Make Believe Bonus: Love And Berry

Perfect Young Ladies

Every weekend over the last few months, I find myself on the fifth floor of a supermarket housing a teeny-tiny arcade. The focus of my attention is something called Himitsu No AiPri. You put a ¥100 into the machine, and it spits out a random card featuring a colorful anime lady on it. From there, you choose one card — new or brought in a big ol’ binder full of women — which represents a song. From here, AiPri becomes a rhythm game, where you move the card around a flat surface in time with the music, all in the efforts to impress three “judges” scoring you for your virtual idol performance. You get a score out of 10 at the end…and the chance to earn more cards, if you are willing to part with more real-world coins, which my daughter certainly expects every time her selected tune comes to an end.

This game is for toddlers in every way, down to the arcade machine itself being ideal for pint-sized heights. They love it. Whenever we end up there, there’s usually a line to play. Every kid usually clutches a little case full of AiPri cards accumulated over previous visits. They get animated while playing, singing along to the peppy pop within and absolutely losing it if the initial card coming out of the slot is shiny. I now understand the annoyance my own parents must have felt when I begged for packs of Pokemon cards in the ‘90s.

AiPri is also wildly popular. Packs of officially licensed candies with a bonus card sell out routinely, and fetch inflated prices on online auction sites. There’s an entire ecosystem of clothes, toys and books on sale. Naturally, a cartoon debuted alongside the game earlier this spring. Most telling of its emerging dominance among the kid demographic is the collaborations the franchise gets up to. Right now, they’ve linked up with Oshi No Ko for a set of special cards featuring the legendary idol from that show, Ai¹.

Before that, though, AiPri featured two characters that looked out of place in this game’s universe. The idols of AiPri are all Technicolor-bright, and extremely anime in design. Yet in September, they were joined by a pair of women who appeared straight out of a forgotten Dreamcast title or direct-to-DVD Aughts animated film. Yet here they were, appearing on the cards spat out of the machine and popping up on screen to cheer on the player.

They are Love and Berry, and turns out they are pioneers.

It’s always exciting to encounter something you never knew existed before. It’s even better when nobody around you remembers it either. Seeing as it was a Japanese game specifically aimed at little kids during a time where I was in college in the Midwest, me not knowing these two was to be expected. Yet my circle of Japanese connections the same age as me — my wife, the majority of my friends — also barely remembered Oshare Majoo Love And Berry, released in 2004 by Sega. That’s because they were, like me, university students, focused on a billion things that weren’t a silly tamborine-centric arcade machine designed for four-year-old girls.

Yet these two teenagers who loved dressing up and dancing — but were also witches based off the title of the game though I’m not sure where that really factors in — were extremely popular in their heyday. The discovery of Love And Berry via AiPri coupled with the music associated with the pair — more on that in a bit — sent me down a rabbit hole. Luckily for me, 2024 marked the 20th anniversary of the game, meaning I had plenty of ways to learn about it. Including this long video of Hinatazaka46 members who clearly did grow up with it having a nostalgic experience playing it once again².

On the surface, it’s not particularly complicated. Users put a coin in the machine, and receive one card. They usually feature a type of clothing, a hairstyle, shoes, accessories and beyond, which can be used during a part of the game where the player dresses their preferred character for a big dance. This is not just customization…one needs to coordinate outfits correctly to raise their “oshare power,” or over stylishness. Then the rhythm portion begins, with players smacking a pair of yellow buttons in time with the beat. Either Love or Berry wins based on this alchemy of fashion smarts and groove timing. The true champion, though, is the parent who has successfully entertained their kid for several minutes, at least until the fall of 2008, when the very boom they created resulted in them becoming outdated…and the target audience probably aging out of it too.

As is often the case, the deeper you go in learning about Love And Berry, the more fascinating details emerge. Despite leaning hard into the idea of girls loving fashion and dancing to pop music, the game actually altered the perception of card-based games, which to that point were seen as a boys activity, owing to the immense popularity of 2003’s Mushiking: The King of Beetles, which adopted the same get-a-random-card-and-use-it formula except instead of clothes it was beetles³. It set off a boom in girl-centered card games…leading to things like AiPri.

