Sometimes, the first couple of seconds can tell you a lot about a show. With the extreme closeups of a gun being loaded, girl in a dress, general art style, ruined church setting, and shots fired at some swirly darkness, the first thirty seconds of Venus Versus Virus let you know you’re watching yet another of the crusty mid-2000s urban fantasy pieces. What it doesn’t tell you is whether you’re watching something into which actual effort was put, like Shakugan no Shana, or something that’s going to just bring you pain, like Omamori Himari.
The opening continues with the character who looks like Hatsune Miku with an eyepatch exiting the church and encountering an unknown redhead girl. She reveals she’s out of bullets, so they draw little knives from under their skirts to battle with, letting you know that senseless violence and sly fanservice (or fanservice that likes to think it’s sly) are the order of the day. Not bad to get out there before the opening credits, I guess — At least most people will know what to expect. Or so you’d think but it’s not exactly representative of the show and I’ll get back to this bit later.
We start proper with the redhead, Sumire, as apparently a normal schoolgirl. However, despite appearances of being the typical “late for something” dork, she already works with the twintailed eyepatch girl, Lucia, (and her father figure Soichiro Nahashi and a younger girl called Laura, all together making up the Venus Vanguard) to fight supernatural evil soul-stealing shadow things called Viruses that evidently plague the normal world. We see that they’re intelligent and capable of speech, at least some of them, but also evil spirits with mutable forms and freaky powers.
A girl comes to them regarding a Virus plaguing her (not that she knows such terms, allowing Sumire and Lucia to explain them to the audience) and when the two exorcists have some trouble fighting it off (after uncovering it with Lucia’s magic eye that she keeps hidden under her eyepatch and by using Sumire as unknowing bait), we reveal and trigger the fact that meek and weak little Sumire has a super-powered berserk mode, in which she’s more than capable of dispatching viruses with her bare hands, but also inclined to try to obliterate her friends.
And, of course, the first episode can’t end without showing us a shadowy group of presumable villains and having them say something cryptic and threatening, supported by some cryptic and threatening narration from Sumire to assure us that a bigger plot is coming. This really is the sort of thing that an AI could write if it were trained on other urban fantasy shows.
Oddly enough, the characters on the team (Lucia, her father figure, and everyone else who works with them) don’t know what is up with Sumire turning into a crazy Virus-killer when exposed to anti-Virus serum, and so try to study her power something resembling scientifically, to understand it and hopefully grant her control. Of course, she doesn’t exactly like being a guinea pig, which gets us the fossilized plot beat where she tries to run from her responsibilities for an episode. At the end of it she has to berserk herself to deal with a Virus hunting her and accept that she’s part of the supernatural world for the time being, even if she does seem to strike a happier balance where she can actually maintain her old friendships going forward. At the end of the episode, she runs into a mysterious young man who will obviously serve as her love interest for at least a bit.
Sumire keeps visiting her crush, Yoshiki, but we’re more interested with the next monster of the week, a possessed girl who still has a lot of her personality left (enough to be the one to call in the exorcists, hoping to save her brother from what she doesn’t know is her self) but all the same can’t be saved. At least Sumire doesn’t have to berserk this time.
Then, for no obvious reason, Episode 4 is all about how Sumire and Lucia met, which starts with Sumire pricking her finger on a magic brooch Lucia accidentally dropped and gaining the ability to see Viruses. A resulting chase also gets Sumire shot with the serum bullets, triggering her berserker state (which we can presume she also gained from that pricking her finger on the broach)
I have no idea why they decided to put that here. If we’re going to get a whole episode for how this started for Sumire, why not put that at the start, where it would make sense? It’s not like episode 4 is deep in or there’s a groundbreaking reveal that really changes how we view the show in that starting material, it’s just an average sort of opening placed at the one-third mark. And if you want to just open in media res with everyone’s relationships established, that’s fine too, but then don’t go back and blow an entire episode on a setup that we can basically figure out from how they interact and what they say in the present. And it’s not like this story is lacking either; it has everything the show does in episode one in terms of what’s needed to catch the audience: a little action, a little mystery (or it would be if we didn’t know exactly how it has to pan out and what has to happen), a general lack of personality, you name it.
In a sense, this makes me reflect on how the first episode opened with a cut to later events, and leads me to believe that the producers of Venus Versus Virus decided to tell the story out of order because they knew that good storytellers would often make use of such tactics, but did not understand why those better storytellers do it, and instead thought that if they put things out of order it would somehow, magically, work to their benefit.
