Her employer, freelance Virus exorcist Lucia Nahashi, despairs of Sumire ever getting her act together, since she's no more courageous or competent on her dozenth Virus hunt than she was when they first attacked her. But she keeps Sumire on the payroll for one unique talent: Sumire is a Virus antibody, and when she comes into contact with the special antibody-bullets Lucia and her team create from dead Viruses, she goes into a berserker state.

Then she tears Viruses apart with her bare hands, chuckling gruesomely all the while. Problem is, in that state she apparently considers human souls just as tasty as the Viruses do, and containing her becomes an issue.

Given that she can't control her own transformations into Virus-killing mode or back again, she isn't exactly the greatest asset, but Lucia wants to keep her close for study. Besides, she occasionally comes in handy as bait. And considering the dangers of Lucia's running a business offering exorcist services to people dealing with Viruses, she needs all the help she can get. Even, apparently, squealing, reluctant, whiny help.

Two of the first four installments of Venus vs. Virus feature specific cases of Lucia's: one initiated by a girl whose friends are disappearing, possibly because of a giant shadow following her around, and one the case of a young girl whose twin brother has holed up in his room and won't come out. The other two deal with Sumire: How she met Lucia and how she continues to resist the very idea of Viruses, let alone the fact that she has a knack for killing them.

One more time around this mulberry bush

The trope of the giggly, helpless or untalented girl who switches back and forth into badass-killing-machine mode comes up a lot in anime, and Venus vs. Virus doesn't do much new with it. In fact, it doesn't do much new with any of its ideas. There are a bunch of minor interesting touches—Sumire's blushing, casual relationship with an older guy who loans her books; the best friend's little brother, who's desperately trying to ask Sumire out; Lucia's glowing golden magical eye, which she keeps covered with an eyepatch most of the time; the way Sumire seems to be ridiculously popular at school even though she's as flustered and talentless there as everywhere else—and there are teases of a larger plot to come, as barely seen enemies lurk smugly in the background, monitoring Sumire's progress. But the characterization, the character design and the monster-hunting plots are all bland as milk, with nothing much to distinguish them from better entries in this genre.

In particular, Sumire's nonstop sobbing insistence that she didn't ask for these talents, she doesn't want them, she wishes Viruses would just go away, she can't take all this horror any more, etc., is just plain tiresome. The reluctant anime savior with a talent that no one else has but that she doesn't want is even more of a cliché than the part-time badass, and two entire episodes out of four dedicated to Sumire's repetitive whining are just too much. There are probably viewers out there who could sympathize with her angst, but they aren't likely to be the majority.

The idea of the Viruses themselves—people whose souls were stolen, leaving them to wander around trying to fill the void by stealing other people's souls, thus creating new Viruses—is fairly neat, but even here, the monster design looks like something out of the '80s: Viruses are either many-eyed blobs or evil-looking gargoyle people, drawn with scant detail and prone to repetitive fights that feature more "Why don't you just give up now?" rhetoric than fast-paced action. There's nothing hugely wrong with Venus vs. Virus. There's just nothing to recommend it over all the many similar series.