Trivia / Symphogear

• Actor-Shared Background: Why does Tsubasa sing enka when she goes to karaoke with Hibiki and Miku in episode 9? Must be because Nana Mizuki spent most of her childhood^note when she was 5 years old until she was 15 years old, to be exact being trained to sing enka and participating in enka singing contests and jobs before she finally debuted as a voice actress/singer in 3rd year high school. Normally, young people don't sing enka when they casually hang out with friends. A sadder side to this is that both Tsubasa and her CV, Nana Mizuki, have similar issues when it comes to paternal abandonment and parental approval. Makes one wonder how many nerves it touched for Nana Mizuki to do GX E9.
• All-Star Cast: In the most literal sense of "all". It's not that surprising that the Symphogear users are played by some of the most accomplished singers from the anime world, but even the Bridge Bunnies, Those Three Girls, the Big Bads, their Co-Dragons, AND the lady who runs the okonomiyaki restaurant are stars in their own right, as seen here.
• Anime First: This is the first original anime by Noriyasu Agematsu.
• Colbert Bump: Crunchyroll's posting of various clips of Symphogear XV on their youtube page and promotion of the series as a whole on twitter has given it a minor bump in popularity compared to past releases. The Posting of the episodes of the first 3 seasons in full on their Youtube account in preperation for the Worldwide release of the Mobile game helps, too.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: A notable example in AXZ with Cagliostro being voiced by Shouta Aoi, a male voice actor.
• Follow the Leader: Symphogear: Feast of the Valkyries ~Shirabe’s Cooking~ is essentially the franchise's take on Today's Menu for the Emiya Family, with both being a Everybody Lives Slice of Life spin-off featuring the resident Supreme Chef cooking for the rest of the cast and others learning how to cook certain dishes.
• God Never Said That: Contrary to popular belief, the show was not a 2 cour (26 episodes) run that was switched to 1 cour (13 episodes) midway. Symphogear was always intended to be one cour, it's just that there were too many ideas and they had to be cut out. You can read more about it here.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: An image of the stereotypical Indian/Middle-Eastern men who show up in concert reaction shots has apparently become a meme in India and Pakistan. See it here.
• No Dub for You: Both its NA stream and home released from Discotek Media are sub only.
• No Export for You: At least at first. G was never licensed to the west compared to the first season when it premiered back in 2013. However, with Crunchyroll's licensing of GX, they were able to bring both G and the first season with them. The same happened to AXZ which wasn't licensed during its premiere run but did get licensed alongside XV.
  • Live outside Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and South Korea? Senki Zesshou Symphogear XD Unlimited is only available there on Apple Stores and Google Play, with interested players from other countries requiring to download it via a Japanese iTunes account or a 3rd party download website.
• Playing Against Type:
  • In real life, Ayahi Takagaki is a Pungeon Master Genki Girl. She plays Chris. That is all.
  • Tomokazu Sugita voices Doctor Ver, which is a type of role that usually goes to his friend, Yūichi Nakamura.
• Promoted Fanboy: The artist for the spin-off manga "Symphogear: Feast of the Valkyries ~Shirabe’s Cooking~", has previously done fanart (with certain spicier examples with Hibiki and Miku) for the show ever since the first Season.
• Recast as a Regular: Inori Minase originally had minor voice roles in the first season before she gets to voice Carol in the third season.
• Referenced by...: The anime Healer Girl was directly inspired by Symphogear, per the director. Just flipping it from singing used for combat to singing used to help people.
• Sleeper Hit: The first season did rather poorly in terms of home video sales, due to its budget problems. The singles and OST, however, sold well enough that a second season was ordered. Each subsequent season has sold more than the last in terms of home video sales.
  • The first season sold an average of 5,045 copies per volume, the second season (G) average grew to 8,701 copies per volume, the third season (GX) grew once again to an average of 14,229 copies per volume and ranked as not only the top selling anime of the summer, but also ranked as the tenth best selling anime of 2015.
  • Season 4 (AXZ) grew yet again to an average of 14,792 copies per volume, and ranked as the sixth best selling anime of 2017.
  • Season 5 (XV) incredibly grew once again, to an average of 16,857 copies per volume, and ranked as not only the top selling anime of Summer 2019 by far, but also ranked as the fifth best selling anime of 2019.
    • The final volume alone sold more than 36,000 copies, the highest single volume opening sales for the series by far.
• Throw It In!: During Chris's transformation sequence, the "Bang!" line is actually an ad lib from her voice actress, Ayahi Takagaki. Likewise, Hibiki's ORAORAORAORAORAORAORA in the final battle of AXZ was actually Aoi Yūki ad-libbing, as she reveals in this interview.
  • Interviews ended up revealing that the entire main gimmick of the series was born from this. First from a misunderstanding during pre-production that turned "character songs play during battle" into "characters sing during battle"; and then the concept of having the voice actors directly sing over the scenes instead of using canned Image Songs (making the acting all the more intense and allowing for ridiculous spurts of Hot Blood, but also making Symphogear one of the toughest anime to voice act for) was improvised during the first episode by Minami Takayama. As she was basically done with singing in the show already (being Kanade and all that), she could only give a cheerful "sorry guys, looks like I just made your work a whole lot harder" to the other seiyuus when the idea caught on.
• Word of Saint Paul: Yuka Iguchi confirmed in Symphogear Live 2016 that she plays Miku as being in love with Hibiki. Aoi Yūki said that the feeling is mutual on Hibiki's end during Symphogear Live 2016 as well. In addition, both Iguchi and Yuuki also called the duet between Hibiki and Miku, "Itsuka no Niji, Hana no Omoide," a "love song" during the concert. Yōko Hikasa also confirmed that Maria is interested in Tsubasa and is annoyed that the latter won't touch Maria.

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