It doesn’t. It’s not so scrambled that it’s hard to follow the story so it’s not as though it hurts too terribly much, but there’s no reason to it at all.
After this, we actually start to introduce the mysterious vague villains with unclear evil motivations. The first of the lot is Luca (yes, her name is obnoxiously similar to leading lady Lucia), some sort of lightning-wielding spellcaster who possesses one of Sumire’s friends and attacks her boyfriend in order to provoke Sumire into driving herself berserk. Of course, in provoking Berserk Sumire she bites off more than she can chew and is fought off, leading to obvious dead horse beat number “I lost count a while ago” where Sumire blames herself for the people she cares about being put in danger.
While Sumire is losing her bonds with her friends and also taking a temporary retirement from monster hunting, the rest of the Venus Vanguard has a run in with the fire-wielding Guy, who is pretty much like Stiyl Magnus if he couldn’t ever find a shirt and thus had to make do with several belts under an open coat. And joined a soul-stealing cult of some sort. If you’re wondering if that design is dated and embarrassing now, it’s dated now and was already embarrassing when it came out.
Sumire comes back in action at the last minute, of course, but this time Berserk Sumire alone isn’t enough, and Lucia has to use her magic eye of very shiny but undisclosed actual power as well. Again, very basic paint-by-numbers escalation.
We then get another slightly less arbitrarily placed flashback. This one is to the past with Lucia’s father Lucif, her mother Lilith, and Nahashi as their friend, who seemed to be carrying a torch for Lilith. Laura and the evil twin of her who appears with the baddies in the present (Lyla) are also there, revealed to be animate dolls or homunculi, hence why they haven’t aged. As mage students, the lot of them sought the “True World” but learned that the only way to reach it would require human souls, which can’t really be ethically sourced.
Lucif seems to think that the whole regular world is buggered, and that the True World should be brought about. He first turns from his quest when he’s unwilling to sacrifice Lilith, but eventually he heads off and takes Lyla with him, leaving behind a pregnant Lilith. He returns some years after, having turned himself into an inhuman (presumably Virus-adjacent) super-wizard and intent on taking Lilith’s soul, obtaining the “True World” and becoming a god after all.
As it turns out (and Lucia discovers in the present), he did rip her soul out, but it eluded his grasp, meaning he couldn’t get at the True World. And it was Lucia’s birthday at that. Which also happens to be Sumire’s birthday, suggesting to Nahashi somewhat and the audience more strongly that Sumire may be the reincarnation of Lilith with the special soul needed to reach the True World. As options go, at least it’s self-contained.
After that, Lucia is in a downward spiral and Sumire is still having boyfriend trouble. The mess comes to a head when Luca and Guy decide to bully Lucia and she loses it completely, her eye power threatening to incinerate everything. Sumire, now able to control her berserk, wades into the burn zone to save Lucia from her despair in what should be a powerful scene but really is just an OK one that basically confirms that Sumire has inherited Lilith’s soul fragment.
Managing to save Lucia also gives her the confidence boost to not run away from her boyfriend. After an episode mostly spent teaching Lucia to bake cake (and be more human) and getting Sumire and her boyfriend really squared away, we see Lucif actually enter the scene, seemingly having Sumire’s boyfriend as an agent. Because boyfriend so perfect something had to be drastically wrong and/or he’d have to die, surprise, has something drastically wrong.
Boyfriend tries to put some moves on Lucia while Sumire isn’t around, but Lucia mistrusts people at the best of times, so it’s not like he’s going to get much leverage there. He changes tactics and manages to get her with a trapped magic book that makes her pass out but doesn’t stop her eye from going crazy, driving him off and meaning she wakes up unhurt. Lucia tries to warn Sumire off, but has neither evidence nor a willingness to straight out say what happened, so Sumire doesn’t take the warning. Lucia digs deeper, finding that his home address leads only to a Virus-infested ruin while Nahashi and Laura hunt for Lucif without telling anyone else what they’re doing.
This leads to Lucif gloating, revealing his plans to snatch both girls, and leaving Nahashi and Laura presumed dead under some rubble. Unsurprisingly, both Nahashi and Laura survive, this being about the most flagrant example of things evil overlords should never do compressed into one scene. The former is at least injured badly, I suppose. Meanwhile, Sumire walks in on Lucia and her boyfriend about to fight, and really wants an answer as to what’s going on.
