Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: in the nebulous future, all known civilization is ruled in a very skewed and dystopian way that seems to make the masses happy, but a small group of plucky teens and outcasts… Yeah, I’m just going to assume you’ve stopped me by that point, since it’s the pitch for basically every big name young adult novel, an obligatory episode or five of every “scenario of the week” scifi show, and the occasional piece of well-respected Sci-fi as well. Some of those pieces do it better, some do it worse. I won’t even claim to be immune to the allure of the archetype myself, it’s a damn good backbone.
But when you tell an archetypical story, you need to both bring something of your own to the table that’s new and interesting, and know what makes that archetype powerful and resonant. If you do, joke aside, you can create some good stuff – maybe fun, maybe meaningful, and certainly at least worth a look. If you don’t… well, let’s take a look at Yurei Deco.
So, we’re introduced to our future: the city of Tom Sawyer, where universal surveillance has created an allegedly peaceful society based in augmented reality technology and the use of “Love” (internet clout) as the primary currency and measure of social standing. Here we see a girl, Berry, who is obsessed with the city’s one big urban legend – an entity known as Phantom Zero, that zeroes out all Love values and digital data when it manifests. Seeking out Zero in what she believes is a game, she runs into a rogue hacker kid who uses an augmented reality cloaking device to be invisible to normals, who she can see thanks to the fact that the AR implant for her right eye is on the fritz. Through a series of hijinx involving her picking up of one of the hacker’s digital items, the two of them end up running into the real Phantom Zero, a dangerous glitch thing that drags them into an HD full-dive scenario.
They escape with data on Phantom Zero, but while Berry passes out with the data-object in her possession, the authorities show up with their cleaners and end up chasing off the hacker (eventually revealed to go by Hack), pursuing Hack to a safehouse where Hack gives the authorities a heck of a time before being apprehended. This leaves Berry with the plot trinket.
Looking into things, Berry gets a glimpse of where her parents work. They’re, evidently, content moderators, who approve or delete all content in order to maintain the government’s control of information. So, naturally, we can’t expect any help from the adults in this situation. Following the data Hack left, Berry then attends the rendezvous with an associate of Hack, named Finn.
Yeah, having Hack, Berry, and Finn inhabit the town of Tom Sawyer isn’t a particularly subtle reference, is it? The funny thing is despite how heavy-handed the Mark Twain theme is in the names, it doesn’t really connect to anything in the narrative. The show, as a whole, is an overbearing pastel 1984 for kids with extra Fractale parts, which has very little to do with anything Mark Twain ever wrote. But, if I have to point out every little bit of nonsense in this one, we’re going to be here all day.
In any case, Finn and Hack are both the titular Yurei (ghosts, for those who haven’t picked up a smattering of Japanese words. Notably, the “phantom” in Phantom Zero uses a different word.) In the land of Tom Sawyer, Yurei are undocumented citizens. There are, apparently, quite a few of them, and being outside the system grants them some degree of freedom while also meaning they don’t benefit from being a part of society. It is, naturally, a tenuous position.
In any case, Finn and Berry learn that Hack has been arrested and that the trial will be the very next day, at which the authorities are entirely prepared to use Hack as a scapegoat for the whole Phantom Zero incident. If convicted, Hack will be “Sent to a correctional facility and never seen or heard from again.” and I’m just going to assume that line was guest written by 4kids frantically avoiding the word “killed”. Yeah, this particular police state is neither subtle nor clever. But, then again, it’s Yurei Deco.
With needless full-dive VR interfacing and the help of (what else) a couple more excessively colorful insane people, the two manage to reconstruct the Zero Event, which should prove that Hack didn’t do it… not that they don’t have Hack on plenty of other fraud Hack actually committed, but whatever. Berry infiltrates the trial claiming to be a lawyer from a human rights group, but her illusion of an adult fails as she gets too excited delivering the evidence. And, just to make things more chaotic, the zero phenomenon strikes. Berry springs Hack and they flee, and in the pursuit the government mooks skip directly to “shoot to kill” and both Berry and Hack are presumed dead in a fireball explosion.
Four months later, Berry is a yurei herself for reason of presumed dead, and has become part of a detective club along with Hack and Finn and a bunch of other eccentric weirdos that are either members or co-conspirators like the gas-mask wearing Smiley, Wilson (who never talks and wears some kind of robot cat suit), and Madam 44 (this show’s version of Megabaa from Den-noh Coil), looking into the whole Phantom Zero thing as well as whatever other incidents cross their plate. This starts with a man looking for his lost daughter/avatar, and pretty much goes from there. All the while, they deal with the facts of being Yurei, like the unspecified system the authorities have that makes people steadily forget “anything sad” through unspecified means.
