Wee-ha, an image album! This album contains ten vocal tracks from five female seiyuu (voice actors) of the Sega Saturn game Langrisser III. Despite the general cheesiness that comes along with these sorts of collaborations, I was personally impressed with this album, and it quickly grew on me.
All of the vocalists have their own style, which means that a track-by-track review is almost in order. The first two tracks, sung by Yuko Mizutani, are pretty standard tracks. The sample here gives you a feel for what these vocals sound like. The Flaire tracks, sung by Konami Yoshida, have got to be my favorites. While having lots of cheesy background tracks, these two tracks with the vocals are REALLY catchy. I could listen to these two songs over and over. I was honestly very impressed with these tracks, and had hoped to find the rest of the album sounding this good.
The Tiaris tracks, sung by Mika Kanai…they’re childish. “Angel’s Smile” is REALLY childish, to the point where Kanai makes her voice sound like that of a 5-year-old girl, and I found it to be truly annoying. “DAN DAN DAN” isn’t as childish, and the chorus is sort of catchy, but it’s standard J-Pop fare.
The Luna tracks, sung by Hiroko Kasahara, are mediocre. Because they are so mediocre, I couldn’t even sample one of them. They aren’t bad, but they are pretty boring. Neither of the songs stuck with me. They fill up time, but when listening to this CD, I would normally skip these tracks.
Finally, the Fauna and Luciris tracks (having the same seiyuu), sung by the somewhat-well-known Kikuko Inoue, are slower and done with more of a “ballad/love-song” style. These are pretty good songs. I liked them a good bit. Nothing extraordinary about these tracks (like most of the album), but worth a listen.
As far as I was able to tell, none of these songs are inspired by melodies from the OST. This is a neat album, but none of the music is from the game. If one were ever to attempt to pick it up, one should know it can be found for fairly low prices on eBay every now and then. Enjoy the samples, and decide if it’s your “taste” or not. I didn’t especially like it, but a couple of the songs made purchasing the whole album worth it.