Wait, I have more facts that absolutely wowed me over the last two months! Despite looking like the sort of thing that would be a staple of arcades, it actually rarely appeared at said venues because the clientele was extremely young girls and it would be a bad look to mix them up with the male-heavy demographic usually parked out at game centers. Instead, it flourished in malls, supermarkets, theme parks and other family-friendly spots. Also helping that reality…the fact it was classified as a vending machine rather than an arcade game, owing to the card one got at the very beginning. All of this holds true for subsequent titles, with Love And Berry setting the pace for a genre of entertainment wowing a lot of kids.

In the middle of the Aughts, Love and Berry started an honest-to-goodness phenomenon. All kinds of supplemental toys and goods were released going off of this commercial compilation, while the two were fixtures of these monthly magazines geared towards young kids full of activities and goodies…or, in their case, limited-edition cards alongside the rare “lunch mat.” They had IRL “experiences.” They inspired a popular parody on a variety show. If you have about an hour to kill, you can watch an original Love And Berry animated movie that is largely in a familiar anime style for the bulk of its run time…but jumps into CGI segments for the performances, which look more advanced and doll-like than the game but still deeply unsettling.

Naturally, two decades later, the kids who grew up with Love And Berry are ready to get nostalgic for their own childhood, to the point of cosplaying as the duo. After learning about the existence of this, I couldn’t stop stumbling across Love And Berry 20th anniversary events, ranging from a pop up in Shibuya’s PARCO department store that also included a special cafe, to another mini shop taking up residence in Harajuku’s center of kawaii KIDDY LAND, which I did swing by earlier this week (see below). They’ve collaborated with Sanrio, and Hatsune Miku, and of course spiritual daughter AiPri, including an appearance in the corresponding cartoon where they appear as like, celebrated legends of the virtual idol scene (except they live in a museum, which seems kind of rude).

Shots from my trip to the Love And Berry pop-up store. I bought a sticker and a towel.

A collaboration with AiPri, though, also seems totally at odds. That modern game is busy, bright and barraging images at the young players swiping cards around — most tellingly, the game and show make heavy use of emojis, which might speak to the screen-damaged generation in front of them. Japanese kids entertainment in general can feel maximalist. The Pretty Cure anime series — imagine a 21st century version of Sailor Moon, except every year the characters get replaced and the theme would change from “planets” to like “food” — is another staple in our house, and the transformation sequences in that are borderline overwhelming, as they load up with vivid twinkling sounds and details that remind me of like a Jam City album…or a Pachinko parlor.

It’s everything Love And Berry is not. It’s much more basic and far less flashy. It looks like Shenmue if Shenmue was about being an idol. The transformations are literally just putting on a beanie or jeans. The actual game play happens in spaces based off the real world — Shibuya, a basketball court, a TV stage. Unlike a lot of fake Aughts nostalgia, this feels apt for the times, of having great technological breakthroughs that could be applied to media but which nobody knew how to master. You had to keep it simple.

And that’s most true when it comes to the music, the aspect of this franchise I’m most fascinated by. If AiPri is like PC Music, Love And Berry is the Dreamin’ Wild of children’s rhythm games.

I think AiPri has some pretty catchy tunes that aren’t far removed from the idol music I write about, but it’s also very clearly made by people who grew up in the same SoundCloud-drenched times as me and often nodding to other contemporary developments (this one is clearly shaping its piano melody and vocal lines from YOASOBI). It’s good, but trying to be something else and appealing to a wider audience⁴.

The music of Love And Berry was made for children, and accordingly it’s charmingly simple and at times bizarre. Every song clocks in at just over a minute, and the goal is more about offering a representation of different styles that can help keep kids entertained rather than perfecting any one style. As a result, you get songs trying to do disco, hip-hop, throwback rock, idol pop and beyond. Like the game itself, everything feels a touch wonky on the tech front — everything is synthesized, but the synths sound extremely goofy, with the singing meanwhile sounding oddly low in the mix.

