Den-noh Coil (or Dennou Coil; it’s been inconsistently romanized over the years) is a science fiction (one might even call it cyberpunk) show that features a future deeply influenced by augmented reality technology. It’s a dive into a multi-layered blend of digital and physical realities where our young heroes attempt to work out for themselves what’s real to them and what’s worth saving. If that sounds familiar, don’t worry; the similar pitch to last week’s Fractale review is accurate, but the differences between the shows are more vast than the gulfs between stars, so I don’t expect to mention Fractale again this week.
Instead, Den-noh coil is a kind of show that I have to admit is right up my alley, with similar tone and content to Noein, KagePro, and too many 80’s movies and imitators thereof to count. I have a soft spot for works that take younger characters out on an adventure, because when they’re done well they really capture the feeling of a world that’s big and mysterious and full of wonder. I’ll try to not let this particular weakness get too much in the way of giving the show a properly fair review.
The show starts with a 6th-grade girl (Yuuko “Yasako” Okonogi) moving to a new town, Daikoku City, with her little sister (Kyoko, who is at the age where pointing at something and yelling “poop!” is endlessly entertaining to her). They also have with them their dog, Densuke… but Densuke isn’t normal as we would know it. He’s a cyberpet, a being that exists as data and that normal humans interact with by wearing special glasses that have become, in this world, as common as smartphones have become in ours. Yeah, I guess this is the future where Google Glass became king of the Operating Systems.
Densuke soon spots a small black cyber critter of some sort and gives chase, prompting Yasako to chase after him, until he vanishes into a black hole in a wall. Distraught and wondering what to do about Densuke, Yasako comes across a fellow kid, Fumie, and she offers to help Yasako retrieve her dog, explaining a few things about the town in the process.
While cyberglasses are used elsewhere, it seems this particular city has some… eccentricities. Because of overlaps between modern and obsolete cyberspace, individuals can find material known as Metabugs, which can be processed into a variety of unauthorized digital trinkets, and have to deal with the occasional appearance of those weird black things, called Illegals. However, the Space of Daikoku City is also patrolled by a “giant red monster” called Searchy and its flying spherical minions, Q-chans. While these are outwardly friendly-looking hands of the city department that manages cyberspace (Searchy being less a monster and more a giant red jellybean with a cartoon face and a habit of declaring “Me Searchy!” in a childish voice), their habit of mercilessly laser-blasting away things like bugs, glitches, obsolete space, and hosts of meta items render them the implacable pursuers of kids who like to dabble beyond the advertised features of cyberglasses. However, Searchy can’t enter private residences, schools, or shrines, making the situation kind of a game of tag.
Densuke is rescued, but it seems that the Illegal that he was chasing has decided to take a ride inside of him, rendering the digital dog sick, and at least temporarily a target for Searchy. They manage to give Searchy the slip and reach the shop of a crazy fun and cyber-inclined granny called Megabaa… who also happens to be Yasako’s actual grandmother. She can heal Densuke by working Metabugs into her special “metatags”, but it will take time.
In the meantime, while Fumie and Yasako become friends, another party is interested in Densuke. This is Yuuko Amasawa, aka Isako (mercifully, neither she nor Yasako are referred to by their first names much), a gifted hacker – called an “encoder” – who can alter the digital world by drawing complex seals with chalk or even using a lot of tricks she’s preloaded into herself that are faster and stronger than what most of the kids have. She sends her little digital minions to kidnap Densuke, which sees Yasako rushing to once again rescue her dog. Isako’s true objective, however, seems to be the Illegal inside Densuke, which she needs for some desperate purpose. Ultimately Yasako gets Densuke back, and tries and fails to get Isako to open up about what’s really going on.
Yasako and Isako both end up transferring into the same school, where they’re classmates with Fumie, a boy named Daichi and his misfit band of hacker minions (rivals of Fumie, though most everyone sees chemistry between the boy and girl who haven’t figured out that hitting someone is not how you let them know you like them), as well as Fumie’s friend, a rather quiet and reserved boy named Kenichi Harakawa, or Haraken for short.
Isako thoroughly humiliates Daichi when he tries to bully her, and stops Fumie in her tracks as well. After soundly beating the “Hackers Club”, Isako takes control of it and continues her search for Illegals and an elusive special kind of metabug called a Kirabug. In the first arc, she solidifies her control and continues her search, in which she’s supported by a young man called Sousuke. Isako is opposed by Haraken’s aunt, Tamako, who is a cool bike-riding young lady and also, as a worker at Cyberspace Administration, the true master of Searchy.
