This one’s for the millions of K-pop fans counting down the days until Blackpink releases their new album: The official music video for ‘Ready For Love’ was released to a worldwide audience on Friday, July 29. The highly anticipated MV depicts the iconic quartet as animated avatars inside a virtual reality (VR) world.

Thanks to multiple trailers and promotional posters released by Tencent Games’ PUBG Mobile prior to the MV release, audiences already knew to expect virtual reality-inspired visuals.

However, despite the flashy animations in the official video for ‘Ready For Love,’ Chinese fans seem more impressed with the group’s vocal performance.

“Although the characters don’t look real, the song and the quartet’s voices are so beautiful,” expressed a ‘blink’ (a portmanteau of ‘black’ and ‘pink’ and a moniker assumed by fans of Blackpink) on the microblogging platform Weibo.

Meanwhile, several netizens have pointed out that the animated characters don’t resemble the real stars as much as they had hoped.

“Our stars are prettier than the digital models,” claimed a fan.

A Chinese entertainment media site echoed the above sentiment by publishing the following: “The video is creative, but some viewers have complained that they could not recognize the stars.”

Meanwhile, some netizens have wondered if the MV’s visuals were copied from ‘Dreams Come True’ (1998), a song and video by South Korean girl group S.E.S., while others are still anxious for a full-length album to drop.

“We finally got one ‘new song,’ but hopefully, we can see more live performances in August!” reads another comment.

‘Ready For Love,’ which first appeared in the 2020 documentary, Blackpink: Light Up the Sky, was also performed by the girl group at PUBG’s in-game concert in mid-July.

Cover photo via Twitter