Minori Suzuki, the Pokémon voice actress who first auditioned to be a singer

Minori Suzuki

Photo: Dick Thomas Johnson from Tokyo, Japan / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 1, 1997 Aichi Prefecture
Occupation	Seiyū
Awards	Seiyu Awards — Singing Award, with Walküre

The audition that made Minori Suzuki was for a singer. The makers of Macross, the long-running mecha franchise in which pop songs decide space wars, were looking for a new diva, and the teenager from Aichi who applied wanted above all to follow Megumi Nakajima, the voice and singing voice of Ranka Lee in Macross Frontier. She won the part. What nobody planned was that the acting attached to that song would take her further than the song did: a generation of children now knows her as Liko, one of the two leads who replaced Ash Ketchum in Pokémon Horizons: The Series, and not as the idol who sang her way into the business. Her acting credits keep piling up while her solo records have gone quiet, and that imbalance is the question her career is now working out.

The double ambition was there early. As a child she was praised for reading aloud in class and for her singing at school shows, and somewhere in the last years of primary school she decided that voice acting was the one job that would let her do all of it. She was shy, and sport changed that: basketball first, then middle-distance running, which she took up seriously in middle school and still keeps up with runs and gym work, a habit credited with the stamina her live work draws on. At a middle-school festival she sang a cover of a Maaya Sakamoto song, became a devoted fan and joined Sakamoto’s fan club. In high school she paid for weekly lessons at a voice-acting school in Tokyo with money saved from a part-time job.

Born on October 1, 1997, in Aichi Prefecture, she was still a student when the Macross producers announced their search for a new singer and voice actress in late 2014. Her mother, a fan of Macross Frontier, pushed her to enter. From roughly 8,000 applicants she was chosen to play Freyja Wion, the heroine of Macross Delta and the newest member of Walküre, the in-story “tactical sound unit” whose concerts are deployed in battle. The series premiered in April 2016, and Walküre’s first single, carrying the opening theme “Ichido Dake no Koi Nara”, came out that May.

Walküre did not stay inside the screen. The five singers, Suzuki alongside JUNNA, Kiyono Yasuno, Nao Toyama and Nozomi Nishida, topped the Oricon weekly singles and albums charts and the Billboard Japan singles chart, and their first album, Walküre Attack!, was named Animation Album of the Year at the Japan Gold Disc Awards. Freyja returned in two Macross Delta feature films, in 2018 and 2021, and in 2021 the unit received the Singing Award at the 15th Seiyu Awards. Their farewell, the Final Live Tour 2023 “Last Mission”, played six arena shows to about 74,000 people.

Her own records followed a gentler curve. On the FlyingDog label she made her solo debut in January 2018 with “Feeling Around”, the opening of Ms. Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles, which reached No. 21 on Oricon. Three albums came next, Miru Mae ni Tobe! in 2018, Kami Mino in 2020 and fruitful spring in 2023, along with theme songs for other series, including the ending of Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card, where she also voiced Akiho Shinomoto. Signing to Sakamoto’s label let her sing lyrics written by her idol, a wish she had carried since the school-festival cover.

The acting widened faster. She was Angie Yonaga in the murder-mystery game Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony and Agnes Digital in Umamusume: Pretty Derby. In the rhythm game Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! she became Ena Shinonome, a role that has carried her onto concert stages and into the 2025 feature film. On screen she played Akiko in Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop and Uran, the robot girl, in Netflix‘s Pluto.

Then came Liko. In April 2023, after a quarter of a century following Ash and Pikachu, the Pokémon anime started over with two new protagonists, Liko and Roy, the latter voiced by Yuka Terasaki. TMDB counts 159 episodes so far, and TV Tokyo’s listings still credit Suzuki as Liko in October 2026. That autumn of 2023 she also changed course offstage: she left e-stone music, her home since her debut, and on October 1 joined Aoni Production, the veteran voice-acting agency.

The trouble with the usual telling, the idol who also acts, is that the numbers point the other way. Walküre’s chart-toppers belonged to a franchise with a rule that its music must serve the story; Suzuki’s solo singles peaked between No. 14 and No. 31, and no new solo single has appeared since “Musical”, the Sugar Apple Fairy Tale opening released in January 2023 on the same day as fruitful spring. The agency move was about voice work; not until March 2026 did she sign separate management, Cloud Nine, for the singing. The singer who won the audition has been, in practice, a working actress who sings in character.

The acting work since makes the case for itself. She was Shiori Yomiuri in Days with My Stepsister in 2024 and Memmeln in Zenshu in 2025. In July 2026 she voiced the Siren in Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island, the giant creature at the centre of the story whose power is a mysterious song, a role that turns her voice into the threat. This year she has also been Ema Mochinaga in Onegai AiPri and Bianca in DARK MACHINE THE ANIMATION, and she keeps a stage line that began with the play MOTHERLAND in December 2021, with a reading play scheduled for November 14 in Tokyo.

The music is moving again. In October FlyingDog announced that Walküre are returning, with the original line-up, on a single titled “Walküre wa Makerarenai”, roughly “Walküre can’t afford to lose”. It arrives on March 24, 2027, with an audio drama directed by Macross creator Shoji Kawamori. The first test of the comeback is whether it opens the door to new records under her own name.

Tags: actors, anime, voice actresses, Macross Delta, Minori Suzuki, Walküre

Related People

Related People

Discussion