This transitions into a second arc where we’re mostly concerned with the kids researching Illegals. Isako wants to find them because they’re the key to acquiring Kirabugs. Daichi (kicked out of his own club by Isako) also wants to stay involved to show Isako up. Fumie, Yasako, and Haraken want to present a research project on the topic for school and are willing to spend their summer break on it, but the topic is a lot more personal for Haraken – a year before, he was friends with a girl (one might say he even had a girlfriend) named Kanna, who was researching Illegals. She died in a traffic accident in a way that suggests the self-driving “cybernavi” system should have been at fault, but which has been blamed on the poor dead little girl for doing something wrong ever since. Haraken suspects an Illegal may have disrupted the Cybernavi, causing her death, and also blames himself since they had just had a little fight and he wasn’t there. Thus, he wants to find the truth behind Illegals in order to finally resolve the matter of a dear friend or possibly first love’s tragic demise.
There might even be more to it, however, as in the depths of Obsolete Space (the kind of space where Illegals can exist normally) he has a strange encounter, and even hears Kanna’s voice calling to him, suggesting that some part of her is still trapped and suffering in the broken cyberspace realm known to urban legends as “The Other Side”. Naturally, adults (particularly his Aunt, who seems to be his guardian) aren’t particularly inclined to take seriously his claims of a dead girlfriend trapped in the haze in need of rescue.
Alongside this, we learn more about Yasako and Isako as well. Yasako has a formative memory of meeting a boy at a tall set of steps with torii gates, and that he went by the codename of 4423. There was also something frightening that happened back then, and an encounter with a humanoid Illegal that talked to her relatively pleasantly. She searches for the shrine, but finds that it doesn’t seem to exist in the physical world. Perhaps the depths of the digital Obsolete Space would contain her answers…
Isako, meanwhile, seems to be doing this for her brother, who appears to be in a coma, a secret hidden away in room 4423 of the local hospital. Isako believes, and her contacts support her in this, that her brother’s mind is trapped apart from his body on the Other Side, and that she needs to collect Kirabugs in order to open a passage there and save him. However, she’s tried to open the passage before, about a year ago, with implied disastrous results. With Searchy aggressively cleaning up obsolete space and destroying Illegals and bugs, Isako doesn’t have much more in the way of chances and can’t afford to fail again.
This comes to a head when Isako finally decides to enact opening the passage. However, Tamako is on-site with her Searchies, placing Isako’s hacker club minions in a losing battle to protect Isako’s encodes. Yasako and Haraken are also on-site. They split up, and while Yasako is away, Haraken runs into Isako and cuts a deal, trading her the proper codes to backdoor Searchy in exchange for her help to reach the Other Side. However, while this lets her beat Searchy long enough to finish her work, enough damage is done that Isako’s targeting is off, and the passage to the Other Side opens for Haraken rather than her.
Though the Passage closes, Haraken gets a solid glimpse of the Other Side, reinforcing the idea that Kanna is waiting for him… and the show is not done with chaos. Later that night, as Fumie stays over with the otherwise home alone Yasako and Kyoko, another form of passage opens in their house, calling forth masses of humanoid illegals. Some of them abduct Kyoko’s cyberbody (the projection of a person wearing glasses, effectively their mind) and it’s a race to rescue her and then find some sort of safety as the humanoid Illegal masses swarm the house, slowly busting their way through all of the defenses Megabaa left behind.
A rescue is made and the group links up with Tamako (who has her remaining Searchy on the job, the fact that she’ll be fired for it be damned) and Isako, who has been alerted to the fact that the Passage can open spontaneously for a bit, and will do so in the presence of certain factors.
Meanwhile, while Tamako confiscated Haraken’s glasses, he goes ahead and uses Kanna’s (given to him by her mother much earlier, so he could investigate) to interface with the digital world. Sure enough, he’s the one the Passage appears for to start with, and he enters, leaving his physical body behind to delve to the Other Side in search of Kanna.
