excited
kilerkki for making them for us!!! Eventually we're going to have to see about upgrading our account so we can use more icons at a time. Athena's really wanted to for a while, so we'll see when we have money.So back to this challenge.
baranoneko posted a link on her LJ to an audio file from La Corda d'Oro, where all the voice actors play little fairies that have vastly different personalities than their normal show characters, and said she'd like to see how many of her friends can guess who's who. She also listed the names of the fairies and all the voice actors, so it's like a matching game. We thought it would be fun to post about it in our journal, to give people an idea of how we go about attempting to identify voice actors.When we watch anime, every new character is like a lock, and we search through our set of keys (the voice actors whose voices we know) to see if we can find a match. In this case, we've been given a list of keys, so we don't have to go through nearly as many. And here it is:
The Fairies:
Putoru
Rukuri
Nanaru
Wenusu
Turusu
Yupii
Maru
The Seiyuu (Normal Role):
Taniyama Kishou (Tsukimori Len)
Itou Kentarou (Tsuchiura Ryoutarou)
Fukuyama Jun (Shimizu Keiichi)
Morita Masakazu (Hihara Kazuki)
Kishio Daisuke (Yunoki Azuma)
Ishikawa Hideo (Kanazawa Hiroto)
Konishi Katsuyuki (Ousaki Shinobu)
Let's just go through our thought process as we listen. Putoru has a Tomokazu Seki quality to his voice. Katsuyuki Konishi has come to be known by us as "the guy who sounds exactly like Tomokazu Seki," so he's a pretty strong guess right now. Incidentally, we usually differentiate if it's Konishi-san or Seki-san by how expensive the rest of the cast is.
Rukuri is Jun Fukuyama. He's been in about a million things we've seen recently, so we've come to recognize his voice fairly quickly. (
pudges, see: Sakurakouji-kun.)Nanaru is someone using a voice we don't recognize. This means he's likely to be... well, about anyone in Corda, since that's the "Neo Romance series with the cast we don't know so well." Still thinking on him.
Wenusu sounds a lot like Auron on our Final Fantasy X CD, so we're thinking Hideo Ishikawa. If it is, we thank him for using his Auron voice, because there's no other way we possibly could have guessed him, except by elimination, but not with this cast.
Turusu sounds has a Tomokazu Seki quality to his voice, but it's not quite as close as Konishi-san's voice tends to be, so we're leaning toward Kishou Taniyama. Now if only we'd been able to watch the rest of Midori Days...
Only one other character we know laughs like Yupii, and that's Waji from Hare + Guu. And he's played by Daisuke Kishio. I love that laugh. Yupii also kind of sounds like the obligatory cute blond boy from Cluster Edge, so it must be Kishio-san.
Maru has the "Square-Enix hero" voice quality that belongs to people such as Takahiro Sakurai and, well, Masakazu Morita. He also has a quality to his voice that sounds like someone trying to be serious but just can't quite contain himself, like an overstuffed suitcase. Also, when he gets a little worked up, he has an energy in his voice that matches Morita-oniisan♥'s perfectly (especially when he says, "Ii n dakedo!").
But to be honest, before
baranoneko posted her challenge, she posted mini-rave of this drama in which she mentioned Morita-oniisan♥ playing a calm fairy against a spastastic one (since deleted for the purpose of the challenge), which was really the basis of our guess. Teheh. We really need to learn Morita-san's voice better; we've only really heard him as Ichigo. But all's fair in VA identification. Also, it didn't affect our Yupii guess, since we weren't sure if she said Kishou-san or Kishio-san.Now to go back and check on those first three fairies. Still liking Konishi-san for Putoru, and still no question for Rukuri. We know Kentarou Itou's voice well enough to know that he's not Turusu, so by process of elimination, he must be Nanaru.
Still, one of the biggest secrets is to never assume, even if you know the voice really well. I've said before that we were thoroughly convinced that Nagiinyo in FushigiBoshi no FutagoHime was played by Soichiro Hoshi, who is one of our absolute favorite voice actors, and we should have been able to distinguish someone else's voice, but we read the credits and were wrong. So until we read the final credits, we can't say for sure, especially because we are so unfamiliar with most of the voice actors in this series.
And there you have it. Tadah! We would have posted it a lot earlier, but we wanted to make sure to get lots of work done on the crazy crazy thing so we could justify playing FF12 all afternoon. Fortunately, thanks to going back to standard time, we've been waking up an hour earlier all week. It's amazing how much more work you can get done.
Speaking of FF12, I just thought I'd give our first impression, which was Lord of the Rings meets Star Wars. It's very interesting, though so far I'm not sure how I feel about the main characters. We're not very far into it, and we have to get over the English voices. For the most part they're actually very good, it's just the main guy, like usual. I know I didn't like Tidus nearly as much until I heard his Japanese voice. After that, when we played FFX, whenever his voice got too annoying, I'd replay it as performed by Morita-oniisan♥, and it was much, much better.
And that's why I'm tempted to look up Vaan's Japanese voice actor (we listened to a trailer once and he sounded very familiar) soon, rather than waiting until we beat the game. We'll see. In Vaan's case it really is more the acting than the actual voice (in Tidus's case it was both), so maybe as he gets more into the character he'll sound better.
And now! It's time to go play. Today I'm thankful for an extra hour to work in, voice actor challenges, fun analogies, more sparkly new icons, and finishing work (even more than we'd planned!) in time to play more Final Fantasy before Teen Titans.
