Last time, Kaburagi logged into Deca-dence itself, hoping to manage the win against Omega. However, this is going to take some help as we move onward. Minato and Jill manage to set up a system so that the players can help Kaburagi assemble a weapon with which to kill Omega and stop the need for spatial collapse. Pretty high drama, right?
Actually the episode takes its time. There aren’t that many active enemies, and it’s more about people coming together. Donatello, though, says screw this friendship and building stuff and takes his avatar to get ready for a proper fight.
Kaburagi’s trouble comes in the form of interference from the system, who appears to say hello. Turns out Kamina Shades Boss and the familiar he had were just facets, puppets for the overall System to use. The system… is also not actually opposed to Bugs, it seems: in its pure, core form it sees Bugs, including the bug-hunting, as a way to establish innovation. All the same, System tries to dissuade Kaburagi from fighting on, and he flashes back to all the things Natsume said and tells the System to stuff it. After the System drops some heavy-handed foreshadowing, it gets out of the way and Deca-dence activates as Omega bears down on it.
Kaburagi (now as Kabu-dence) tries to assemble the ultimate weapon, but Omega is ready to fire its laser for the kill… which is when Donatello flies in to ram a giant pair of rocket harpoons down its throat, throwing its aim off. The bug robots mourn and cheer Donatello’s heroic sacrifice… until he walks up, having logged out. Apparently they forgot he could do that (other than Jill), which is disappointing for some of them. Kabu-dence fires his drill spear after the last piece is helped into place by Natsume and the other fighting Tankers. Omega takes it on the chin, but doesn’t get done in just yet. Kaburagi needs more power… and that means going full Limiter Removal. With that, Omega is obliterated, the spatial collapse halted… and the fortress Deca-dence begins to crumble with Kaburagi still logged into it, and no limiters. His face-screen winks out just as rocks come tumbling down onto his body.
Later, Natsume and company exhume Kaburagi from the wreckage. She says goodbye, but the last lights fade from his broken body – he’s dead.
After a few years, the world is in a new place. Deca-dence has been rebooted from your typical monster-fighting MMO to what looks like more of a Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons game, Gears – now also visiting in their natural bodies – doing all sorts of farming and building alongside the tankers as a city flows from the ruins of old Deca-dence. Others find their roles in sports or (for Kurenai and Donatello) combat sports using some of the old tech, while the Gadoll have been resurrected as peaceful pet creatures. Minato is now the Supreme Commander, heading up the new System, into which Jill has been re-integrated, as she had a history studying the nature of Bugs. As they look over her old files, they realize she has something: a backup copy of Kaburagi’s code! The last scene is Natsume, now working as a tour guide, being shocked to see Kaburagi (in what looks to be a recreation of his first Avatar) walking out of the wastes.
So… how did the show do?
Overall, I thought the last arc – the aftermath of the Gadoll Factory – was probably the weakest material in the show. It was still solid, but it didn’t hit the greatness or emotion of some of the previous stuff, perhaps because this is where it became clear that Natsume wasn’t actually going to be able to step out of Kaburagi’s shadow. This is his show, and I guess I shouldn’t really begrudge that, but I liked how Natsume was going early on and was looking forward to seeing her growth and turmoil as she faced a world that didn’t want to accept her.
The ending is… interesting, to me. The decision to kill Kaburagi made a ton of sense with his arc. He became all about pushing his limits, so seeing him die by breaking the limits, ultimately victorious in his demise, felt like a strong culmination of that. Bringing him back… I guess it makes sense. They are robots, so having a backup of somebody’s data doesn’t feel like a cheap move. But because Kaburagi just died and we didn’t have an episode of denouement, his death lacked the emotional impact it could have had, even if he was ultimately resurrected after some time had passed. On the whole, Deca-dence knew when and where it could cut intermediary scenes because we didn’t need to see them, but in this case having some hang time for his death to sink in for the audience would have made the resurrection more powerful. And that’s laying aside the tons of sci-fi questions (Is restoring a persona from backups really the same person “coming back from the dead”? Or, more specific to this plot, the “what about” questions for his conversations with Minato and the System and how much those experiences had an impact on his final moments and wouldn’t be recorded in the backup. Not to mention what he even is now. Is he just the avatar, basically a lab-grown tanker who can hang with Kurenai and be a fatherly mentor figure to Natsume?) that remain un-asked because, well, the credits are rolling.
In the end, I think Deca-dence is a good show. My mark for it is, overall, A-. It had the potential, the vision, and the writing skill to reach for the stars, but there were a few ways in which it fell short. The epic feel of the first arc was lost a little in prison and more with the very close conflict with Omega. There were some excellent scenes, like the prison riot, the battle on the mountain, and more… but for all the fast forward the show did, there were also some scenes that were kind of paint by numbers. It had an amazing ambition, but though it adapted very well to the run time that was given, I do think it was ultimately held back from realizing its true potential by having to tell this entire story in just twelve episodes.
I’d recommend it, somewhat warmly, but I don’t think it’s going to go down as an all-time great. Instead, it’s just a good show that would like to remind us that “Original” isn’t dead