineers, and long range snipers - and finally a tank for good measure. You have a limited amount of “command points” which you spend 1 point at a time to move a unit, or 2 points to move the tank, and each unit has its own “action points” which determines how far you can move. For each time you move a unit you can also select to perform a particular action once - to attack, heal, or do nothing. Each troop, individually chosen by the player, has their own buddies and potentials which affects their effectiveness. Buddies means that some troops performs better when placed in close proximity of other characters he/she likes, and potentials are special status modifiers which triggers randomly or under special conditions. Some are your standard attack up/defence up, while others are more specific such as “lone wolf” (gets status boost when working alone), “panic” (opposite of lone wolf), and some are comical/bizarre like status boost when surrounded by the opposite sex, or even the same sex for that matter. After each successful battle you earn a certain amount of money and experience depending on how well you did, which is rated by a rank between S to D. The experience points are then spent on levelling up your troops while the money is used to upgrade your weapons and tank. There are also extra goodies in the form of side episodes to unlock outside of the 18 main chapters etc but I won’t go into the details. When you beat the game you can also use the cleared save data to restart the game from the beginning where you inherit all your troops level and weapon research to encourage the player to play a second run, and since you won’t be able to unlock everything the first time round it’s worth playing again. The map designs are fairly challenging in that it will punish you for mistakes and that you are likely going to be replaying some stages a few times before you can pass it, but it’s also not impossibly hard such that it disheartens you to the point of throwing the controller on the ground and stop playing the game. If you’re on the second run with all the upgraded weapons and high level troops at your command then you can try to better your score or try different tactics - and what’s good is that the game is actually fun enough that you are quite likely to play it through a second run.

The battle screen

Now how would this game impression be complete (and worthy of being mentioned on this blog) without a mentioning of the cast? Sega knows full well the attraction of having famous seiyuu in their games, and for this game the main draw comes in the form of Inoue Marina playing the heroine Alicia. The character of Alicia can be said to be going against some of the common traits designed to induce the moe feeling of which a lot of us had became used to in the recent anime/manga/game entertainment world - as she doesn’t have any sort of personality short-comings or quirks, she’s not clumsy, airheaded, dreamy, short-tempered, preachy, tsundere (despite having twintails and Sega claiming her to be on several occasions), bad at cooking etc. Alicia just has her feet firmly planted on the ground and does the right things at the right time. In some ways you could even say that she’s boring, but being normal in an entertainment world currently so full of abnormalities can just be the right quality to make her stand out, which is probably why Alicia is so easily likeable since she won’t be hitting on any sensitive nerves. By this Inoue Marina, probably thanks to her own level-headed personality (despite her trying so hard to not be), is a perfect fit for the character of Alicia. From displaying Alicia’s gentler feminie but not overtly girly side when away from the battlefield, to portraying a capable and responsible soldier looking to protect her homeland, all delivered in just the right normal voice pitch without any sort of peculiarity.

There are other big names in the game such as Kuwashima Houko playing as the quiet Isara, Toyoguchi Megumi as Rosie, and even Noto Mamiko as Princess Cordelia of Gallia. But arguably the other big attraction - or LULZ factor, depending on your view point which I’ll get to now - comes in the form of Fukuyama Jun playing as Maximilian, the prince of the East European Imperial Alliance who leads the invasion. Maximilian is reminisce of Lelouch in so many ways that you can’t help but think that the people at Sega had probably watched a little too much Code Geass in their spare time and hired Fukuyama Jun just to satisfy their inner otaku. Even us here at seiyuu3 can’t help but dish out a few “Yes! Your Highness!” whenever Maximilian issues a command in the cut scenes.

In conclusion, Senjou no Valkyria is a highly polished game that you can spend many fun hours on. Highly recommended.

Omake: The TGS event on nico nico douga.

Hyakka Seiran is a project started by Seiyuu Grandprix sometime last year. The premise is simple enough - grab some famous seiyuu, male and female, and get them to cover famous anime songs, then sell some CDs and voice ringtones. Sounds like a winning (money-making) formula, no? So what could possibly go wrong?

The volume I purchased, volume 2 of the female side, contained more than enough names that I’m very familiar with to pique my interest - Inoue Marina, Nazuka Kaori, Pak Romi, Kaneda Tomoko, Hirohashi Ryo and Yamamoto Maria. Throw in some interesting covers - like Inoue Marina covering Gurren Lagann’s “Sorairo Days” and Gundam SEED’s “Annani issyodatta no ni”, Pak Romi’s Fullmetal Alchemist’s “READY STEADY GO”, Mobile Suit Gundam’s “Ai senshi”, Aura Battler Dunbine’s “Dunbine Tobu”, Kaneda Tomoko’s “Combattler V” (yep I’m quite an old school mecha head) it was enough to get me to do a one-click purchase.

