User blog:Rilena/I am tired of all the anime/cartoon designs for mascots

Art by KEI I am serious when I say I am tired of all the cartoon box art we have for VOCALOID voice banks, regardless of how the product sounds. Ever since the release of Hatsune Miku, I believe (not sure, since there's not lots of evidence) that there has been an increase in cartoon style avatars for boxes. This especially became common in V3 and V4.

Also, when the V5 standard vocals were released, there were a bunch of people who were upset because their designs looked like something from The Sims 2. The issue is that their vocals were high quality, yet some people only seemed to care about what the "character looked like." They're allowed to say that, but when I see dozens of comments saying the same thing, I'm reminded that VOCALOID has sometimes been reduced to this "cute/handsome avatars for software singing songs" concept. And I believe Yamaha is trying to reshape the image of the software to what it was back in the V1 era (2004-2006).

I guess these companies though the cartoon mascots would make them famous, but so many voice banks have cartoon designs that it might be time for a change. I'm not saying that designs that are hand drawn should go away, I just think the market is overflowing with so many anime-esque mascots. Similarity is an issue that was addressed when it came to voice banks, specifically in V4 (for Japanese VOCALOIDs, I believe.) Though it is nice to see new voice banks for the Japanese language, I think more emphasis should be put on English (we lost 8 in V2), Korean, Chinese, and Spanish. If new voice banks come our for those languages and other languages (like German/Italian/French, etc.) that would be nice, since there would be more variety.

Hopefully this can all be done in the future, but with what I have heard about VOCALOID vs CeVio, this might not happen soon. Unless VOCALOID has some magnificent breakthrough in the US that doesn't have to do with Miku or the Crypton VOCALOID crew.

--Rilena