Keiji Fujiwara dead, and Utawarerumono S3 dies with him:

Keiji Fujiwara is Haku's voice actor, the protagonist of Utawarerumono S3.  He plays an important voice acting role where he has two voices, his voice while pretending to be Oshutoru and his normal voice while thinking in his own head.  Such a difficult voice acting job -- how can anyone else pull it off?  Haku is Keiji Fujiwara.  His distinct voice was the soul of Haku in S2.  How can anyone replace him now?

Someone has to pretend to be Keiji Fujiwara pretending to be Oshutoru for this to work.  Is there any voice actor in the business that good?

Or are we going to bring in some voice so different from Keiji's that the two seasons will basically have nothing to do with each other anymore?  Even though the plot is so inextricably linked?

Maybe the animators should have thought of this before delaying the Utawarerumono S3 anime five years for no reason.  Now their protagonist is dead of cancer -- at age 55.  Old age.  He wouldn't have been so old if you'd made the seasons back to back.  Instead you tried to cheat fate, randomly wait five years between installments -- and now it's too late.  Any season we get now will never be an authentic recreation of the visual novel -- which does have Haku voiced by Keiji in a stellar job of voice acting that can never be replicated by anyone.

Utawarerumono S3 was, right alongside Bleach, my most anticipated anime.  I hope they still make it.  I hope they cast Kenjiro Tsuda as Haku next.  But whatever they do it will never be as good.  I hope it can even be half as good.

Every single series that likes to string itself out with massive gaps inbetween needs to look at what just happened and change their ways.  I understand if the source work itself isn't finished so it's impossible to hurry up, but many times, like with Utawarerumono, that isn't the case.  The source work had been complete for years and nothing was stopping the animation company from getting a move on.  I'm looking at you, Ranma 1/2.

No matter what happens with the anime, Keiji Fujiwari can be proud of his lasting legacy with the visual novels.  They're practically perfect.  I guess people will have to play the video game version of season 3 now.  Unfortunately, since he was Leorio's voice actor, it's now impossible to get an authentic Hunter x Hunter sequel season too. . .

P.S.  Here's an idea.  Just rip the audio data from the visual novel and use Keiji Fujiwara's authentic lines right in the anime.  Copy and paste.  Word for word.  Why wouldn't this work?