Notes taken with a 0.7mm pencil.
When the news broke that Mio’s voice was going to change, I wasn’t even going to post. It’s entirely possible that Mio is retiring anyhow and will only appear in short scenes. But some people seem to take it hard. Being a fan of Mina (CV: Rie Tanaka), I’m not affected, but my condolenses anyway. Be sure to watch the YGOTAS ep.8 (offset 4:42), which is very relevant.
She has made j1m0ne to pay attention. Indeed, only 3 years in business and already GOH at AX in 2 weeks, confused Hinano with a Vocaloid role, etc. etc.
I was listening to “Alive” at an IM@S CD, and it struck me how Haruka Tomatsu can take plainly insane notes for Ai Hidaka. If Miku did that, I would say “pfft, how fake”, but Miss Tomatsu is a living person. I don’t go to opera often, but I am sure she would be competitive. Talk about talent buried.
UPDATE: J. says that TomaHaru also moonlights as a bikini model. It’s unclear to me which career started first, but I am firmly convinced that can sing. And if she is also cute, what’s the harm in that?
In the post about IS, Smithy drops this remark:
Inoue Marina, known for her roles as Natsuru in “Kämpfer”, Kana in “Minami-ke” and who also stars in this season’s “Freezing” will play the role of Laura [in Infinite Stratos].
Meanwhile, Richard Stallman is known for posting weird personals at Craigslist, Adolph Hitler is known for his impressionist paintings, and Pete Zaitcev is known for fixing bugs in euca2ools.
Leaving the horse armour aside, this caught my attention:
[...] it wouldn’t be that difficult to design an iM@S-beating idol game that played on the same compulsions (both gameplay and content-wise) as iM@S, but it’d likely be, if not incredibly difficult, certainly extraordinarily expensive to line up all the necessary non-gameplay elements. Beyond accusations of mimicry, the biggest one is the voice-talent, which is where iM@S really struck it lucky. Most of the voice actresses for the games main characters – even the ones brought on recently – were hardly prolific at the time they signed onto the series, and many of them continue to be otherwise relatively small names. In the case of Rie Kugimiya, they were clearly extremely fortunate to sign her just before her popularity absolutely exploded. Yet they all worked out. To try and take mindshare from iM@S at this point, you’d probably have to build yourself a pretty stellar voice-cast to build your marketing around [...]
The facts weren’t new for us. Asami Imai’s performance was amazing in the anime, we know that. She grew together with iM@S as DiGi narrated. But one of “brought on recently” was incomparable Haruka Tomatsu, who since very much proved that she offered more than a cute package. I suspect that her promise must have been obvious to whoever audited her in 2008. So… It is not just luck, but clearly someone at Namco has a keen eye and knows how to negotiate (it may even be the same person — a real-life Producer).