Kamitsubaki City Under Construction

I had dropped the she show after few episodes but read a review that said it gets better and so I continued. I finished it. It does get better in the sense, at least I understood more of what's going on. Because for many episodes I just didn't understand what was happening. The show drops you like in the middle of a much larger show? But I don't know of any earlier seasons. According to Wiki before the anime there was this: "It began in 2019 and consists of songs, videos, as well as a tabletop game and a videogame. A rhythm game titled Kamitsubaki City Ensemble, was released on August 29, 2024" So basically if you are a fan of the franchise this adds more to the lore and maybe a conclusion the story that spanned in multiple media since 2019? I personally am not a fan of this. The CGI is so-so to horrendous. Not a fan of the animation or art style. But the songs are good , which is important , as the main characters/witching's sing to save the city. My Rating: 5/10 (Mediocre)

Kamitsubaki City Under Construction is an anime that doesn’t appeal to everyone. If you aren't a fan of the Kamitsubaki Studio V.W.P. Girls, who are the protagonists of the series, or if you dislike CGI animation, there's a good chance that this anime won't suit your taste. If you do give it a chance, don’t let its slow start fool you. Kamitsubaki City Under Construction had an insane redemption from the mistakes in its first half. While it starts as a mildly interesting but extremely dark and depressing series, one which relies in shock value for its appeal instead of focusing on the girls andtheir music, the story has some plot twists that completely change the way you see it, turning it from an edgy, mid at best anime, into one that actually manages to convey what these girls' songs make you feel when you listen to them. The animation is also extremely good for a CGI anime, having a unique style, and above all, the songs are stunningly good. While Kamitsubaki City Under Construction had its mistakes, and it's not for everyone, it doesn’t deserve such a low score. I strongly recommend giving it a chance if you are a Kamitsubaki Studio fan or if you want to learn more about them.

Kamitsubaki City Under Construction is a strange case of a CGI anime that almost feels like anime. Most 3D anime fails on the most basic level. Ugly, jaggy, and jarring. You know the type: Ex-Arm, Kamierabi / God App., Kingdom (yeah, that one), Netflix Gamera: Rebirth, or those bottom-tier isekai that suddenly switch to PS1-level CGI dragons. But this one is different. Sometimes, you even forget it’s CGI at all. The visuals feel oddly authentic. Smooth, color-graded, and edited like a modern anime. It feels closer to the Genshin Impact style, or how Demon Slayer blurred the line between hand-drawn and digitally composited animation. In anera where anime itself borrows heavy from game aesthetics, Kamitsubaki City fits naturally into that hybrid space. It’s easily one of the better-looking 3D anime out there. The music is not bad. None of the songs gripped me emotionally, but they were well produced, and the sound direction has polish. The voice acting surprised me too. For people who’ve never done voice acting before, the VWP girls delivered surprisingly natural performances, especially Kafu or KAF, who could hold a conversation with the antagonist without breaking immersion. It sounded like real voice acting, not a “Youtuber reading a script.” It helps that Kafu, isn’t entirely new to the anime scene. She’s also sung ending themes for Jashin-chan Dropkick, Urusei Yatsura (2022), and Black Clover (ED11). But where the anime truly collapses is in narration and story structure. It somehow fails to explain the core story while still over-telling everything else. Things just flow on-screen with no emotional grip. Even most isekai or CGDCT shows manage a simple narrative arc: start, develop, twist, overcome, end. Here, everything feels like one long, shapeless nightmare with no rhythm or payoff. The director seems more focused on expressing his own artistic vision than on guiding the viewer through it. It insists on being “art”, yet forgets that it still needs to entertain on some level. The story itself isn’t even that complicated: a post-catastrophe world, five girls fighting otherworldly invaders using songs and power to loop reality. So basically it's like a mix of: -Singing(music) as a weapon, [Macross/Symphogear/Purin Session Orchestra / Tact Op. Destiny / Listeners] -Time-loop / redo mechanics [Re:Zero / Steins;Gate / Erased / Tokyo Revengers / Bokutachi no Remake] -Gritty, dark magical-girl tone [Madoka / Mahoushoujo Site / Yuuki Yuuna wa Yuusha de Aru / Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku ] The show isn’t isekai, nor is it just a copy-paste collage of recycled tropes. It tries a small step toward originality and the visuals show that effort but in doing so, it disastrously overlooks the viewer’s perspective. There’s even a desperate attempt at breaking the fourth wall, clearly borrowing from Evangelion and SSSS.Gridman. It’s a vain gesture, a proud step forward that only highlights how desperately the show wants to seem innovative. Ironically, that ambition exposes just how shaky the rest of the series’ foundation is. The pacing rushes through events, drowning the viewer in exposition without giving us time to feel anything. You can see all the ingredients, but none of them are cooked. It’s just a big pot of uncut, raw narrative. And the characters are practically indistinguishable.There are five witches, but only Kafu and maybe Ysekai Joucho chan (Rem but witch Elaina) leave an impression. The rest blur together in the same grim-black aesthetic with streaks of color. It’s all “cool design” and no personality, section9 style (GitS). Even the transformations make it worse, when both the heroines and enemies share similar beast forms, you end up watching goldfish and lizard monsters fighting each other with no clarity or meaning. Also, It doesn’t help that motivations are paper-thin. Some monsters become allies, some girls “fall to the darkside” and kill their friends, then revert, all with zero emotional grounding. You don't have to be super structured and generic feeling like shounen but the show wants to be poetic and tragic, with out earning that emotion. What makes it weaket though, is how the main pink-haired girl spends so much time cowering in a corner, shaking and crying, lamenting “I don’t want to sing,” while the other, less important characters fight bloody battles that reveal their backstories. Whether intentional or not, the narrative structure echoes series like Madoka or Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku (MSIK). In MSIK, this approach works because subcharacters and antagonists are memorable, while the protagonist’s weakness and eventual resolve remain central. <WARNING! HUGE SPOILER! Skip this if you haven’t seen Madoka Magica> <spoiler start> Madoka takes it further: the character we assume is the lead turns out to be a side figure, and the true central character’s struggles make the climax far more impactful. <spoiler end> Kamitsubaki City, by contrast, lacks the charm, cleverness, or emotional payoff of these examples the pink girl’s fear and hesitation never resonate, and the supporting characters leave no impression. In the end, what I got out of it was: The CGI is actually impressive. Ysekai-joucho chan is cute, and maybe I should check her music later. But as an anime, Kamitsubaki City Under Construction clearly strives for artistic depth, it often feels like a hollow, tangled experiment that struggles to connect. One last note: It just occurred to me........maybe Kamitsubaki City is eXpERIMENTaL, in the sense that character development is optional. Beats me.