However, like everything too good to be true, there’s a catch. You see, they don’t actually get to sing the whole song, rather just snippets of it. “Hyakka” in the title - literally “one hundred songs”, means that the aim was to collect 100 songs on each CD, and how they did it was to have 10 seiyuu each singing 10 snippets to make it 100, so in reality you only get about 7 minutes for each seiyuu. This wasn’t a big issue, as I’ve already read a review which highlighted this fact, so although still rather disappointing, I was ready for it. Production, on the other hand, is clearly on the cheap side. It sounds like they gave the seiyuu no practice at all and just shove them in front of the mic and tell them to sing, karaoke style. Some songs even had clipping in the recording. Painful.

So why am I still talking about it? Not to discourage potential buyers nor going into a rant actually, because even with all the negatives, it still manage to turn out to be somewhat of a neat purchase.

While the karaoke-ness of the recordings was initially a huge turn off, after listening to a few of them singing it dawned on me that it can also be viewed as to how well some of these seiyuu can sing without mixing aids and after touches. While a majority of them sounds more or less like people singing in a karaoke, a few of them performed well enough that it was close to recording level of quality. The ones that managed to do that were Kitamura Eri, Pak Romi and Nakamura Chie.

Working backwards from the list, let’s start with Nakamura Chie. I’m not terribly familiar with Nakamura Chie (I don’t watch Naruto lolz), but she had that old-school style of singing that made her cover of 80’s classic “Pajama no mamade” (Creamy Mami) and “Natsu no Mirage” (Kimagure Orange Road) instantly triggering the nostalgia in me.

Pak Romi’s line up was a trip down the mecha memory lane. Her cover for Turn A Gundam’s “Tsuki no Mayu”, Brain Powerd’s “Ai no Rinkaku (Field)” was just pure love. Also her ability to deliver a sound that almost matches that to MIO’s (now known as MIQ) original powerful vocal performance in “Dunbine Tobu” commands lots of respect.

Finally, Kitamura Eri. Another one full of classics like Rinbu revolution, You Get to Burning, Give a reason, Alone, Pure Snow etc. and possiblly the best cover of Yuzurenai Negai I’ve heard, seconded only to Momoi Halko’s version last year. In fact it did so much for my opinion of Kitamura Eri’s singing ability that if she was to announce a CD right now, I would buy it in a whim with no questions asked.

Some of the other decent ones came from Yamamoto Maria and Inoue Marina. And to top it off Kaneda Tomoko’s track is just off the chart crazy since there is just no way for me, and I assume a lot of others, to take her voice and singing seriously - which is all good and well for comedic effect though.

The CD is clearly for the seiyuu otaku only, and even for those interested, the best way to sum up this CD will be that it’s like a box of chocolate samplers - some are tasty, some are not terribly good, and some makes you crave for more of the same flavour, but in the end there’s just not enough of it. I’ve made clips of what I think were the two best performers on this disk - Kitamura Eri and Pak Romi - and embed them below. Have a listen yourself.

Kitamura Eri’s



Pak Romi’s

I’ve talked about the Minamike’s seiyuu trio - Sato Rina, Inoue Marina and Chihara Minori’s manga effort here, and what do you know, they really are going to publish their work. From March this year, the Minamike radio show “Minamike no Minakike” will be collected and released in CD form, and according to the program’s site, the first pressing for the CD will come with the “Sensei and Ninomiya-kun” manga that the seiyuu drew. Not much else is known right know and checking the release schedule, it appears that there will be more than one CD for the program’s recording, so it’s unknown whether they are going to split the manga over the volumes or just release it on the first installment only.

Either way, I’m really interested in checking the manga out drawn by the three, plus I really enjoyed the radio show as well, so this should be a no-brainer purchase for me.

There was quite a bit of demand for the Inoue Marina section of the event where she talks about herself sharing similarities with Kana and showing her “dojikko-ness”, so here it is. And yeah I quick-subbed it out of personal amusement and boredom, and no I don’t plan on doing any more nor seeding this on torrent, making it available for download etc.

Marina is pretty convinced that she’s a “dojikko” and shares similarities with Kana. What do you think?

I know exactly what the other unnamed seiyuu whom auditioned for the role of Housaka feels when he said to Ono-D that Ono-D is definitely getting the role of Housaka. Watching this little clip and you know the guy is perfect for the role.