That is apparently not enough for Berry’s parents to forget her, though, as they’re apparently using their relative authority to search for any sign of her survival, using a mechanism that’s far beyond what the Yurei knew existed and that thus promises a lead in their search for Phantom Zero.
And for that, we jump into a series of single-episode case-of-the-week scenarios, where someone manages to find the detective agency staffed by non-persons and think “Yeah, these bizarre eccentrics will solve my problem!”. A man wants his girl avatar back, make of that what you will, as mentioned. A scientist wants a wikipedia page corrected. Doesn’t seem like detective work, but okay, they’re kind of hackers for hire too. They totally beans that one but the scientist had things wrong as well so all’s miserable that ends miserable. A drone seeks lost master. The master is already dead, but this one seems like it might tie to something since said person was involved in the fake game cover story for Phantom Zero and may have been rubbed out.
On the whole, this show feels like it was taking notes from Den-noh Coil, but I feel like they were taking note of the wrong things. The kids there spend episodes doing some largely irrelevant investigations too, but first Den-noh coil is twice as long (leaving plenty of room for a main plot to unfold with good pacing) and the investigations were tied in to what was interesting. The kids were, as their main point, looking into the phenomenon of Illegals, and any of the weird one-off episodes had to do with Illegals as well, encountering the strange digital beings and learning more about them. Here, the point is Phantom Zero – the real Phantom Zero, or “Glitchy-witchy” to use Hack-speak, and the individual cases are at most tangentially hinting in that direction. This leaves the show torn for this stretch between being something like Den-noh Coil and being something more like Gene of AI, and that’s not a comfortable line to straddle.
And Den-noh Coil was, in my mind, a great show. A new Augmented Reality themed science fiction kids adventure tale will be compared to it, but doesn’t need to beat it to pass. But it is telling just how that comparison falls out. I suppose I can’t be too upset since it’s not that many episodes in the grand scheme of things, but did they have to have such minimal connection and interest?
Not every vignette in Yurei Deco fails to be germane, though. Oddly enough the next one has a payoff: the gang goes looking for a mysterious ramen cart known only through rumors and when, after puttering about for half the episode, they find it, they discover that the proprietor of the ramen cart that doesn’t exist is an AI who was formerly the engineer of a place called Mark Twain, which was also mentioned by one of the rumors (said to be in the sky). Then, Phantom Zero randomly pops up and drags everyone into full dive cyberspace, killing the ramen AI in the process but leaving us with something that resembles a real plot hook, along with a peacock-feather circuit, the second one found.
For some reason the characters who went along (Berry, Hack, and the ever silent cat dude Watson) don’t dwell on the fact that someone they were interacting with as a fellow person was essentially murdered right in front of them by the hostile digital spook they were looking for and instead lightheartedly tease the party members who opted out about how good the ramen was.
The next episode centers around Berry working with Hank (the token black guy who has the only legit business of the lot as a salvager and junk-seller. Honestly, aside from the fact that his whole lanky frame could probably fold up and fit inside his afro, he’s normal) in order to recover “treasure falling from the sky”, said to be a deorbiting ancient satellite that will fall in a given location.
Now, setting aside that anything moving at satellite velocities isn’t going to make it to the ground as anything other than slag without deliberate equipment and technique for surviving reentry and the fall, if it makes it to the ground at all, it evidently also has a plot-relevant data capsule, or so the team believes on no evidence other than presumably having read the script. They plan to catch the capsule just like a baseball, down to having a baseball-catcher robot remoted by Madam 44 for the purpose. How do they spot it incoming? Binoculars. Gotta say this case hits the ol’ verisimilitude hard in new ways compared to the rest of the show. You’d think all the general insanity of the characters would prepare you for the show having a kindergartner’s concept of “an object falling from space”, but it really doesn’t.
At least when they do catch it there’s some hint of force and some heat (not that the heat, which is generated by compression in the upper atmosphere as the object bleeds off speed, and that would almost certainly ablate a baseball-sized capsule… oh forget it.).
The capsule leads to the reveal that Finn has been keeping loads of secrets, and Finn tells everybody off, disbanding the detectives and claiming they were all just pawns and nothing about Phantom Zero or the like mattered.
Since the apple of this show doesn’t fall very far from the tween dystopia tree, you kind of know this isn’t going to last and softer motives will be revealed, but bear with it. The show ends faster if you just take it in stride. Naturally, redeeming the character we know is a friend and know is going to stay a friend from having said jerk things starts with an extended flashblack to Finn’s childhood.