Kamitsubaki City Under Construction — Well...what a willful misconduct for a series that hedges on that sole aspect, more than anything. It's no secret that when the AniManga industry has been wiped off to shreds, adapting more often than not mediocre to average series regardless of their many genres, that the theme itself becomes the only centrifugal force to showcase the strengths of some niche shows. This becomes even more pronounced when those shows are of the "mixed-media" variant, which has many different kinds of projects under its belt, with successes and failures...of which anime is part of that latter category, which for years has neverbeen compelling to begin with. And its latest victim this summer season is Kamitsubaki-shi Kensetsu-chuu, a.k.a. Kamitsubaki City Under Construction, one of Kamitsubaki Studio's projects under the banner of its well-known VTuber singer group, V.W.P. — Virtual Witch Phenomenon. If you do not know what Kamitsubaki Studio is, or at least the VTuber group itself, they've gained a reputation for being a virtual idol group formed in February 2021 with its 5 prominent members of KAF, RIM, Harusaharuhi, Isekaijoucho, and Koko, banking big on supporting their emerging fans since being active in late 2019 and well into the COVID years, being known for each of their individual endeavours into the J-Pop Vocaloid space, and coming together as V.W.P. to invoke their musical, endowing songs of healing that bring about connections and resilience in times of weariness. But in the sphere of the anime project just by itself, you might be wondering: with a terribly low MAL score that's bothered by day and darkness falling into the night with CGI that doesn't look terrible and a well-respected VTuber group with their songs that hardcore fans can relate to, it just falls sharply on the one thing that should've been supporting everything from the start: the story and its narrative, penned by whom I believe is not a recurring mistake. An urban, high-tech metropolitan city, with its people living peacefully as if it's daily life on a stretch, everything looks fine from the surface. But what the everyday person does not know is that the city is hiding a massive danger, one that is only known to a select group of girls called Witchlings, who are able to save their city from impending disaster by being eliminated by futuristic beings created from the very same energy that everyone is living in, by singing their heart out to save their world. Get the correlation with the music theme here? For sure, the strikeout would be the Witchlings, performed by V.W.P themselves alongside their familiars to get the story on why they are here in Kamitsubaki City and what secrets lie beneath the rabbit hole that the 5 members, designated by their fictional full names, have to contend with for a city that, as they say, "the gloves come off" once every bit of its story connects to a greater being that'll help them triumph against an old enemy. However, its construct is one of the series' Achilles' heels, and it sure feels like a one-man job trying to keep it altogether while trying to deliver a rather over-expositioned and under-delivering premise altogether, and you need not look far for the sole person who's responsible for it all: Kodai Kakimoto. I already had an issue with him being both director and series composer for last summer's P.A. Works' blunder of a CGDCT show with Na Nare Hana Nare, a.k.a. NareNare: Cheer for You!, and when it seemed as if the BanG Dream! franchise director could do no wrong handling what is by now a well-respected series with its huge fanbase, he comes to another show having the exact same positions in the show's staff team and topples the perfect Jenga block setup in the exact same way possible: if It's MyGO!!!!! is the bad equivalent to Na Nare Hana Nare, the same could be said for Winter's Ave Mujica with Kamitsubaki City here. For the wild decision to make the anime entirely in 3DCG, thank the heavens that it's not by some company who thinks that they're capable of doing a good job verbally. And for what it's worth, Shogakukan Music & Digital Entertainment (or SMDE in short) has had a hand in anime production, with the best-known example being the collab with J.C.Staff for the Shinigami Bocchan to Kuro Maid a.k.a. The Duke of Death and His Maid, series from Summer 2021 to last spring. SMDE's 3DCG is already considered on the acceptable level, so the overall production gets a pass on that one. The music, thankfully, is good, and it's about the only thing that I'll admit that Kodai Kakimoto is good at, being a seasoned sound director. For sure, V.W.P's songs echo throughout the anime, from their songs of wallowness to rejuvenating, and while I don't vibe with every song, including the OP and ED songs, I can see why there exists a huge fanbase for either member or the group as a whole. Alas, this is a classic case of a pitch where everything else makes sense, just not the one that SHOULD be holding the anime altogether, because that easily decides the audience retention for the series, which is miniscule from the beginning (at least in the West). It's good for V.W.P. fans and newcomers to get into their music, but when the story and narrative are THIS haphazard and overdesigned, forget about ever yearning for anyone to come back to this show, and saying that the anime-inspired "adaptation" is more of a fad than anything remains yet a classic vital instrumentation of why mixed-media anime continues to get a bad rap. I'm sorry to V.W.P. and their fans, but you'd be better off forgetting that Kamitsubaki-shi Kensetsu-chuu a.k.a. Kamitsubaki City Under Construction, ever existed to begin with. What a meaningful "anime," turned meaningless.