As Yasako panics, desperately searching for Haraken, she teams up with Isako. Isako knows a two-person job when she sees one, and despite some misgivings, gives Yasako the last Kirabug, so that she can follow Haraken into the depths of the digital and retrieve him. Time is short, though, as the management agency has deployed a new 2.0 Searchy (looking more like cube versions of the spherical Q-chans) which is aggressively cleaning up the mess, no matter who might get trapped by it
Yasako catches up to Haraken at the boundary of the Other Side. There, they do find Kanna, or what’s left of her consciousness in the Digital. Kanna says she loves Haraken (which she also wrote in her diary, reading which brought him to tears) and also says her goodbyes, now being at peace. Yasako also takes this moment to declare her love for Haraken, and uses a special metatag to send him back to his body. For her own part, she has to run, and though it’s a close call even with Tamako and Searchy giving everything they’ve got to fend off the 2.0 models, Yasako returns to her body in time, meaning that everyone seems to be out of this alright.
So, that’s the end of the show, right? The Passage is gone, the 2.0s will clean up the remaining bugs, Yasako and Haraken are probably going to be a thing (not that he got a chance to give her a real response, but so goes it in a lot of shows), Isako is out of options and will just have to come to terms with things… there’s maybe one episode of cleanup to do. Actually, there’s an entire arc, and as dramatic as the finale of the Kanna arc got, this one is determined to top it in order to become the real climax.
At first, it seems like things are about as I described. Haraken’s little adventure put him in the hospital and while he hasn’t woken up quickly, he should make a full recovery. However, for Isako, things start to really go to hell. A mysterious voice behind some of the 2.0s calls her, and reveals the horrible truth: she’s been lied to this whole time. Her brother is dead. He was never even in Room 4423; it was a digital illusion created in order to control her. Now that the mess has been cleaned up, all that’s left is to make Isako the scapegoat for all the bad things that have happened. The 2.0s chase her, trying to reformat her digital self and leave her helpless, but she gives them the slip with a little help from Yasako, who still wants to try to be friends.
Also revealed is that Densuke is sick; his battles with the Illegals in order to protect Kyoko have left him with damaged data beyond what the normal management software can repair. Yasako tries to look for a solution, and makes a discovery: Densuke predates the modern cyberspace, having been produced by Coils, the company that invented Glasses technology, rather than Megamass, the company that operates it. The dog is, in fact, a “Coils Node”, capable of interfacing with Coils cybergear on the deepest levels of the Space. This includes one impressive setup in Megabaa’s house, left behind by her late husband, who was a doctor who worked heavily with the emerging Glasses technology in order to help reach certain therapy patients.
However, it seems that the sinister driver behind the 2.0s is onto them, as the new model breaks the rules and enters the house, trashing the Coils gear before it can be used to heal Densuke. They run, attempting to find a surviving Coils space or at least to duck the 2.0s, and run into Isako. Isako agrees to help, and gets guidance from Souske in order to bring Densuke to somewhere there should be another setup… provided she comes alone for one last chance at reaching her brother, who Souske assures her is just being kept hidden from her. Isako takes the obvious bait, ditches Yasako at the last minute, and brings Densuke to the device, which is actually there.
The device, however, doesn’t just heal Densuke, but rather uses him as a catalyst for a new passage. Despite Isako’s best efforts to control the matter so everyone can be happy, it turns out (surprise, surprise) that Souske is against her and intending to burn her. Ultimately, she, guilty over what’s happened to Densuke, sacrifices herself to the passage in order to protect Yasako and prevent a broader disaster.
With Isako in a coma from which the prognosis of recovery is grave and Densuke dead, it seems like everything is at an end. Parents confiscate Glasses, Daichi finally makes himself useful by protecting Fumie from bullying with some judo moves, and Yasako tries to come to terms with her grief at losing her friend and her beloved pet.
One last ray of hope is thrown to them, though – a last possible way to reach the Coils domain that might not be closed. Desperate and resolute, Yasako follows it, gaining the support of Tamako, Megabaa, Haraken, and more along the way. Even Densuke briefly appears in the later bits, helping Yasako and letting her truly say goodbye. She finds a Null Carrier – a being that looks like one of the humanoid Illegals but is actually the prototype, a device meant to take people to the Coils domain properly. Souske, controlling the 2.0s, isn’t keen on letting Isako be saved. His interest is in creating a massive Scandal to bring down Megamass because of how they moved on on the technology his father, once a Coils engineer, created.