The bonus footages on the first Minamike DVD was LOLZ in the non-sensical Minamike way. Ono-D of course steals the spotlight. On the other hand Inoue Marina trying to appeal with her non-existing dojikko-ness somehow makes her image overlap with that of Kana’s (Is Kana really stupid? Or she’s just trying to do stupid things to get attention?). Marina making a big fuss by telling everyone that she dropped her mobile phone into the toilet, yet somehow seem proud of it all looks like something Kana would do. Heck that’s almost a Minamike gag right there.

Believe it or not, I’m actually not the type that follows seiyuu radio shows. However this season had me following the Minami-ke radio “Minami-ke no Minakike”. I’m not sure why I’m attracted to this particular radio show - it’s probably the random-ness of it, as each episode has no particular theme to it and it goes in all sorts of direction, and the adlib nature of the radio show resembles the anime itself. Of course it has the added attraction of having two seiyuu that I’m interested in - Inoue Marina and Chihara Minori, and I’m starting to warm up to Sato Rina as well.

One example of the random-ness of the show was when they talked about the show-within-show, the love drama “Sensei and Ninomiya-kun”, that the Minami sisters watches. Since in the anime there really is no story to this show, one of the seiyuu, Inoue Marina if I recall correctly, suggested that they could draw a shoujo manga of the show, and they can each take turn drawing a chapter each week. To keep it short, the idea got the go ahead and they are now serialising the manga, so to speak.

Originally they were doing it for fun and they weren’t going to show it to anyone, but since Inoue Marina is such an excellent drawer, Chihara Minori’s childhood dream was to be a mangaka and apparently Sato Rina is said to be a good drawer too according to her wiki entry, it turned into something they didn’t quite expected, so they’re now giving the listeners a glimps of it by posting a couple of sample pages from their manga.

First you have Sato Rina’s:

And here you have Inoue Marina’s:

The three of them joked about publishing it in one of the episodes, maybe at Comiket or package it as a special in the DVD or something, and who knows, maybe just like this little idea it may come true.

While watching the Lyrical Party 3 digest and also a recent entry on Inoue Marina’s blog I was reminded that she’s known to be a pretty decent drawer. So I went digging around and made a collection of pictures she drew:

Yoko from Gurren Lagann. DO WANT.

Lum from Urusei Yatsura. If you are wondering why the caption has Reinforce II there you should watch the Lyrical Party 3 digest. No matter what you think of the show itself, the cast and the Lyrical Parties are still awesome fun.

The Manabi Straight gang. She did this on a whim before an event.

From episode 22’s ending of the Zegapain anime, Marina did the SD drawings while someone else coloured them, but you get the idea.

So cute it makes you go “Awww”.

Omake:

Marina drew this when she was little, back then just like a lot of other girls she dreamt about princesses.

houkoholic: Yayz for Lyrical Party 3!!!!111111 Hooray for fire hazards!!!!!!!

sent: Lyrical Party for teh winz!!!!11111

houkoholic: ok let’s be serious now, what was your impression of LP3?

sent: Well, there were parts they executed well and some parts, not so much. Let me get this out of the way though, the guests were really done up well today. They looked great on stage. It’s a real pity only the 200 people or so at the front out of 7000 got to enjoy that eye candy.

houkoholic: Seriously, everyone was so glamorous and so beautiful, it’s a wonder why they decided not to, you know, actually put them on those 5 big screens in the venue and instead make us watch powerpoint slide shows.

sent: Ok let’s backtrack a bit for the readers and explain the setting a bit. Events like Lyrical Party are all about the seiyuu. They come on stage, play some games, give some commentary and generally the fans get to see them out from behind the screen. LP3 was much like last year’s Lyrical Party, except this year it’s been tripled in scale with around 7000 in attendance at the Tokyo Big Sight. 10 members of the seiyuu cast were there to celebrate the commencement of Nanoha StrikerS season. This included, of course, Tamura Yukari, Mizuki Nana, Ueda Kana, Shimizu Kaori, Sanada Asami, Takahashi Mikako, Yuzuki Ryoka, and 3 new comers Saito Chiwa, Nakahara Mai and Inoue Marina. That’s an impressive assembly. And with a surprise video message from Donna Burke (Go Aussie!), it could have been a hell of a fun event.

houkoholic: But, and it’s a BIG but, things are just mishandled in various places and the experience was significantly downgraded.

