I grew up in the 80s watching an anime series called Robotech and recently finished watching a movie adaptation of the series—Macross: Do You Remember Love?—for the first time since I last saw it over twenty years ago. Of course, back then DAWs/plugins/samples/etc. weren't part of my life so what really grabbed my attention this time around was Kentaro Haneda's beautiful score. The strings in two particular pieces have been haunting me (in a good way) ever since:

- Teenage Dream (second half): isolated / scene
- Before the Battle: isolated / scene

Now, I'm the type of person that believes anything in the right pair of skilled hands is possible, but my inexperience is getting in the way of trying to imagine this sound being reproduced with VSL—is it possible? Are there specific VSL string libraries I should be looking at? Are there any inherent technical limitations (e.g., lack of particular articulations, a special kind of recording technique, etc.) of the VSL string libraries that would prevent this sound from being reproduced? Wrong type of library?

Wow, thanks so much for doing that, Brian! This is encouraging! :)

Would you say it's mostly Dimension or mostly Appassionata? Or was the layering kind of evenly split? Also, which reverb do you use?

 This is a crisp, in-your-face string sound with a long reverb, so you can easily do this with Orchestral Strings, Chamber Strings, Dimension or Appassionata, depending on how large an ensemble you want.  Also, you can layer Chamber for example, with Appassionata, to get a tighter sound on the attacks and legato.  And then if you place it into MIR, you can use the customized presets for those instruments and adjust however much reverb you want very easily.