Lucia is not good at explaining herself, relying on it basically being Virus Hunter’s intuition, putting a rift between her and Sumire. Nahashi arrives later and manages to tell Lucia everything about Lucif’s plans that Lucif went and blabbed, but Sumire is already off on her own, looking into her boyfriend, finding there’s no record of him at his alleged school. I have to admit, with as paint-by-numbers as this thing has been, I was expecting her to do the dumb as a brick thing and run right to him rather than the “two brain cells to rub together” thing of investigating.
While the rest of the gang looks for Sumire, boyfriend calls her to the Museum. She confronts him and he reveals everything, to which she remarkably doesn’t go with denial as her reaction. However, despite subduing Sumire with Lucif’s other goons, he ends up being too earnestly in love with her to go through with stealing her soul. He fights off Guy and Luca, presumably killing both of them off (Luca dragged into the earth and Guy incinerated by reflecting his own fireball), but Lucia comes just in time to not see any of the last minute heroics and stabs him to death before he or Sumire even realizes she’s in the room.
Sumire goes totally berserk, puts a hole in Nahashi when he jumps between her and Lucia, and then gets thrown in a time stop bubble by Lucif, who gloats about how the despair awakened her and the time is right for the True World and… honestly, if you care about this villain scheme please dial it back; it’s generic and not worth even the words I’m spending on it. Especially not since we are now (as of Sumire going in the bubble) in the last episode.
Nonetheless, Lucif goes into detail, talking about how he’ll make the perfect world and even resurrect Lucia’s mom. He tries to convince Lucia to just go along with the scheme, and she even gives in until Nahashi (still not dead) gives her a different flashback. After Lucia rejects him, Lucif decides that rather than just ripping her soul out by force or anything, he’ll have Lucia and Sumire fight to the death to be the new god of the True World in the most compressed version of the Survival Game ever.
It doesn’t start right away, though – Lucif says that Sumire’s awakening isn’t complete, meaning he teleports out with her to fight later. Nahashi is then allowed to actually expire, which at least feels a little bad as a character death should.
We then fastforward to winter – it having been July in the previous scene. The world has forgotten about Sumire like she’s a burned-out Torch, Lucia has been training non-stop because the coming battle is all she has, and finds the birthday present Sumire got for her (including a very sentimental letter) just before everything went to hell… just before everything goes to hell again.
Lucif has taken his time preparing a very brainwashed and partially soulless Sumire for the battle, and we get to the opening scene of the show with the two of them fighting in and around a ruined church.
On one hand, framing it that way does mean that when we get back to this fight, we do at least believe that it’s emotionally hard on Lucia, because they really bonded. On the other hand, we didn’t need the preview, and the resolution is lame. Lucia triggers her magic eye, pledging to save Sumire, and according to Lucif everything goes out of control. He tries to stop it, but the ghosts of Lilith and Nahashi physically restrain him from messing with the girls so that he gets dusted by the surge of light. It’s implied that Laura and her counterpart get obliterated as well, though Laura did create a pocky pentagram for some incoherent reason.
We don’t actually see the end of the fight either – we see Sumire still going in for the attack in the core of the light and Lucia seemingly ready to receive it one way or another and then just a cut to the bedroom at the Venus Vanguard where there’s a picture of the two together (which might have been taken before) along with some other sentimental items and a voiceover from Lucia saying what she was thinking at that last moment, that she was glad to have met Sumire. Was Lucia successful at fixing Sumire’s many issues (including being forgotten by the world, being permanently berserk, and having her soul partially dissociated)? Did they just kill each other? Was the True World created but Lucif denied entry for reasons of being dust on the wind? Is one of them god now? Are both? I could try to make an educated guess but the show isn’t worth it. Might as well say they were both dragged into the Kagerou Daze. It would be as logically satisfying.
I guess it’s supposed to be ambiguous, but ambiguous endings are things that need to be handled delicately. Venus Versus Virus doesn’t know that, it just knows that (as with telling things out of order) it’s something that good material sometimes does and therefore apes the style without understanding the reason behind it.
An ambiguous, esoteric ending works in something like Serial Experiments Lain because the entire show is a bizarre, psychological trip with both futurist and Gnostic themes that question the nature of reality. Venus Versus Virus is a very basic teen urban fantasy action entry. In Mekakucity Actors, some elements of the ending are up to interpretation, but the feeling of the ending is very clear; it’s upbeat and hopeful, and whatever the grand truth is the characters we’re invested in are happy. In Shakugan no Shana Final, there are ambiguous bits, like what the post-story world (especially Xanadu) is actually going to be like. But we spend at least half a season on the struggle over it, not half an episode that hardly even touches on the idea, and something is achieved in the final conflict that means all the struggle had meaning.
