Without a doubt, the thing that makes 2D characters in anime and games really come alive are the seiyu, the voice actors who spend years training their voices so they can make the characters we all love real for us. I started watching the currently-airing Sore ga Seiyu! (English title: Seiyu’s Life!), an anime about three tamago voice actresses (the word means “egg” but in Japan’s entertainment world it refers to a fledgling performer who’s just starting out) as they try to make their way in the industry. I like that the 4-koma manga the anime is based on was created by Masumi Asano, the voice actress for Hakufu from Ikki Tousen, based on her experiences. While the show isn’t quite up to the level of Shirobako when it comes to showing how the anime industry works, it does try to help viewers understand the seiyu world in interesting ways. As an anime fan, one of my pet peeves has always been when they ask a Japanese seiyu who doesn’t actually speak English to do voices in the language, which usually comes out sounding terrible. (Some examples are Kaji and Mari from Eva 2.22 and Ohno from Genshiken.) I always thought it’d be cool if my daughter entered this field, since she’s good at voices and her English is excellent, though after seeing the incredibly strict framework the poor voice actors have to work in, and knowing that the vast majority of them earn about $850 a month, I’m not sure I really want to recommend this line of work to her.
I see that yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the release of Windows 95, the first version of Windows you could use without wanting to claw your eyes out immediately, and this made me natsukashii (nostalgic) for those bygone days when I got my start publishing Japanese 18+ games in English. It was a simpler time back then, when anime fans connected to the Internet using analog modems, which many then used to download “hentai” games in Japanese, despite the difficulty of getting these games to work in the Windows of the era. While casting around for something interesting to do, I made contact with Mr. Sato, the president of an H-game maker called JAST — for some reason, 80% of eroge presidents seem to be named Sato — and we decided to try publishing three of his games in proper English under the JAST USA name. In retrospect, I was trying to do something that was utterly impossible (publishing a kind of game that had no distribution channel), but happily I also started another company called J-List — literally, to tide us over for a few months until the visual novels took off — which of course became our main business. We’ve all come a long way since those days thanks to the warm support of our awesome customers, and we thank each and every one of you!
One game J-List customers are waiting very patiently for is Shiny Days, the awesome sequel (well, sort of a prequel actually) to the bestselling School Days. We’ve got a small announcement though: in the grand tradition of School Days publisher STACK, there’ll be a delay getting this most awesome game out to our customers due to issues mastering the massive 18 gb game. The physical Limited Edition games will now ship by September 18, but we’ll push the download edition out to customers who have preordered sooner, as soon as the final master is ready (in 1-2 weeks). So preorder the game now, while you can still get the limited edition keychains!
