Back at the beginning of the new year and my blogging career, I discussed my love of Virtual YouTubers and my excitement over the upcoming Virtual YouTuber anime called Virtual-san wa Miteiru, distributed by Crunchyroll under the English title Virtualsan-Looking. It took me a long time to work my way through the show, having only recently finished watching the last episode. It was a miserable experience. Everything that could have gone wrong with Virtualsan-Looking did. And as one of the very few people who actually watched the program to completion, I have a duty to warn future generations about it and beg the industry never to make this mistake ever again.
The idea of getting together the top Virtual YouTubers for an anime story is great. The cast they chose is diverse and interesting, with several of them having done collaborations before, with existing chemistry to play off and new relationships to develop. But the first mistake newly formed studio Lide made was with the format of the vehicle. Rather than something like a slice of life where we see the virtual girls interacting with each other in and out of their own respective wheelhouses, they gave us a sketch comedy show.
That’s already a little iffy. None of the Virtual YouTubers that make up the core cast of Mirai Akari, Cyber Girl Siro, Nekomiya Hinata, Tanaka Hime and Suzuki Hina, and Tsukino Mito do anything much like sketch comedy. They are fantastically popular, with millions of fans between them, but the largest overlap in their performances that made them popular is video games. Siro and Hinata are largely video game YouTubers, and the rest have all streamed or recorded video game commentaries and performances. But games hardly make an appearance in the show at all.
Hinata has a brief sketch most episodes, “Hinata-chan Heads to School,” where she imagines herself in video game-esque combat situations on her way to a school she never reaches. It lasts only a few minutes and fails to employ the two key features that made Hinata so popular: she’s a cute catgirl that makes adorable anime noises and wears spats, and she’s extremely good at battle royale games. The transition to the TV anime medium was a completely missed opportunity. We get to see Hinata walk down a street and fantasize about cool battle stuff she could be doing instead of, you know, actually seeing her do it.
The technical production and presentation of the show is on par with what we see in the girls’ everyday YouTube uploads. It features maybe an aggregate 60 seconds of hand animation, appearing only in the series OPs and finales. The rest of it is the same 3D model motion capture they had been doing before they ended up on TV. And it’s a shame, because the little bits of hand animation we see in the show teases us with what a proper Vtuber anime could look like.
Instead, we see characters constantly clipping into their own models, unable to directly interact with each other, or objects, or anything. These are excusable, even sometimes endearing, hiccups in a short online video format. But a full-length TV anime was supposed to bring Vtubers into the mainstream, giving them the resources and support to fully realize their characters beyond the limitations of their original format. What we got instead was a total fish out of water situation, with our beloved YouTube waifus stumbling around unfunny sketches way outside their comfort zones.
That isn’t to say the show is completely without value. It at least introduced me to some Vtubers I wasn’t previously familiar with. Tsukino Mito is one of my new favorites and I only learned her name because of Virtualsan-Looking. I was shocked, though, when I looked up her channel and saw how funny she could be. Her skits in Virtualsan have so little to do with the longform storytelling livestreams that made her popular it’s hard to believe they’re the same character.
I’m hardly alone in disliking Virtualsan-Looking. It barely scrapes a 2-star rating on Amazon.jp, with a majority of Japanese fans giving it the lowest possible rating. And while the platform I watched the show on does not share view counts with users, the number of comments, a proxy for viewership, falls off a cliff from 66 on the first episode to 5 on the second and never more than 3 thereafter. The only reason Virtualsan-Looking isn’t notorious for its awfulness is because of how little it was marketed and how little Crunchyroll did to promote it. Most western fans simply didn’t know it existed, and they’re the lucky ones.
There is also the added element that the core cast of Virtual YouTubers in the show are not very well known outside Japan. While Nekomiya Hinata is the third most popular Vtuber in the show by total subscriber numbers, the proportion of her videos that have been subtitled into English and the number of non-Japanese comments suggests that she is the most well-known to international fans, and she has relatively little screen time compared to Mirai Akari or HimeHina. If international superstar vTuber Kizuna AI had shown up (beyond singing the OP song), more J-List readers probably would have suffered Virtualsan-Looking.
I hardly think the failure of Virtualsan-Looking means the end of Virtual YouTubers. No doubt AI-chan herself and Sony-owned number two Vtuber Kaguya Luna will have their own TV animes before long. Hopefully they carry over something of what made them popular to begin with, as well as doing something of value with the new medium.
