Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 552

Suginami Ward, Tokyo.

In a fairly spacious apartment, Hikaru Tono checked his clothes one last time in front of the full-length mirror.

The girl in the mirror had smooth black hair, fair skin, delicate features, and a pair of beautiful big eyes, making her look both pure and spirited.

Objectively speaking, this is a face that would earn preferential treatment in any industry.

However, in Japan in 2018, in the idol-driven and fiercely competitive voice acting industry, beauty was no longer the decisive factor.

Hikaru Tono has a clear understanding of this.

She is not formally trained in animation; she studied a completely unrelated major in college. Because of her love for animation, she continued to participate in auditions for various voice acting agencies after graduation.

It wasn't until last year that the girl finally made her official debut as a new voice actress.

During that year, she took on several nameless background roles, provided a few insignificant lines for some random characters in mobile games, and participated in several small offline events arranged by the agency that attracted almost no attention.

That's all there is to her resume.

Plain and ordinary—this is the typical profile of the hundreds of newcomers who flood into the industry every year.

However, the girl was quite lucky.

At the end of last year, her voice acting agency received investment from Starry Games and joined the Starry Games Alliance.

Although Xingchen's investment did not cause much of a stir in the Japanese industry at the time.

This is a common practice in Japan after a large corporation gains influence over an industry.

Many large Japanese companies invest in upstream and downstream supply chains. By taking equity stakes, establishing long-term agreements, and providing financing, these companies can effectively lock in upstream and downstream partners with relatively small capital investments, ensuring the stability of their businesses and profit margins.

However, there is a prerequisite for achieving this: you must actually hold a leading position in a certain industry before others will recognize you and accept your investment.

Xingchen only started doing this in the second half of 17.

In the past year, StarCraft games have flourished in Japan. FGO, with its FGO Assassin mode and consistently strong storyline and presentation, has firmly established itself as a national game in Japan.

Final Battlefront and Azur Lane have consistently ranked in the top five for years, while at the beginning of the year, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Mobile replaced the former Knives Out in Japan.

Judging by its current state, it could very well become the next FGO.

In the PC platform field, although there was not much development due to the sluggish Japanese PC market, the collaboration between StarCraft and Sony on the console side can be described as a great success.

The low barrier to entry for free-to-play games has allowed many players who previously owned consoles and knew about StarCraft, but had never played StarCraft games, to access StarCraft's channels.

Starting in November, almost every month, Sony's free game charts were filled with games from StarCraft.
While this is partly due to the fact that Sony's console platforms don't have many free-to-play games, this momentum has still amazed many people.

In addition, there was the natural expansion of Star Tap and Star Wallpaper, the explosive growth of Titok, and the rapid expansion of the TV Watch app.

In addition, Starry Sky Animation and Starry Sky Variety Shows continue to provide content.

It is no exaggeration to say that Starry Night Games' influence in Japan even surpasses its influence in China.

Of all these influences, the most important for the Japanese voice actor community is Hoshino's continuous investment in voice actor variety shows.

Before the advent of StarCraft, voice actors held a rather awkward position in the Japanese entertainment industry. On one hand, voice actors were highly tied to their characters; to gain popularity, they had to voice popular characters. However, the problem was that only a handful of anime could become hits each year.

Highly popular characters are definitely a rare and hard-to-find resource.

Moreover, a character is a character, and a voice actor is a voice actor. Even if a voice actor gets a job in a very popular work, it doesn't mean they will become famous.

This brings us to the second awkward situation for Japanese voice actors: a lack of promotional channels. In the past, the most common way for voice actors to promote themselves was by doing radio programs.

Undeniably, some well-made radio programs do have a large audience in Japan.

The problem is that radio can only reach a small audience. Apart from the occasional promotional program related to the animation, that's just promoting the work, and the audience's focus is still on the characters and the animation.

Things only took a turn for the better after Hoshino entered Japan.

Chu Chen invested in video program production mainly because he had ample publicity funds; to put it bluntly, he had too much money to spend.

In the actual implementation process, Starry Night Japan also likes to use well-known voice actors as guests in order to promote their games.

As more and more games based on the StarCraft universe emerge, so do related voice actor programs, giving voice actors more and more opportunities to appear on screen. FGO even has its own television program.
Therefore, for voice actor agencies, regardless of why Starry Sky established this channel, Starry Sky, having control of these resources, is practically the ultimate authority, the king of kings.
So much so that when Starry Sky made its investment request, virtually no voice acting agency dared to refuse.

Of course, this is also because most voice acting agencies have accepted Starry Sky's investment.

Therefore, the entire Japanese voice acting community, apart from the fact that many voice actors could logically call Chu Chen "boss," did not experience any substantial impact.

However, Hikaru Tono is an exception.

Chu Chen had a slight impression of this girl, but that was all; he had only looked her up casually after watching the anime.

So at this year's annual meeting, when Chu Chen was chatting with people from the variety show department of Starry Sky Japan, he mentioned Hikaru Tono and casually remarked that she had a good image and should have the potential to be a show host.

For Chu Chen, this was just a casual remark.

He couldn't even remember whether he had said "not bad," "okay," or "somewhat interesting."

But for others, this is not just a casual remark.

So, just yesterday, Hikaru Tono received a phone call.

"Hikari-chan, get ready! You'll be appearing as a guest on the variety show 'Final Zone' tomorrow!"

"Huh? They invited me to be a guest??"

Hikaru Tono had just finished showering when he heard what his manager said, and his jaw almost dropped to the floor.

"But I didn't participate in any voice acting!"

The agent on the other end of the phone sounded like someone who had won the lottery, completely unable to contain their excitement.

"That's not the point. We'll definitely arrange a new role for you later. The point is, you were specifically asked to participate in the show this time!"

"A roll call?" Tono Hikaru's mind was even more confused. "Who? The production team?"

"It's not the production team! It's someone higher up, someone much higher up!"

(End of this chapter)