It’s a New Year! Welcome, welcome 2022–soon to be the year of the tiger. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday time and enjoyed our 12 Days of Weebsmas blogs. We ourselves, counted down the new year in kabedons, rewatched all of Furuba so the curse would break at midnight, and made a bunch of soba! So overall, a good break. But now we’re back at it with blogs for the New Year and I thought, what better to start than to reflect on one of the last anime we finished last year, and also one that brought us such…a weird but fun time. Let’s talk Visual Prison.
So for the sake of slowly getting back into blogs, I’m going to go ahead and keep this review on the shorter side. Which means a quick summary of the show. Let me begin this description by saying that when we first heard about Visual Prison, we were confused if it was about–vampires? Singing? Or fashion? Well. After watching it, I can tell you that it’s about…vampires…and singing…and fashion. Okay maybe less of that last one, but we can’t deny that their outfit choices are on point (but honestly most vampires bring their A-game with fashion). Okay to give a little more context–teams of vampires sing to the red moon so that it can cry and give the winners tears and when they collect ten they get a wish. No, seriously that’s it. Of course, we have our great dhampir (half-human, half-vampire) main character who idolizes an idol who ends up being a vampire (and oh so much more), the weirdly romantic twins with a complicated “who’s older” backstory, a vampire slayer turned vampire with massive trauma, two older vamps who you can’t tell whether they are friends or lovers, the obligatory asshole vampire, the obligatory glasses wearing one who is obsessed with the asshole vampire, the trap that’s older than all yall’s grandma, and then the MC’s idol who bleeds trauma so hard that I’m convinced he’s the reason the moon is red.
Now, these vampires are made up into three idol groups, competing for the moon tears. And the anime…is mostly singing. Some drama. We get some episodes to learn about other vampires–though not in too much depth and not all of them. But there are some who get pretty fleshed-out backstories which is definitely nice. There are purely fluffy fanservice episodes — such as one where ketchup makes Eve get possessed by an ancient vampire princess who gives everyone animal ears and tails, but also some more emotional episodes such as the reveal of Ange’s real parents. So it definitely has a nice mix of drama and fluff. It felt like a very fanservice oriented show to be entirely real. But y’know, Star and I really didn’t mind that at all. Like literally at all. It was totally fine. In fact, I think some of the fanservice made it funny–or more like, we made some of them into jokes. Either way, we really enjoyed this show.
As for the music–songs were great. We liked every single piece sung in this show even when they were…uh…interesting choices (cue Lost Eden’s main song). The lyrics were always meaningful and the songs themselves catchy. Like, we still get the opening song stuck in our head constantly. Also, we lowkey want to learn it and do a Visual Prison cosplay because goshdarn are these outfits pretty. I do think more variation in songs would’ve been nice since pretty much every episode there was a performance. But like, with lack of song variation, songs got old fast. Even if they were catchy.
If there was one thing that REALLY bothered me in the show overall, it was nothing to do with the singing–voice acting–or plot. Actually. There may be one thing that bothered me on the plot side but I’m not going to mention it due to spoilers. I’ll just say if you’ve played the true ending of 7’scarlet–well, I expected THAT to happen all over again and it didn’t. Anyway, back to the original thing that continuously bothered me–the CGI. It was just…weird. So, the CGI I’m referring to is used during performances. It doesn’t look great. It actually kind of looks like a classic vocaloid music video. Now, this has some charm to it the first time you see it. HOWEVER, the CGI is not consistent. Meaning that sometimes performances aren’t CGI and sometimes they are animated as normal, and I’m just not down with that. It feels like it’s not necessarily a stylistic choice in that manner, but rather a lack of money. In a way, the CGI problems remind of how Yuri On Ice did the same–only animating some performances but using CGI for others. Of course, YOI pulled it off better being a sports anime.
Overall though, we really did enjoy what little Visual Prison had to offer. There was nothing amazing about this anime, but nothing overly awful either. It was fun. There was never a dull moment with Visual Prison, and it had a real will-they, won’t-they feeling with literally all of the characters. Especially Gil and Ange (which thank goodness that was a, they won’t). I think if anyone is looking for a vampire, musical, pretty-boy anime to watch–this is definitely your cup of tea. But of course, that’s just our opinion.
What did any of you think of Visual Prison if you watched it? Liked it? Hated it? Wished that there was more actual vampire blood-drinking in it? Let us know! We’d love to hear others thoughts on it. And welcome back to our blog for another great year of weeby wonderland.
Stay weebtastic,
xoxo
Luna
Nerdy Bloggers | Y0uC4n7kn0w | Star & Luna 
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