I swear to Haruhi, even Omamori Himari had a better ending than this, as insipid and stupid as it was with Tamamo no Mae quietly slipping into the harem group shots because we actually have some idea what happened and it is on brand for that (stupid, awful) show.
Twelve episodes, and what was the point of Venus Versus Virus? The way it was framed, starting at the end (when we don’t know its significance) and then spending all but maybe ten minutes of the show’s run time just getting back there, this should be an absolutely legendary conclusion, the sort of thing that’s worth spending all that time to get to. I talked about the book The Brothers’ War in my review of Xuan Yuan Sword Luminary and that sort of does the same thing, with its prologue set on the eve of the final battle. But the story getting there is huge, telling an entire lifetime worth of material for the titular brothers, and the place they’re going is introduced as big and meaningful with the book’s very first line: “It was the night before the end of the world”. That’s something that, on a basic level, serves to intrigue you and draw you on because you want to know how everything came to that point. Sumire and Lucia’s fight is introduced as a fairly standard little brawl, so while it’s kind of anomalous when you see them as friends it’s also very forgettable, and there’s not a sense that fate is moving inexorably towards that point as some kind of absolute finale. Hell, they skirmish so many times early on when Sumire can’t control her berserk that I just sort of assumed it was another such moment and disregarded it.
And for all the talk of the True World, we never really get a good understanding of it. I mean, I can relate some technical specifications, but the emotions around it are all messed up. Lucif and Nahashi learned the first hints of it from their wizard mentor, a man we never see because the earliest point on their flashback has them at his grave, wondering what to do with the unfinished studies they were engaged in. Lucif obsesses over it and how much he hates the current world and would like to trade up, but we aren’t given any reason why he has this quest until the first half of the final episode. Even then, it’s a five second moment of him as a little kid protecting Lilith from being bullied. Apparently that means the whole world has got to go. Assuming he wasn’t just lying to manipulate Lucia; he likes to do that.
I understood Old Man Barbem’s scheme in RahXephon better than this, and RahXephon kind of flubbed on that score itself. We’re not at the mind-breaking horror of the Koi Koi 7 ending… but we are closer than any show should ever be.
And yet… for all that I’ve just gone on about the ending, because it really deserves to be called out in the hopes that someone, somewhere will not repeat the mistake of using a literary tool without understanding why it’s used, it really does just circle back to the show as a whole being more standard than standard. The ISO regulation dead horse beating, if you will. I mentioned early on that this felt like it could have been written by an AI, and I think that is the sense that shines through. For all the tolerable character moments, it really is just the reduced and reprocessed formula that you can see in a million other, more unique sorts of stories. A naive outsider is brought into a world of both wonder and threat, bonds with their magical senpai, and ultimately has to face off against the biggest the setting has to offer because while normal on the outside they’re actually super-special. There’s nothing strictly wrong with that… but you can’t be just that. You have to bring something to the table that sets you apart. Even bad shows do that more often than not. What they bring may stink to high heavens, but they do bring it.
Is there anything that makes this show stand out? The OP and ED are pretty good, I guess, but not so great they’d take a crack at the best ones. Laura narrates some tiny post-credits segments that give extra lore, which is not quite up to par with “Leave it to Kero” in terms of being funny or informative. It places some weird borders on flashbacks that are highly conspicuous but not as obnoxious as elDLIVE‘s strange intercuts because there’s a clear reason. I guess the ending is kind of staggering in its lameness, but at the end of the day it is just a lame misuse of technique, if one that personally offends my sensibilities.
So, I’m going to go with no on this one. I’m retroactively shocked I found this show to review, because as much of a stale miscreation as it is, I wouldn’t think anybody would remember it enough to acknowledge it.
The grade I’m going to hand out this time is a classical F. Unlike Girls Frontline there are redeeming elements to the show, where it managed to regurgitate a scene mashed together with enough good tired dead horse bits that you just sort of shrug and accept the fleeting enjoyment that comes from seeing something profoundly okay. In all honesty, I was very ready to grade Venus Versus Virus in the D range until I hit that stupid ending that, especially when you look at how the show is constructed, drags it down a fair bit. However, those redeeming elements are so mild, and still done better elsewhere to such a degree, and the bad elements bad enough, that I can’t imagine a world in which Venus Versus Virus would be worth spending your time on beyond maybe looking up the intro and outro songs. Honestly, even that’s dubious; you could do well to just avoid this one like the plague.