In it, Kid Finn discovers that the purification system that’s supposed to minimize garbage and keep his polluted slum livable is broken. He does unspecified science to prove that the untreated waste piling up from the broken treatment plant is bad, and tries to tell the Customer Center authorities, only to be ignored by the automated greeter program because he’s a non-person. The goons who come looking for the illegal access to the system don’t listen either, so shame on them. Rather than handing the data off to someone who is registered and can deliver it (Since I guess giving digital data in this world is transfer and not copy and anything he gave over was thrown out), Finn gets ostracized for supposedly selling out the slums to the authorities and kicked out of the district with a cilantro plant to his name while, presumably, nobody else does anything smart or uses any contacts either.
The gang, learning about this tragic past thanks to Hack, follows Finn into the district where he grew up, which is still a garbage heap and where Finn is struggling with the overgrown and still broken purification system. Finn is still obstinate about not accepting help, but gets the obligatory talking to in order to come around. The group is able to fix the place in an afternoon, but actually resetting it to run on the software side (which is evidently what the capsule data from the ancient satellite was for) will apparently zero out all the Love in the area. Rather than just, ya know, doing it and slipping away they talk about this in a crowded plaza and get an angry mob accusing them of being Phantom Zero and not taking “it will make the trash go away” for an answer.
Credit where its due this episode (the backstory and redemption of Finn, up to the angry mob forming) is one of the best episodes in the show in that it actually feels legitimate for the genre rather than relying on smoke, mirrors, nonsense-speak, and catchphrases. Even Hack gets to talk like a human and make a good point.
The resulting manhunt in the next episode is somewhat entertaining, and the part where they try to tie in all the disparate pieces. Berry’s parents learn she’s alive and try to help, and eventually the last three remaining members of the gang on the run (Hack, Berry, and Finn) head to the invisible island in the sky called Mark Twain, where Phantom Zero is supposed to be, and the formerly trigger-happy forces of the Customer Center just kind of watch them be airlifted by tiny little drones.
In Mark Twain, they try to sift through all the backup data for the entire history of the island to find Phantom Zero’s true identity before more goons arrive and turn it into more chasing, culminating with Berry and Hack facing off against Phantom Zero and/or the master administrator in the hyperverse while Finn uses ninka skills to keep their bodies safe from the waves of enemies.
The final episode then opens with, through no context, a little girl living with her family in an idyllic walled mansion, her only concern that she can sometimes hear the narrator. Then Berry shows up, identifies the girl as Hack, and recites Hack’s catchphrase (well, one of them at least) to reset the scenario to one with regular Hack. In the real world, the security bots subdue Finn and bring Hack and Berry to a sealed chamber with a weird older woman. This is Injunction Jo, the leader of the Customer Center and true identity of Phantom Zero, who decides to explain everything.
Long story short, Jo is determinist Willy Wonka, who believes that all reality and thought is based on algorithms (an idea done often in scifi, but that had not been even remotely introduced here. Gutterball for the theme of your theoretical main antagonist) and yet constructed this whole mess to recruit some young idiot with heart to take her place. That’s it. That’s the whole point of this show. Why this roundabout Phantom Zero bullcrap? What’s the point of it when the damage Zero does we’ve seen reset by the authorities? Why can’t you use any other sane mechanism to get a successor? Never addressed. It’s just a Willy Wonka setup. Both Hack and Berry are given the offer and neither of them likes it, but Hack is goaded into taking it as a challenge to prove whose vision of truth is actually the case.
Finn and Berry are returned to the surface and manage a clean getaway when the rest of the team’s hacking makes everyone look like the Phantom Zero from the game. After a time skip, Berry is living with her parents (who were evidently released from being arrested) but eating like Yurei (real cooked food, not flavored with AR sense hacking). They’re still content moderators at that, but under Hack’s regime everything goes through, just flagged as good or bad rather than bad things being erased or hidden. Everyone else, similarly, is going around brighter lives in an ever so slightly reformed world, like Finn’s neighborhood getting registered and Love being able to be gleaned by working picking up the years of trash. Jo flies off to parts unknown in some kind of airship, just let off for the murder of that ramen cart AI, but I guess that’s okay because the silent cat man takes over the secret ramen cart. Even Hack, despite being “god” of this realm, comes to visit Berry acting just like old times. The end.
Hoo boy… This is not the worst show I’ve seen, not by any means, but it does have a lot of problems I feel obligated to rip into and not a lot of redemption from those foibles.
