seiyuu3

Kikuchi Mika (Arika of Mai-Otome, Mokona of Tsubasa) wrote in her blog that her older brother had opened up a manga cafe in San Francisco named “Manga Cafe Mika” - which her brother and mother appropriately named it after Mika herself. Mika said that maybe she can have a signing event there sometime.

Who knows, maybe if you bug them enough be a nice loyal customer and ask they might bring her over.

Kitamura Eri first personal single coming up?

The Animate online store has an entry listing which essentially says “Kitamura Eri 1st Maxi-single” with a serial of LACM-4513, coming out on July 23rd. Since KitaEri has released numerous character singles for anime such as Seto no Hanayome and Kodomo no Jikan already I’d take it that this is going to be her first single under her very own name. I’m pumped for this release as I think KitaEri is another power seiyuu singer that has plenty of potential to make it big. However, LACM points to the single being released by Lantis, so there’s this looming bad vibe about this which I can’t shake off as well.

Either way, this is a good time to re-visit KitaEri’s Hyakka Seiran anisong covers to see why I’m excited:

Tamura Yukari’s Budoukan Live DVD set release confirmed

Anisong site Axive has reported that Yukarin’s historical live at Budoukan “Love♡Live 2008 *Chelsea Girl*” will see a DVD release on July 23rd (damn what’s with this day?!). A DVD release is expected and anticipated by many, but the real bit of news is that they are going to have a 5.1 soundtrack - a first for King Records’ seiyuu DVD releases I believe. Due to various circumstances I actually had to pass on this concert, and while there is no substitute for physically being there, at least a nicely mastered DVD with 5.1 soundtrack can capture part of the magic. Yukarin is taking one for the team here - as I’m sure depending on how this release is recieved that a 5.1 track for Nana’s Live Fighter concert for this year would be a given. So here’s hoping that the release will be good.

I have Minorin fanclub goods

Lazy man way to finish off this entry.

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)

According to her latest blog post, Minorin will be releasing her second single of the year on August 6th. The title of the single is 雨上がりの花よ咲け (Ameagari no Hana yo Sake). The date suggests heavily to me that they are planning to get this out before Animelo for some promotional effects.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with Melty tale storage, and I’m starting to worry about Lantis’ spam tactics when it comes to their seiyuu and anime song releases - it seems they just don’t really know what to do with their seiyuu talents, they just know that they are popular and need to pump out CD after CD, but without actually finding the right direction for their artists to go along with.

Anyway, I’m still cautiously optimistic. So let’s see where this one will go.

PS. I’m now a member of Minorin’s official fanclub “Minori Smile Season (m.s.s)”, will be getting the fanclub goodies in a week’s time, woot!

So I got my Live Formula DVD from Amazon JP (great bargain there btw @ 4600yen, I’ll talk about it a little later, maybe) and I just had to re-live and share this mesmerizing moment:

It’s all about the arpa (Italian for harp) - the arpa in the composition adds another dimension to the music of the song which you don’t find often in your average pop-inspired anisong. The off vocal version of Heart-shaped Chant, one of the rare off vocals which I actually listen to, shows this off quite well, but watching it being performed live is yet another level altogether.

The arpa performer, both in the original score and in the video, is Agematsu Mika - she’s the sister of Elements Garden’s Agematsu Noriyasu (Eternal Blaze, Dancing in the velvet Moon etc) and is a renouned award winning professional arpa player. Her official page has an English version so you can read about her there. Apparently when they originally recorded the song, Agematsu Mika just went in to the studio and played her arpa impromptu. She deserves major credit for making Heart-shaped Chant into such a special song, without her arpa, I seriously doubt I would like the song as much as I currently do.

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.

Just announced on the official website today is that Yukarin is going to attend the Saturday session of Animelo 2008.

With Nana-chan (Mizuki Nana), Minorin (Chihara Minori), Yukarin (Tamura Yukari), Kurinoko (Kuribayashi Minami) on the same day the Saturday session practically has all my top favourite female seiyuu singers covered - add in ALI Project and GRANRODEO and I’m totally sold on the Saturday session now. Sunday’s session on the other hand is still up in the air. While I’m 120% certain that Ishikawa Chiaki will sing “Uninstall” and I’d love to hear that song live, the line up on Sunday doesn’t quite appeal to me on the same level.

With Nana-chan, Yui and Yukarin all attending this year, this means the three top selling female seiyuu artists of the current generation are all at Animelo. With angela also in the line up this makes me wonder if King Records had decided to throw in their weight this year and stop letting Lantis gets all the glory. Perhaps we will see a DVD release by King Records this time, which may as well, since their seiyuu DVD release are better than Lantis - video quality wise anyway.

Animelo 2008 had added a few more names to the line-up in the last couple of weeks. While both Psychic Lover and savage genius were familiar names to Animelo, one that came out from the left was the announcement of Kurobara Hozonkai performing on the Sunday session.

Kurobara Hozonkai is Horie Yui’s strange little goth band that was born from her radio program “Horie Yui no Tenshi no Tamago” back in 2006.

Well they finally announced it - one of the hottest anisong events Animelo Summer is on this year and the official site is now open. A preliminary list of artists attending are already on the site - with familiar names such as ALI Project, Kuribayashi Minami, Mizuki Nana, Chihara Minori, Ishikawa Chiaki, JAM Project, Momoi Halko, Hirano Aya, and two new players GRANRODEO and angela.

This year’s key word is “Challenge” - and with that they are definitely taking some new organizational challenges by not only upping the venue scale from Budoukan to Saitama Super Arena (the capacity depending on layout can be up to double the size), but also splitting the concert into two days, with what appears to be different artists performing on different days. I’m a bit torn on this move - as much as I like the prospects of two days worth of awesome live performances of anisongs, I don’t like them leaving me no choices but to go to both days to see all the artists I want to see.

On a related note, one of JAM Project’s long time female member Matsumoto Rika broke news shortly after the closing of JAM Project’s domestic concert tour that she will no longer take part in JAM Project and JAM Project related events. While hopeful fans were praying that it’s a late April’s Fool, but the profile picture of JAM Project at Animelo reflected this change. It’s a big blow to JAM Project, especially that JAM Project is supposedly doing a world tour this year (and what’s up with that anyway? Hardly any news is out regarding the schedule). Otakon still has her listed as guest, but I guess it’s up in the air.

According to her latest blog entry, made on the 4th, RieRie has changed to an agency named リトリート (Retreat) effective from April 1st. A quick search on the netz turns up surprising little information on an agency with such a name. Now not so long ago, 2ch had threads (also covered by Canned Dogs)about a large amount of seiyuu leaving their agencies, and the one which suffered the most lost was Tokyo Actor’s Consumer’s Cooperative Society (Haikyo). The rumor has it that seiyuu Morikawa Toshiyuki is starting a seiyuu agency himself and invited many in the industry to join his company, and that the company’s name would be named sometime in April. RieRie’s new agency Retreat could very well be the agency in the rumor.

Currently, a lot of the old time seiyuu agencies are actually spinoffs from talent agencies. It’s not too difficult to imagine that the two sectors has different requirements and work rules, thus it makes a lot of sense that some of the old veterans whom are slowly moving down from the front line are now doing their part in helping the industry.