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Sauce.

I’m really feeling her returning to the seiyuu circle in full force with this announcement. The song choice is awesome. 今はまだ遠いラブソング (Ima ha mada tooi Love Song) was amongst the first few songs that got me hooked on Tange Sakura. Throw in a couple of CCS covers (Catch You Catch Me and Platinum) plus the theme song “You’re my destiny” to the new radio program (which is pure moe crack from just that little bit they insert at the beginning of the radio show) and this already looks to be a solid album. Looking forward to hear how she would go back to cover her earlier songs as well after she spent a decent amount of time in the last few years just singing.

If you have only gotten into either seiyuu and/or anime fandom in the last few years, then the name of Tange Sakura wouldn’t mean much to you. But to some of us old farts veterans that had been around during the anime/seiyuu boom periods in the late 90s/early 2000s with shitty 28.8k dial-up internet, if I just say “hoe?” I’m sure all the old farts veterans will remember those good old days(TM).

For the others who wants a brief history, you can visit here (the old shitty page I wrote eons ago), but for the tl;dr, Tange Sakura was one of the great seiyuu that defined the 90s seiyuu idol boom. She stopped working as a seiyuu just when she reached her peak in 2000 which left many of her fans, me included, with unmeasurable sadness (FWIW, one of the rumors back then said that her retirement had to do with stalkers, some things never change, heh).

So why bring this up now? Because Tange Sakura recently came out of retirement, and with the new otaku craze date-sim game Love Plus by Konami (not a misnomer this time, Love Plus is a date-sim game to the very definition of the term and not the bastardised English usage) she came back with a Big Bang. She is now also hosting a radio program on Cho! A&G call “Tange Sakura no RADIO A.La.Mode”. While sadly this is not streamed officially on the tubes, you can find copies of it around. So listening to this program today I’m fully reminded of how much we seiyuu-otas LOVED her ultra-moe voice back then.

It’s not just her voice, which is cute, delicate and soothing without being piercing ultra-high pitched like some other seiyuu, but her real killer technique is in those little non-word sounds like “kya” and “eee” she makes, during the drama part the usage of those in her acting is just pure MOE. But this should be expect, as Tange Sakura is the person that personified the first “official” MOE character, Kinomoto Sakura from Card Captor Sakura. Oh, and Tange Sakura is 36 this year. Yes, for real, her voice is still that moe at this age.

I wish I had access to my stash of Tange Sakura CDs which I bought during those years because I have a serious itch to re-live those times again, too bad they are a few thousand ks away.