The ending is predicated on a lot of reveals that we get in very short order, as well as efforts that were building up in the background for the whole show but that didn’t have a good point for me to introduce them. Briefly put, five years before the present Isako and her brother were in a car crash; her brother died and Isako was left in broken mental state. Yasako’s grandfather used Glasses tech in order to create a mental safe-space for her, but ultimately had to do a deep dive to rescue her from it. This cost him his life since adults don’t have great synergy with “the Imago”, a capability to really interface mentally with the digital realm (that Isako, Yasako, Haraken, and Kanna all possess, explaining the separations between their real and cyber bodies).
During the time that Isako was out, interacting with her brother’s mental doppelganger in her safe space (which went on to become “The Other Side”), Yasako also became lost in the digital world. This is when she saw the stairs with shrine gates (The Other Side, or at least its entry way) and met 4423 (Isako’s big brother, though 4423 was actually Isako’s patient number). There, the brother gave Yasako her nickname just like he had given Isako hers in the past, and she even kissed him on the cheek. Her precocious little display of affection infuriated Isako, and part of her became something dark and terrible, an amalgam of her rage and jealousy that would later be semi-incarnate as Michiko, and under that name be the subject of many urban legends of the digital world.
After, at the brother’s request, Yasako fled from the darkness that was the enraged Isako/Michiko, she had the encounter with the peaceful humanoid “illegal” – actually her grandfather’s vestige, still trying to find Isako and bring her to the light in order to save his last patient. Evidently he was at least partially successful, but Isako came back a bit scrambled up and fell prey to the ploy regarding her (actually dead) big brother.
Now, Isako is back in the Other Side, with a degraded fake of her brother attending her and the evolved incarnation of her own childish spite, Michiko, trying to keep her there forever. Yasako is trying to intrude (once again) on Isako’s “paradise”, even while Souske does his best to hunt her down (stopped only by his little brother subverting his hacking attempts, since said little brother was kind of friends with Yasako and didn’t want to see her outright murdered by his big brother, even for the sake of their father).
Ultimately, despite many false starts, Yasako’s words do get through to Isako, causing her to reject Michiko and head back to her body and a life with a future.
One year later, Yasako and Haraken appear to be a thing, Kanna’s fatal traffic accident was solved (it was due to her cyberbody being desynched from her physical one, so the car dodged cyber-Kanna and smacked right into the real one) formally and the girl held blameless, and everyone else is more or less getting along well. Isako hasn’t been seen in a while, since she moved out of town, but she gives Yasako a call to affirm that while she still might not understand what friends are, she’s looking forward to when they some day meet again.
Now, I told that story cut as close as I could, and the whole way straight through. Den-noh Coil, however, is not that straight and quick path. This show is, more than anything else, a mystery. And it is paced like an atmospheric, speculative fiction mystery should be paced. Which is to say, slowly more often than not. The first act masks this by doing a lot of adventurous kid stuff, looking into Illegals (with several episodes each showing one very particular case of a weird glitchy being the kids encounter and interact with) or collecting (meta)bugs, or just running around and dodging Searchy for most of an episode.
In that, it lets you steep deeply in the atmosphere of the setting, as well as get to know the characters. I barely mentioned Daichi, and didn’t name any of his subordinate hacker kids… but they’re actually huge characters (at least in the first half) who have a lot of play and dimension. The show makes you feel comfortable in the setting of kids having fun with their summer vacation, dark shadows looming over it or not. However, this isn’t really filler or waste; rather, it’s taking its time to set up points for the big mysteries later without you realizing just how much of this is setup, because you’re engaged with the story going on right now. Urban legends about Michiko and the Other Side are told long before they’re important. Most of them are deeply inaccurate (many of the Michiko legends seeming to be based on Null Carriers) but they plant the seeds of ideas for later. Yasako’s encounter with 4423? We get to see a fragmentary version of it, representing her hazy memories of five years before, fairly early. This includes the kiss, and even has her speculating dreamily that maybe Haraken (who she’s starting to crush on) might have been 4423, before discarding the idea on account of 4423 having been older than her. It’s there, and there’s clearly something to it when you think about it in isolation, but in the moment it seems to be more a matter of Yasako working out her present feelings.
At about the halfway point there’s a recap episode, and then Den-noh Coil hits full steam. It’s given you the setup without you even necessarily realizing you were setting up for something else, now it can just go, opening the passage and sending the show spiraling into scenarios that sometimes resemble outright horror (like when the broken Nulls are attacking the house, and every protection is slowly worn away).