I think one of the things that ends up working against this show in a subtle but big way is how it’s all so weird. Hack speaks in a particular cadence that can be parsed, but only barely, and most of the other characters as well are these big, loud, unreal characters. This extends, of course, to their visual designs. The entire show has this bright, pastel look to it. It’s fitting enough for the coat of digital paint thrown over the world, but the problem is that it extends through everything. The digital stuff is kind of wacky… but “real” people and objects are as bizarre or almost so.
In Den-noh coil, the idea of an existence written heavily with Augmented Reality was sold by the fact that there was usually a distinction between the AR world and the physical one, even where they overlapped. The digital stuff could look weird and mystical or bizarre and bright (Searchy, in particular, would fit right in here), but the regular people were pretty darn grounded and mundane, helping you really feel like there were two (or more) worlds involved in the show. Deca-dence had a similar look and feel for the existence of the robots to the look that Yurei Deco has overall, but again it was part of a setup where there was contrast. Even Fractale, a show about augmented reality that was more on the bad side of the quality scale, knew how to properly contrast a very weird digital vision with a mundane physical in order to sign its creations properly.
Yurei Deco is trying to ask hard-hitting questions. Or, at least, it wants to look like it’s trying to ask hard-hitting questions. But it really doesn’t look it because, well, everything is kind of on the same level of bizarre. Yeah, the full-dive stuff looks different than the AR stuff, but the AR doesn’t look at all different from the physical, and it really makes “reading” the show awkward, from the perspective of visual storytelling.
Moving to those questions or lack thereof, the sense I come away with is that Yurei Deco is about as real as the in-show avatars: a cheap costume with no substance beneath it. It’s angling to hack the brain of anyone with anxieties, well founded or not, about government and/or technology and make those people think its speaking their language, when really it has nothing to say. This becomes very evident in the ending given how much it just sort of throws things at the wall to see what sticks.
In a way, it’s insidious. The way the characters rely primarily on catchphrases and nonsense-talk is a perfect canvas to be projected onto. Hack can make impassioned speeches, but spends most of the show talking in nonsensical verbal tics or rattling off the big SI prefixes people mostly see in computing. Similarly, the vague nature of the city’s authority and its command of information for most of the show is really intent on provoking people to supply their own fears, not in a way that comes off as an intelligent “We give you the dots, connect them” sort of way, but one that feels more manipulative. Jo Wonka absolves the show of having to choose anything, because she claims her whole dystopia was via automatic processes, so you can still kind of fill in the blank.
But more than that, it’s just lame, a construction of smoke and mirrors and cardboard facades set up in a frantic attempt to not reveal that this is every young adult story of misspent youth, angled at a marketable demographic of marks convinced that this could be their future.
This lack of a true core is where Yurei Deco really stumbles and falls next to its many, many competitors in the arena of Cyberpunk. Den-noh Coil had a good core story about grief and memory, supported by characters that felt real. Ergo Proxy had larger-than-life weirdness in its bleak vision that blurred the lines between rules and gods. Beatless, as well as its love story, actually addressed a transitional moment for its future society well enough that we understood where it was coming from and where it might be going to. Even Fractale, which was by in large a pretty bad show, had a more interesting take on the vision of a future lost in Augmented Reality, and a willingness to see the complicated parts of the topic it chose to address, even if it didn’t execute all that well. Yurei Deco has nothing but designs and interactions that attempt to distract you with their absurdity rather than revealing with their relatable natures.
To compare Yurei Deco with another show that is social sci-fi, when The Gene of AI did its vignettes, it didn’t always supply an easy or palatable answer for what should be done, but it usually looked at its cases with enough nuance that you could understand the topic without projecting your own particular interests onto it. Even if it wasn’t clear how you should want things to resolve, it was clear what the show was talking about. When Gene of AI had its vignette about a boy, his crush, and his digital girlfriend made in his crush’s image, it was clearly talking about romance and the complications of human feelings, and how technology might might create new complications in an already complicated arena by blending fantasy and reality.
When Yurei Deco has its episode about a man seeking the return of his cute girl avatar… is it a trans thing? An otaku thing? A catfishing thing? Just a weird show being weird because there’s a guy who walks around in a cat suit and a girl called “Smiley” whose smile, under her gas mask, is a perpetual toothy grin dominating half her face and never moving properly and we’re just supposed to take this as normal because there’s no tell for it being computer chicanery? I think you’re supposed to supply whatever you happen to prefer, and as much as I have my issues with message fiction I have a bigger issue with a hollow impostor trying to look like message fiction without actually saying anything. It’s a Rorschach test cosplaying as social commentary.
