Note: the main female character is named Ichigo Mizuhara. In Japanese, “Ichigo” means “strawberry.”
The earliest in a series of soundtracks published by Team Entertainment for games developed by Vingt-et-un, Kimagure Strawberry Cafe’s soundtrack starts off with some drama tracks, then moves on to the music starting at track 11. We got a dude singing opening and ending vocals, and there are some bonus tracks. Pretty standard release.
Except for one thing: tracks 6 through 10. Now, these tracks hold no value for English-speaking listeners, but these tracks are sort of “karaoke drama” tracks. Ichigo, the protagonist of the game, has her parts removed. You can speak her words in her place, or you can “mad-lib” to create some hilarious dialogue. But again, it’s worthless to anyone who doesn’t know Japanese. Or anyone that isn’t comfortable playing a love-adventure role that is designed for females (or homosexual men).
Jazz and ambient “mood music” dominate this soundtrack. Some composers do well with this, but the un-credited composer(s) from Vingt-et-un are entirely hit-or-miss. Some tracks, such as the character themes (found at the end of the disc) are excellent. Others are complete failures, such as “Morning of the Holiday” with its poor synth and intentionally off-key background noise.
The sampled selections include some of my favorite works, so if you’re sampling this album and considering a purchase, you may want to note to yourself: these songs are the best I could find. Other than that, it’s fairly bland.
All in all, this is an average album for an average love-adventure title. We’ve reached into the most obscure places to find albums like these, and only rarely was the effort worth it. In this case, I’d have to say that I would’ve been just fine without it.