As mentioned earlier, everyone at the event were really dressed up and they all looked fantastic, special mention goes to Nakahara Mai and Yuzuki Ryouka who both looked especially classy. You would think for an event where they went to the trouble of assembling 10 fine looking female seiyuu and went to all the trouble of making them up for the camera in what is obviously a stage show that caters to fans of these seiyuu, they would have the sense to have decent camera work so that the 7000 people can actually see them. Instead, the camera work for the duration of the show was so poor that I barely got a glimpse of them, despite them having strategically set up 5 large projector screens to let people who are too far from the stage to see what’s happening.

sent: The event direction was below par. Not blessed with the best tickets at the event, the screen next to us was all we had to go on. I didn’t really need to be reminded, that yes, I am at Lyrical Party 3, 50% of the time. They needed more wide shots of the stage, and badly. Every time there was anything interesting happening on the stage, the screen cut to the powerpoint presentation telling us which segment we were currently experiencing and they only cut to the stage after it was all settled. That’s just poor direction. The fans are here to see the seiyuu and anything happening on stage is infinitely more interesting than powerpoint.

houkoholic: yeah, like during the picture message game. In any type of TV show that would be the perfect time to do a panning shot of the guests as they draw or when they show each other their drawings, but somehow it didn’t occurred to the video director until quite a few rounds after to do such a thing and swap out the powerpoint and that was extremely frustrating. By the way, I was surprised that both Yuzuki Ryouka and Inoue Marina were extremely good drawers, which makes up for the lack of Kuwatani Natsuko and Mizuhashi Kaori whom provided the amusing drawings from the previous LPs.

sent: This is not to say that the event was entirely substandard. There were parts that were up to scratch. Like the Shuffle Afureco. This is where they take a scene from last season, shuffle the roles and perform it live on stage. The talent of the seiyuus really shone through there and it was highlight of Lyrical Party. The first round was a classic featuring the ending scene from the first episode of Nanoha A’s. The Wii Bowling segment was also good show.

houkoholic: I would say all the games they organised were fun, just that I don’t really get to see what’s happening for the most part due to the poor camera direction. I was particularly impressed with the quick wits of the seiyuu in coming up with made up dialogues to go with the scenes. Vita the loan shark chasing Nanoha for money was funny as hell, and the NHK punch line had me cramping up with laughter. Also big kudos for the Gundam spoof in the second round.

sent: And as much as I like Mishima (note: he’s the producer of Nanoha), he only barely held up his role as MC. There were a few times where his direction could have made the games even more exciting but he seemed satisfied to sit back and let it play out as it was, much like he has in previous encounters.

In a broader sense, the lack of planning to scale is becoming a trend in many of the events that we’ve been to recently. They just don’t seem to know how to address the larger numbers of people. While these events used to be smaller and more manageable, they’re now beginning to reach higher crowd numbers, and evidently the event planners aren’t ready for it.

On a side note, I worry about the writing for Nanoha StrikerS. The style and presentation is certainly different to Nanoha A’s and while I could see what they were going for in the first episode setting up the strong friendship between Subaru and Teana, it lacks the impact that Nanoha A’s carried. Still with 26 episodes to play out the myriad of new characters there is plenty of scope for some classic moments. I would raise some questions about animation quality too but it’s early.

houkoholic: Nanoha is entirely cheese in its core, but I felt they already over did the cheese factor in the first episode with Subaru and Teana’s long chat during the mage rank exam. The opening animation is also not timed as well as it could have been and just didn’t have the same adrenaline rush like with A’s opening, even though I’ve already warmed up to Secret Ambition. On the other hand Subaru’s hand-to-hand style of combat did make for some fairly nice battle sequences. Overall though I say that the first episode of StrikerS is not as exciting as A’s, but with 26 episodes to work with I guess they felt they can ease into the story this time, so will just have to keep watching and see what they can pull off.

Music wise, for the mini-live section it started off with Ueda Kanna doing a very nice performance of “Snow Rain” from A’s. Then it was Nana-chan performing the 3 opening songs in chronological order. Afterwards it was Yukarin’s turn to perform the ending themes. We got to listen to the ending theme “Hoshizora no Spica” by Yukarin for the first time. The song this time around instead of the mellow songs of the previous two it’s more punchy to reflect the now matured and combat-harden Nanoha.

sent: No complaints for the music. Secret Ambition carries that elements garden touch and harkens to the great “Eternal Blaze” and may achieve the same greatness as time passes. Ueda Kana is surprisingly good live. She’s left a good impression on me.

That was it for Lyrical Party III. It had some classic hilarity that LP has become to be known for but execution in the directorial department leaves a lot to be desired. StrikerS should still make an interesting series but I won’t hold out hope for it reaching A’s quality.