Megumi Toyoguchi

Our catalogue holds a hundred and nineteen credits for Megumi Toyoguchi, and that is the short list. Born in Machida, Tokyo in 1978 and affiliated with 81 Produce, she came up through the Japanese voice industry in the late 1990s and has not slowed since. Her name is attached to a startling share of the anime an English-speaking viewer is likely to have watched by accident.

The range is the whole point. Revy in Black Lagoon is a foul-tempered gunfighter with a voice like a lit fuse. Winry Rockbell in Fullmetal Alchemist is the warm one, the mechanic. Hikari, known in English as Dawn, carried years of Pokemon at a register pitched squarely at children, and Junko Enoshima in Danganronpa runs at a manic brightness that would be unbearable in another performer's mouth. Most voice actors settle into a type and get hired for it. Toyoguchi's casting history reads like four different people sharing an agency.

Games have taken as much of her time as television. She voiced Yukari Takeba in Persona 3, Paine in Final Fantasy X-2, Rosie in Valkyria Chronicles and Aqua in Kingdom Hearts, and the catalogue picks up the animated spin-offs of several of those. The earliest curiosity on the record is Nami in One Piece: Defeat the Pirate Ganzack, a 1998 one-off made before the series everyone knows. She is still busy: Hongniang in The Apothecary Diaries, Raphael in the Slime franchise, Ghislaine Dedoldia in Mushoku Tensei, Kage's mother in Ranking of Kings.