The beauty of that, though, is trying to make something catchy out of very little. The Love And Berry soundtrack features all kinds of details that give the songs character, if sometimes approaching the silly. There’s ample record scratches to project rap. Vocals get coated in echo or pitched around at seemingly unexpected times. There’s one track here where Love and Berry just start talking like robots. This is about making the most of what you have, even if it’s just your own voice.

The simplicity, though, makes the melodies here all the catchier, whether they be extremely goofy like on the synthesized-horn hop of “Machi De Uwasa No…” or upbeat in a Showa way on the summer-celebrating “Sore Ga Natsu Nano.” Everything feels vaguely like the tracks they program into karaoke machines, nodding to something familiar but sounding just off.

Yet catchiness comes through, especially on songs like “ABC De Daijyoubu!,” a number really underlining how all of this is made for toddlers (they do part of the alphabet and count) while still featuring a bright hook alongside the odd touch of the pair’s voices digitally rippling when they shout “let’s go!” At 42 songs, the soundtrack covers a lot of ground, but even at its silliest hides a knack for earworms.

What really gets me, though, is what it reminds me of. The at-times janky production but ultimately enchanting melodies instantly made me think of Perfect Young Lady, one of my favorite artists of the 2020s and someone who I’m now convinced grew up playing Love And Berry. Her creations proudly sound recorded in a bedroom and rely on all kinds of machine-generated sounds (the beats, in particular, could be teleported into a mid-2000s Sega game), yet at their core are just super well done pop songs that don’t need extra flourishes to be touching. Plenty of differences exist — Perfect Young Lady offers a more comedic and sometimes biting take on modern life in Japan, while Love and Berry sing about eating shaved ice and celebrating their father’s birthday — but I’m struck by how similar the two are sonically.

The unifying element is simplicity. With the Love And Berry soundtrack, it’s about interpreting a wide swath of existing styles and ideas for a young audience while adding touches that will keep them interested or make them laugh or generally shout along (“let’s go!”). That bare-bones approach necessitates creativity, and the songs here overflow with charm and making the most of a little, all while still being the backbone of a now-defunct rhythm game.

This album should be considered a point of historical interest, at least for those interested in the mutations of domestic Japanese entertainment. Rhythm games aimed at kids and all the merchandise that comes with it stems from Love And Berry, and it never would have been a success without the songs.

I think it stand on its own, too, both thanks to how it adjusts to reality to make something endearing out of the minimal, and in how it captures a very specific moment in time. Trends come and go, as do the vending-machines-that-are-actually-arcade-games titles. As the anniversary celebrations wrap up, Love and Berry will probably become curious once again, a source of interesting factoids galore and nostalgia for a generation settling into adulthood now. The soundtrack, though, remains a fascinating listen, for its weird touches and for the way it creates work so memorable out of so little. It’s an odd piece of history, but one worth remembering…especially while waiting in line to play the games that it inspired.

Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies

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1. The video linked here mentions how popular Oshi No Ko is with elementary school students, but even pre-schoolers know and watch this show, based at least on my daughter’s friends. This and the very existence of a collaboration with AiPri is wild to me as…spoiler turn back now…idol Ai is stabbed to death in episode one and it’s generally pretty disturbing!

2. For my VTuber readers…members of Nijisanji also did this.

3. While Love And Berry offers a potential smorgasbord of sociological and gender research, I will personally argue that the idea that gross-ass beetles represent all boys is far more offensive.

4. Here’s where I note that, ancedotally, I’ve seen a lot of teens and even younger adults playing this game too, and while it’s never tipped over into anything creepy, I do get the sense this game is catering a bit more too them. There’s not as many toddlers in Japan anymore…so you are going to need some older people wanting to hold on to youth to get involved too.