Kamitsubaki-shi Kensetsuchuu.

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 and ... their 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.

As a huge fan of the V.W.P girls and Kamitsubaki studio, I personally liked the anime as a fan of them, BUT if you watch this from a non-fan it is pretty confusing. Before we even get into the anime, this anime is about a group of virtual singers called Virtual witch phenomenon (V.W.P) part of Kamitsubaki studio.

To explain this anime in simple terms, it's like Noragami mixed in with singing.

First off, the setting of the story. Even if you like V.W.P you wouldn't understand the story at all if you haven't read the novel, Kamitsubaki-shi NOVELIZED, or the visual novel game Kamitsubaki-shi ... REGENERATE. This anime takes place after everything that happened in the novel occurred, so it's a sequel to it. To summarize, it’s basically what the girls had to go through to form a bond with their familiars. Meanwhile the visual novel goes further than that, it’s like the anime, you have multiple endings, and some of the features used in the game is incorperated into the anime. If you haven’t already and is a die hard V.W.P fan like me, I would recommend playing the visual novel (the novelized version isn’t out in english yet but the visual novel is)

As a V.W.P fan, I LOVED the anime so much. I've loved KAF for the past few years, and seeing her in an anime and them incorporating some of my favourite songs into the anime made me so happy. They put songs from her oldest to her newest albums which I loved. Watching this anime made me love the V.W.P girls more too, since I’ve only really listened to the group songs and all of KAF’s songs but none of the others solos. The anime is also pretty dark, I didn’t expect to be animated so gory but it's still good.

I absolutely loved how they showed the relationship between the girls and their familiars, it’s so cute and wholesome it made me love the bond they have even more. It’s different reading it in a novel, compared to seeing how it was animated. So at times it is a gory suspense anime, but the other times is a wholesome story showing the girl's day to day lives and their relationship with each sector and their familiars.

One thing I liked is how they incorporated V.W.P’s live from 2024. I wasn’t expecting that and they used the model used in the music video too instead of the anime one (all though the base model is still the same the shader and coloring is different). That was unique, but I thought I was watching some other show when I first saw it.

Overall, as a V.W.P fan I recommend this anime, but if you’re just someone who wants to watch it casually without all the reading then I wouldn’t recommend it.

Kamitsubaki City Under Construction is a strange case of a CGI anime that almost feels like anime again. 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 ... an era 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.