Prayers

Prayers is a goofy, melodramatic, amateurish production. The story hilariously makes a very mild time jump prediction, setting it only 9 years after the anime was released, and launches into its tale with a premise that makes no sense- an earthquake causes Shibuya to sink below the rest of Tokyo, and it then secedes from the rest of the country and old people as a group, becoming a place where only the young are allowed to live, and also where they participate in music-based death games with a chip implanted in their neck. So many questions are left hanging in the air. Why would theyoung secede from the old? How are we defining that? What happens when the young people become old? Also, there's vampires? and cyborgs? They just started writing some bullshit and never bothered to incorporate any of it in a way that makes any sense. Beyond that, it has no idea how to handle people, as nobody seems to be having the proper emotional reactions to anything that's happening to them. They're just totally out of line all the time, either way too calm or way too excited, with little explanation. Even after you've suffered through all this meaningless drivel, you are rewarded with the fact that this anime just ends in the middle of its story. It goes from unremarkable to expressly a waste of one's time. The story never resolves, and will likely never resolve, not that it'd be worthwhile even if it did. Genuinely, there is no reason to watch this anime, and I consider myself very lenient in that regard. Also, is "prayers" meant to be "players"? They call "pray" "sound" in the intro of episode 1, so maybe they actually meant "play", like to play music. Even if this was on purpose, it's still slop all the same. The art is stale and generic, with little to say about it in general beyond its overuse of flashing screens and silly attempts at ultraviolence. Funnily enough, the music is broadly unremarkable, and even at times pretty bad. Given that's the whole point of the anime and its story, this is a huge mark against it, and is the final nail in the coffin for this crap. The characters barely exist as independent agents, and not a single one of them is worth caring about. Overall, Prayers is worse than bad- it's pointless. A bad story could at least be redeemed in some form. A bad story that never even gets to where it's trying to go only serves to waste time that would have been better spent watching something else.

Idol battling anime are everywhere. They represent the anime industry's worst tendencies towards commercial, consumable fanservice, in both the sexual and non-sexual senses. Prayers attempts to decommercialize the music battling concept as much as possible. The result: a bizarre anime that was never going to sell well and, as such, is only available in a half-finished, cancelled state. There is a novelization that (allegedly) has the full story, but there's not a chance it will ever be translated. Prayers ends up deconstructing many tropes of 2010s anime before the entire anime industry was beholden to these tropes; it's more relevant now than when it wasmade. A world with few or no adults wouldn't be a setting for great adventures and hijinks, but a wasteland only attained after lots of social upheaval and disaster. Music battles wouldn't be fun, hype, and cute; they'd be horrific death battles. Furthermore, Prayers features only one song from a real-life idol throughout its runtime (its ED). The rest of the songs are rock versions of classical pieces with scat vocals. This was possibly done to save money: production company Softgarage mainly makes hentai (through its infamous production label Pink Pineapple), so this was never going to be a high budget show. This shows in the art: it is unrefined and, at times, off model. This ends up adding to the dark, downbeat atmosphere of the OVA; sakuga fights and polished animation would make the show feel like cheap junk, indistinguishable for the millions of other 2000s anime with those things. Prayers is full of disparate elements and mysteries that, due to the anime's cancellation at 2 out of 4 episodes, will never be resolved on screen. Cults, zombies, and political revolution all play major roles in the story. This is the turnoff for many: Prayers comes across as an overly ambitious, gory B movie. The actual story, in addition, is generic anime fare. Jesus Yamato refuses to kill, but shockingly, his sweet demure waifu Mary Sue Lucy can (and does) kill due to her connection with the shady organizations in the background! Prayers becomes more than its core plot suggests because, due to its decommercialized and downbeat nature, it has none of the otaku escapism shows like Gundam SEED or Elfen Lied provide. It's a cool story, and it's also a look at the reality of young adult life: filled with dangerous pasttimes, self-destructive, and susceptible to outside influences from infantilized, maladjusted adults that can only be overcome with the will to survive and grow. No, Yoshiyuki Tomino did not write this! Prayers is a swansong of the bitter end of the OVA era: hyperviolent and dark, yet well-constructed, realistic, and not nihilistic edgelord porn. Nothing like it will ever be made again, for better or worse.