The characters are really well done. They don’t always make the best choices, but then they’re mostly grade school kids, or can otherwise be absolved as making the wrong choice fully in character rather than as an artifact of bad writing. When Yasako’s mom tries to console her over Densuke’s demise, she says all the wrong things, but it’s hard to not sympathize with her pleas to focus on the physical world and leave the world of Glasses behind when playing around with that stuff has possibly killed Isako and almost got Haraken. When Haraken walks into the depths of the Obsolete Space looking for Kanna, even though it could seriously hurt or kill him, you understand it – Kanna meant a ton to Haraken and he feels responsible and obligated to do whatever he can for what’s left of her; even if potentially throwing his life away for that is objectively a fool endeavor, it makes perfect sense that he’d go for it all the way.
They’re very much rounded characters as well. Den-noh Coil uses all of its 26 episodes to show us different sides of everyone, so we tend to understand them as people rather than as one-not caricatures. Sure, some of the side characters, like Daichi’s father only get a single note, and Kyoko doesn’t have much to her because she’s too little to fully put everything together, but in terms of the central kids and the few young adults around them? You really get to know these people, their strengths and their foibles. Isako is forceful and proud, but she’s also brittle, and her determination can lead her bad places. Daichi plays the big bad bully because he’s got a temper and an inferiority complex, but he’s ultimately not actually a bad kid, and can be surprisingly caring when someone else is down. Fumie is friendly, if a kind of mean big sis sometimes (as her little brother eagerly attests while narrating the recap episode. In all honesty, while it is primarily a recap episode, there’s enough new stuff for it to still be worth watching that one the whole way through), and much like Daichi her temper and pride get in her way, especially when she has to face scary stuff. Yasako acts like your typical sweet shy girl, or at least sounds like it, but deep down she can be shockingly bold and brazen. These all don’t feel like contradictions or “too much stuff”, they just feel like we’ve come to understand where everyone’s boundaries lie and what they’re capable of.
The only character I wish got more work is probably Souske. He’s the closest thing the show has to a villain, and the show is shockingly uninterested in him. I suppose that’s fine, though – while he does try to kill both main girls (by proxy, if nothing else), the show is ultimately more about their feelings, and not overcoming him as a baddie. This is why he can be unceremoniously defeated by his little brother, a quite minor character not otherwise involved in the struggle, well before Yasako even starts talking to Isako directly.
And, lest we forget, this show spends most of an episode on tears shed not even for a flesh-and-blood dog, but for a cyber dog, the futuristic equivalent of these kids’ Tamagotchi. And it hurts the audience, just like it hurts Yasako, like Densuke was no less real than a meat dog. He was a gift from their dead grandfather, and grew up with them for years, and was brave and loyal and always there when Yasako or Kyoko needed him. Of course it’s sad when he dies! But that takes a lot of emotional groundwork to make pay off right.
To me, at least, Den-noh Coil is like a dream. It’s the realization of that perfect “kids on an adventure” 80’s movie that had action and heart, intelligence, scares, love, and characters that felt real and you swear it actually existed but can never quite find it again. At least, not until you stumble on to Den-noh Coil and how it captures all the many sides and all the energy of that half-forgotten thing that might or might not have been.
From an objective sense, though, it’s not for everyone. Sixth grade or no, these are still child characters. And they’re child characters that are written like children, with all the foibles and potential annoyance that come with it. The show is also slow, even deliberate in its pace, and I feel like some people are just going to wash out in the low-stakes kid adventures. As a whole thing, it uses its slow pace extremely well… but that is there, and even when it “hits the ground running” after the halfway point, it still isn’t moving at a particularly great objective speed. Everything takes as long as it should, in my opinion, but I’m a patient man, especially when I’m being served what I like.
At the end, I fought with myself, a whole little war, and ultimately decided to give Den-Noh Coil an A… and not an A+. While there’s a degree to which I can push what I like since, heck, this is my review blog, I do want to try to be fair and accurate about the level of appeal a show is going to have. And, further, while I appreciate the fullness of the construction and the basking in the theme and feelings and world… if Robotics;Notes is anything to go by, it could have been tighter and still gotten us those well-developed characters and that excellent second half.
An A is still an excellent grade, though, and should be taken as a sign that I highly recommend Den-noh Coil to just about anyone. Even if the slower parts aren’t totally your jam, stick with it and you will be rewarded. And if they are up your alley, like they are mine? Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride before it turns into a roller coaster of an ending that’s a different kind of fun.