I’ll be totally honest right here at the start – I’ve never watched a Vtuber yet. I don’t have any real antipathy towards the idea but to date that hasn’t really been part of my media sphere, following such personalities and their exploits. I’ve heard a little music and been introduced to some of their visual designs, and that’s about it.
I mention this because Kamitsubaki City Under Construction is supposed to be part of a bigger vtuber-driven or at least vtuber-centered multimedia project including original songs, a visual novel game, and of course this anime outing. But I’m coming into this show from the perspective of, essentially, a new viewer. Total sight unseen. And for the duration of this seasonal, I’ll avoid changing that even if I want to, so I can continue to assess each episode from the same anime-only perspective rather than suddenly jumping some week to “it’s no longer a blind run”
From the “first two” episodes (Episode 0 and the proper Episode 1, though I don’t know why they were cut that way), I can say at least it has my attention.
Episode 0 is focused, largely, on the backstory and introduction of main character Kafu. Seven years before the main story, she was a normal little kid when the sun turned green and everything went to hell on earth. This terrible event, which comes to be known as the Blackout, costs Kafu her friends and parents. She’s taken in by a sort of big sister figure, who tries to raise her and convince her to come out of her shell and do things like speaking again.
After those seven years, Kafu has… largely recovered, and goes to school where we learn things like how all physics has been turned on its head and that Kamitsubuki City now uses human emotional energy to generate its power. However, something bad goes down at Big Sis Figure’s place of work, and Kafu rushes in.
There, she discovers an “Incomprehensible Zone” swarming with monsters called Tesseractors, and unfortunately before anything can be done about this, she has to watch her current guardian get brutally impaked and bisected by one of the insectoid horrors.
She’s helped by a being called Laplace, who seems to be able to take the form of a 2D fish shadow on objects, a giant fish monster, or a little mysterious white-haired boy. Laplace instructs Kafu to sing, letting her know that she is a “Witchling” whose song can purify and eliminate Tesseractors. Kafu does this, but she realizes that Tesseractors are humans who have been overwhelmed by their emotions, and that there’s no going back – purification is death.
Unfortunately, the show doesn’t really take its time to let her process these two new blows: that she’s once again alone in the world and that her new task, this great burden only she (and a few others like her) can bear, means putting down former humans. Rather, we transition to her being mostly emotionally well again (if still a little out of sorts about the killing), now living with fellow Witchling, Rime and serving the authorities that hope to keep Tesseractor-related mayhem under control.
Episode 1 throws us in to the music themed magical girl work as we see that the other Witchlings also have various familiars with monster and human boy shapes, and that said beings (which might, based on comments in Episode 0, be the same sort of entity as Tesseractors or at least related to them?) do most of the fighting to subdue rampaging monsters for the Witchlings to sing out of existence, and that Kafu is still a little unsteady because she continues to experience the thoughts and feelings of those she lays to rest.
And if you’re thinking this sounds a lot like the melancholy emotional work that made Day Break Illusion work… there’s more episode in episode 1, as a fortune teller member of the team gets a premonition of a major incoming. This results in a huge fight over an entire farm district on the outskirts of the city, with way too many evil fish monsters for . There, Kafu finds a weird machine with a seemingly friendly humanoid figure made of light inside, only for one of the baddies to break in, get by Laplace, and stab and corrupt the machine.
This causes the barrier that protects the city (supposedly from cosmic rays and stuff) to manifest and waver, and we see the world outside the city isn’t much of a world, but is instead a weird desert absolutely swarming with Tesseractors.
This is basically the twist that Yuki Yuna Is A Hero deployed in its last act, and here we’re getting it in Episode 1. That’s… going to be a lot to take in. It’s a high risk but potentially high reward play. As a newcomer to the franchise, there’s an intensity to Kamitsubaki City Under Construction that I was not even remotely anticipating. Even with something about monsters and saving the world in the pitch, you don’t look at idol-singing vtuber magical girls and think you’re going to get a dark, oppressive, and even at points gory outing. But between the voices of the damned, the bloody on-screen kill of a likable big sis, and the way it goes whole hog with the apocalyptic vibes, it’s clear we’re in for a ride.
It is, of course, too early to say if that ride is going to go anywhere good. The art for the show is… sometimes awkward. It makes use of fairly conspicuous CGI but covers it fairly well with extremely detailed environments and a lot of bold, high-saturation colors. In a lot of ways, the look of this show reminds me a lot of Bubuki Buranki. Which, to be fair, I liked, but there’s still some stiffness and awkwardness in the models that can feel dated, especially the humans trying to exist in human environments, rather than the monsters and mayhem. But it’s not as though Bubuki Buranki didn’t pay the ratings tax for its CGI and Kamitsubaki City is sure to do the same, maybe moreso given that it’s been years and so looking like said older show means feeling a bit more dated.
For my part, though, I’m kind of excited. I want to see what the writers do with this, the art is effective even if it has its stylized issues, and the music has so far been pretty nice (which is important because it’s everywhere). Whether this turns out to be a winner or not, at least I’m anticipating it to be worth experiencing once.