Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Entertain this particular dystopian thought for a moment; what if the world ran on Twitter likes? That, more or less, is the backbone of the society envisioned by YUREI DECO, a neon-block dystopia where the Metaverse has grown beyond its Silicon Valley bounds and swallowed the real world whole, such that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between the two. (This isn’t me reaching, it’s literally called “The Hyperverse” in-show.) Social media tokens called “Love” equate one to one with the sum total of your personal value, and seemingly the whole world is overlaid with a second digital layer of reality that there is no meaningful escape from. Dual implants in each eye, the DECOs of one half of the title, ensure that everyone is plugged in at all times. Truly, Yurei Deco‘s world is one where we are all terminally online, and there is no logging off for anybody.
This is the setting we’re dropped into, handy explanation and all, at the start of this series’ first episode, as we sit in on our main character, Berry (Mira Kawakatsu) and the glorified Zoom class that she calls school. Immediately, we get the sense that Berry is someone who plays outside the rules, as she pulls off some minor computer wizardry to be able to talk to two of her classmates without their teacher noticing. Passing notes for the cyberpunk age, perhaps.
(Somewhere in his lecture, which also serves as our introduction to the setting, Berry’s professor calls the city they live in “the purest expression of liberalism ever to have existed.” Subtle!)
We soon learn that a mysterious person—or perhaps a force—called Phantom Zero has been hitting whole neighborhoods at a time and draining their Love accounts, a big deal in a city where Love is both money and social status. Berry is obsessed with Phantom Zero, and it’s through her eyes and ears that most of this first episode takes place. Including when one of her DECO implants starts glitching out, and she finds a strange origami flower stuck to a lamppost.
That flower, we eventually learn, is the doing of our other main character, a slang-tangling hacker-conman who initially seems like they might be behind the whole “Phantom Zero” thing, given that one of the first things we see her do is sucker a random influencer out of most of his Love. This character’s name, incidentally, is actually just is Hack (Anna Nagase), although you’d have to look at supplementary materials to know that at this point, since it’s not said outright in the first episode.
.hack//Cool Visor, Kid
Berry of course becomes fixated on Hack, who she believes to be responsible for the Phantom Zero phenomenon. Without indulging in an overabundance of detail, she turns out to be wrong, and the real culprit is someone even more mysterious.
The show’s actual plot details aside, what do we make of YUREI DECO so far? Personally, I’m happy to have it around. It’s been a bit since we had a show with interesting visuals that tried to tackle Serious Subjects, or at least, one that didn’t flame out disappointingly. (Sorry, Tokyo 24th Ward.) The series definitely reminds me a fair bit of DECA-DENCE, another colorful cyberpunk series with an all-caps title. More distantly, it recalls Kaiba, and while I’ve not seen Dennou Coil I know enough about it for the multiple comparisons I’ve seen between the two on social media to make sense to me.
A lot of lofty expectations tend to get placed upon anime like this, and this one in particular also happens to be its director’s first TV anime (Tomohisa Shimoyama, though it’s worth noting that he has various credits on things going all the way back to some animation work on Chobits. There’s a show you probably haven’t thought about in a while). While this first episode is a pretty good indication that YUREI DECO is up to that challenge, I do hope folks won’t lose the forest for the trees. There’s a lot to love here already, regardless of where it ends up going.
The Takeaway: If you’ve been looking for the next visually interesting Big Ideas show to come along, you should absolutely be watching this. As for anyone else, I think it’s certainly at least worth checking out.
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