Yusuke Kobayashi

Yusuke Kobayashi’s Long Road to the Center of Anime’s Biggest Franchises

The seiyuu career of Yusuke Kobayashi (小林 裕介) did not follow a clean arc. After growing up in Tokyo – with a formative stretch of childhood spent in England before his family returned to Japan when he was 10 – he graduated from university and spent time working at an air conditioning company, a direction that left him dissatisfied. It was in his off-hours that he began taking singing and voice lessons, eventually enrolling at Amusement Media Academy. When he graduated in 2010 and joined Yu-rin Pro, he quickly found that work was not guaranteed. For the first several years, character voice roles came rarely – once every few years at best – while he sustained himself through narration, commentary work, and stage productions.

That patience was eventually rewarded. Early supporting roles in titles like A Certain Scientific Railgun S (2013) and Witch Craft Works (2014) were modest but real. The Heroic Legend of Arslan (2015) gave him his first sustained lead, carrying the young prince across two consecutive seasons. The role required a specific quality: a protagonist who is earnest and idealistic without reading as naive. Kobayashi delivered that calibration across the full run and its sequel, Dust Storm Dance (2016), establishing himself as a seiyuu capable of anchoring a long-form narrative.

Re:Zero and the Role That Changed Everything

In 2016, Re:Zero – Starting Life in Another World launched to immediate cultural impact, and Kobayashi’s performance as Subaru Natsuki became the center of that conversation. What made the role technically demanding was its structure: Subaru dies repeatedly, resets, and carries accumulated trauma that the people around him cannot perceive. Kobayashi had to express internal collapse while maintaining believable hope – a combination that most isekai protagonists never require. The performance landed, and Re:Zero went on to become one of the defining isekai franchises of its decade. Kobayashi returned to the role across the 2020 second season, a 2022 film, and the 2024 third season, building Subaru across years rather than episodes.

In 2017, the industry formally acknowledged his emergence. At the 11th Seiyu Awards, Kobayashi won Best New Actor – a recognition that arrived several years into his career, a marker of how gradually that career had accumulated. The Crunchyroll Anime Awards later named him Best Voice Actor for 2021, driven primarily by the Re:Zero second season’s reception.

Dr. Stone and the Science of Senku Ishigami

Where Subaru required emotional rawness, Senku Ishigami in Dr. Stone (2019) demanded something different: a character defined by relentless intelligence and a performative arrogance that never tips into unlikable. The delivery is rapid, technically loaded, and specific – Senku’s speech patterns are a character choice, not incidental. Kobayashi threaded that needle across three seasons (2019, 2021, 2023) and multiple specials, turning a potentially alienating protagonist into one of the most watchable leads in shonen anime of the period.

Fire Emblem, Fire Force, and the Gaming Catalog

Outside television anime, Kobayashi brought Byleth – the player-avatar protagonist of Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019) – to life with a quiet intensity that fits the game’s professor framing. The role carried into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Fire Emblem Engage. In the Fire Force anime (2019-2025), his Arthur Boyle served as a comedic counterweight to the series’ heavier ensemble, a self-styled “knight” whose delusion is played with straight-faced commitment. Across Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku (2023), Synduality: Noir (2023), and Oshi no Ko’s second season (2024), he continued expanding a catalog that crosses genre boundaries without settling into a single register.

On December 31, 2024, Kobayashi and fellow seiyuu Yumi Uchiyama announced their marriage – a detail that closed a year that had also seen him return to Subaru Natsuki in Re:Zero Season 3, with Hotel Inhumans following in 2025 as one of his most recent broadcast credits.