It’s worth noting that the writer of all this is Dai Satou. If you don’t know who that is, he’s also responsible for some really great works including Ergo Proxy and Eureka Seven, as well as having a hand in such landmarks as Cowboy Beebop, Wolf’s Rain, Samurai Champloo, and most of the Stand-Alone Complex entries in the Ghost in the Shell franchise. True, his filmography has other lesser efforts as well as those titanic credits, but he’s not the only staff member with some serious background in seriously good material. I would say it’s hard to believe how a show this hollow and soulless could come out of creators with the kind of credits that the staff here had, but I guess RErideD also happened, so these things do just occur. But it still kind of hurts that the guy who had the chief writer and series composition credits for Ergo Proxy would, sixteen years later, turn out Yurei Deco to touch on some related themes of alienation and societal control with none of the intelligence and a fraction the charm.
When it comes to the art and animation, I’m going to be frank here: it’s not just weird like I addressed before, it’s bad, and almost uniquely so. There is, surprisingly to some people, a good deal of crossover between Japanese and American animation. I may have mentioned this when discussing The Big O, a show that looks a lot like Batman: the Animated Series and probably because there was a significant overlap in animators, but it goes back farther (with many classic Saturday Morning Cartoons having Japanese roots) and continues to this day with new styles being developed by learning from bits of either side.
Yurei Deco is a dead end of that evolutionary process, the case where multi-generational inbreeding reinforced negative traits and produced an individual that will hopefully have no offspring. It takes the simplification, exaggeration, and love of ugliness of some modern Western productions (which themselves developed that style by adding anime-inspired techniques to previous examples of cheaper Western TV animation) and lenses that through a more modern Japanese approach that ends up feeling like it belongs in neither world. They look like CalArts characters, or at least more than half way there, but they still move more like traditional anime characters, which doesn’t support the style.
Now, the end result does have some similarity to Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, which I very much appreciated. This is probably no accident, as the same studio is responsible for both. But Eizouken fit its material and also displayed its own moments of visual wonder, indulging in a truly intricate and creative setting. Its characters, while exaggerated in shape and aspect in a way familiar to Yurei Deco, knew they were meant to ultimately represent normal people, and thus didn’t take it too far.
Yurei Deco’s characters I’ve already touched on, and its environments are shoddy, both on a level that seems intentional and on a level that’s at best an unfortunate result of having to have the full-dive hyperverse look different (ultimately, better in its greater detail). Or, you know, just as a result of not having Asakusa’s eye for detail involved in determining what should exist in this world.
Plus, Eizouken was a weird show. Weird animation fit it, and helped support the fact that it was taking place in a world external to most anime you’d see. Yurei Deco is an almost painfully normal show when you analyze what little meat is there. Willy Wonka with a coat of 1984 paint by way of Fractale, that’s the heart of it. It would have been better served by having a more bog-standard art style, or a unique style that wasn’t… this.
So, now we come to it: the letter grade. And at this juncture the biggest question on my mind is this: “Is there any reason to not Fail Yurei Deco?”
The reasons to fail it are weaker than usual – it’s dry message fiction with a homeopathic message that doesn’t look good or tell a compelling story alongside. That’s it. As much hell as I’ve given it, it’s not like this show offended me or hurt me. With that as the case against, it wouldn’t take much in the way of saves to put Yurei Deco somewhere in the D ranks, rather than at the true bottom of the bin.
But, the more I think, the more I don’t find that little spark. Is there a character to watch for? Nah, they’re bland and annoying. Is it good to look at? It really isn’t. Did the story have promise? Heck no, the story is what happens if you get a group of terminally online fourteen-year-olds to play the Misspent Youth RPG and record their sessions. Except I think that the kids would come up with more action and interesting setups.
All said, this poor show sits firmly below Fractale, a show that frustrated me to no end but that at least had soaring ambitions and hints of loftier goals it was trying to achieve. In every regard, Yurei Deco is found wanting, and nothing will stand up to support it in the end.
But can I really outright fail it when it was so… marginally inoffensive? The show is a shell containing very little of value, lots of dead air, and some tricks that piss me off on the level of philosophy of writing, but at the end of the day the sequence of events is logical and some of the sequences give at least a tiny bit of joy. I have no love for this show (pun intended) but… I’ll grant it a D- that it didn’t hurt me. Still, this is a show that is safely forgotten. Go ahead and ghost it.