User blog comment:Atsuko-Regalia/Yumemi Nemu, Tone Rion V4, and Nemu Yumemi/@comment-99.235.121.83-20170111052743

I do agree with your stance on Rion's new design. I honestly thought by first glance that Rana got another update. Took me longer than it should to realize which vocaloid that design belonged to. After thinking about it for a bit, I think I can understand why they opted for a drastic change to Rion - that is, they don't really want her to be Rion at all. Rion flunked in popularity so perhaps the company is trying to 'start anew' by creating a completely different design. Not sure why they still chose not to make her a new vocaloid but my best guess is that they're building on whatever popularity Rion version 1 has accumulated.

However, with Rion and Nemu's shared voice provider, this is not the first time that a vocalist had voiced two different vocaloids - it's been done with Ona and Maika. It's likely this was done from a marketing standpoint so that Maika and Ona can appeal to difffrent audiences whilst using the same voice provider. In the case of Rion and Nemu, the new Rion is an updated Rion bank so the vocals were made to resemble the original's childish and moe tone. On the other hand, Nemu is said to be a faithful recreation of the voice actress so her voice is intended to sound different. Why make another vocaliid character then? This may be attributed to Rion's lack of popularity - likely the company wanted Nemu's voice and image not to be associated with Rion at all and also to give the voice actress her own vocaloid representative since she is well known already.

Anyways those were my two cents on that topic. I've heard Nemu's demo but the backtrack is too loud for me to discern if she has good vocal quality. So far it sounds pretty good with a spunkier, tomboyish yet not child-like vocals compared to Rion and I'm looking forward for more demos.