Atobe's single, Riyuu/E kimochi No.9 on Oricon!!

I happened to see this when I was surfing the NEC website which shows Tenipuri CD releases. Apparently, Atobe's single being the 100th CD release from Tenipuri was a special item and they mentioned something like the track number being shown as 99 on the CD player and it's a deliberate thing. Don't know what they mean but might probably get the CD to hear for myself. Anyway, what was very interesting and surprising was the fact that this CD got No.9 on the Oricon singles chart for this week (11 Apr). In terms of sales figures it's quite far from No.1's BoA (66749 vs 15988) but I think it's a major achievement since Atobe-sama is in fact not a real-life person but an anime character. It's very rare for anime character CDs to get such high sales figures so I'm very happy for Atobe-sama.

To be frank, I've not bought any of the character CDs even though my favourite characters like Tezuka, Sanada, Atobe have released a number of CDs among them. Tezuka has a number of singles and one album this year, Sanada has one single and Atobe has countless of singles and albums. However, the problem I have with these is the fact that sounding well when you speak is not equal to sounding well when you sing. Take for example, Sanada's solo single, Meisei, the song is OK by itself but Kusunoki-san's voice is so deep that the song sounds very sad and boring. Besides, the cover of the single is not too nice (makes Sanada look so weird and fierce) so I'm still undecided till this day about buying this. Likewise for Tezuka, Okiayu-san sounds good when he speaks (bravo for Tezuka and Mitsui) BUT some of the songs don't sound too nice to me. As for Atobe, I think Suwabe-san sings pretty well and I must say that he has better songs to sing.

Actually, among the many songs I've listened to, I would think that Shishido and Ootori's combined single, Brand New Days sounds the best. It's somehow quite Chemistry-style and the song is very soothing to the ears. Besides, the voices of Shishido and Ootori match very well. That should be the song which has left the deepest impression on me. Will plan to buy this single once I'm done with the manga and pay for the movie DVDs in June.

Finally decided to get the digipaks i.e. the separate units for the movie instead of the box set. Paying more than 3000 plus yen for the premium version may not be worth it since there's no much mention of it on the Shochiku site. That's not sufficient motivation to make me pay 9000 plus yen for that. Besides, since it's so expensive, I can go back and buy the first press more easily as compared to the digipaks which is likely to run out first if the box set really has something which is so irrestible.