Yuurei Deco

If I were to describe this series, I’d describe it as a mixture of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One”, and George Orwell’s “1984”, but in a very kid-friendly sense. It tackles themes of a futuristic world of augmented reality and information control, and in a sense, it almost has me fearing if this kind of world is what we’ll see in the future.

In a nutshell, Yurei Deco is set in a world filled with advanced technology where people see the world through “Deco”, which is a compulsory piece of equipment for citizens that allows them to see things in augmented reality. The other function of ... Deco is for the Customer Center, which is basically the government, to keep tabs on all its citizens. If you don’t have a Deco, you’re considered to be “dead” or “nonexistent”, or a Yurei, as this show describes the phenomenon as. The main character, Berry, has a broken Deco, so she can see some things that the citizens can’t see, such as the Yurei. Through this, Berry’s mundane life expands, and a sci-fi adventure of mystery and exploration begins.

My grading criteria: Story: /25 Art: /10 Music: /10 Characters: /20 Enjoyment /15 Thematic Execution /20

STORY: 13.5/25

The story is interesting, and relatable to a degree, because there are quite a few parallels to modern society, such as the “love” system, which resembles social media likes and also seems like some type of currency or social status. It also has me thinking if the future could be like this, with higher-ups choosing what we see and don’t see. Heck, that might be happening already, who knows? Overall, it’s quite simple, as most of the series is focused on solving mysteries, and also, trying to figure out who “Phantom Zero” is along with the “Zero Phenomenon”, which reduces the love of every person and object down to zero.

The issue I have with the story is that it’s rather underdeveloped. The love system and the world itself are a bit under-explained, and I think that took away from the intrigue I had at the start of the show. With the simplicity of the premise, it wasn’t very engaging all the way through, but it definitely had its good moments.

ART: 7.4/10

I find the colour palette to be quite nice and refreshing, but the character designs left a bit to be desired. It has the Science Saru touch to it, and you can almost feel that Masaaki Yuasa was directing this, but it seemed a bit watered down and less jarring compared to his works.

MUSIC: 8/10

The OST isn’t too noticeable, but there are some good spots of music here and there. Opening and ending are solid, and I enjoyed them as well.

CHARACTERS: 12.6/20

The characters are pretty nice as well, and fun to watch. They each have their unique personalities, and in some cases, some emotional backstories as well. Berry and Hack bounce off each other pretty well, since they’re both curious, mischievous, and want to have fun. They even have unique ways of speech, which was pretty memorable. Finn was a good character too, with a good backstory, and I like the quietness of his character. Not much to really talk about here, since the characters are pretty simplistic.

ENJOYMENT: 10.2/15

Not every part of the show was the most engaging, but I found some episodes to be quite the watch.

THEMATIC EXECUTION: 12.8/20

I like what the show was going for, but some times, the themes just weren’t executed the greatest. I saw a lack of direction in the story themes sometimes, but this show executes the fun factor, and some of the tech factors decently.

OVERALL: 64.5/100

This show was good, but it could have been much better with a bit more depth and a better direction to the story. Overall, just a simple, fun show that won’t have you at the edge of your seat or anything, but will have you intrigued at times.

If I could give this show a 6.5 I honestly would. While it's not a bad product at all, I find it to be very creative and interesting. There are just slight issues for me, that can't really give it a 7. But it also feels wrong giving it a 6. Let me explain what I mean by that.

Art: 8
This is very much a main highlight, as it's style is very cartoon like, and different to what you would find in a normal anime. It honestly gives me Deca-dance vibes, in terms of their more cartoon looking parts. Which I can appreciate. It'll stand out ... so much more, then it would've if it just looked like any normal show. It deserves props for that.But in general, the style is colourful, and really stands out among st the crowd. If one thing you'll remember this show for, is the style and substance.

Sound: 7
While the sound, there is a good beat here or there, I do have to talk about the OP, with it's large title haha. It's a nice track, and really reflects the show. There isn't anything bad at all I can say about the sound, it does it's job, which is what you would want out of your anime.

Story and characters: 6
The story honestly can seem a bit scary at times for me personally. Maybe because it honestly feels like the future. With how controlled tech could be in the future, and how people could honestly be picking and choosing what is suitable for us. With some hidden extras hidden within. I don't know about you, but that is honestly chilling. While it might not happen in our live time, butin the future? God, I wouldn't want to think about that.

In terms of other parts of the story, it honestly gives me a few different vibes. From Summer Wars. To Digimon. To as I said earlier with Deca-dance. With how itall seems future like, and going into cyberspace. Very creative and interesting stuff. Even if it doesn't come off well in parts, but hey, the natural look is fun, exciting, and curious about it. With the mystery it holds from the get go.

As for the cast, there isn't really a lot to go around when it comes to them. Not that there isn't any of them to speak of, more that the focus has been more on few then many. Which isn't a bad thing, but more cause of such, there is only little to speak of. Berry is a gal who seems she just wants to have fun, and explore certain things, rather than feeling like she's trapped in this never ending cycle of school work, and studying. While someone like Hack is an all rounder. Fun, mischievous like. It's one thing this anime does well in my view. There are large parts where it knows to have fun, and that's what I love about it.

Yurei Deco is a weird and creative looking curious kind of anime, that may fill your niche. I'd give it a shot!

Style over substance is a phrase I’d never use to describe Yurei Deco. That’s not because I think it does or does not have either style or substance, but because it manages to have both, yet doesn’t know how to utilize them to their fullest capacity. It has all the tools to invent itself as a visually marvelous show with a creative critique on modern society. Given the artstyle, use of visuals, and worldbuilding, was Yurei Deco able to deliver on my expectations or did I set the bar too high?

Yurei Deco presents the viewer with a dystopian future that mirrors our current reality. That ... of which the sum of someone’s self and material worth is determined by the amount of “likes” or rather “love” they have. Love is used as a currency and without it, don’t expect life to be a cakewalk. The story follows a young girl named Berry who has the ability to see happenings and glitches that the normal population cannot due to their augmented reality visors/decos. It’s this ability that leads Berry down a rabbithole in uncovering the truth behind how the world got this way and what she can do to fix it, along with the help of some of the friends she makes along the way.

Without squandering your own viewing experience, the reason I kept tuning into this show week after week was for three reasons: the theme, hack, and the world building. More on the latter two later. For now, I want to focus on the messages the show presents throughout. Though an anime critiquing social media, fad culture, and an all seeing “Orwellian” government is nothing too out of the ordinary. I believe the way it’s handled in this show, along with the juxtaposition to its bright, neon, gradient fabricated visuals set atop a gloomy setting with pueblo-like architecture, is quite innovative. Though I wouldn’t necessarily say this is a show tailored towards a younger demographic, I do think the way the show tackles the various philosophies the way it does sets it apart from other series that deal with similar subject matter that have the leniency of being a show geared towards an older demographic and therefore being able to get its message across more bluntly. So seeing how this show managed to make the topic of dealing with reality head on without making it seem as grim and bleak as possible, was clever and fun to watch unfold.

However, in the last act of the show, the show drops the ball on the message in a way that retcons the “anti-all powerful government” message the show was obviously going for since the beginning by just transferring that same amount of “god” power to someone else who we’re supposed to believe is supposed to do the right thing. Now either this show changed its mind on its message at the very last second, or this show is the greatest subversive metacommentary masterpiece on how power is transferred in a government behind the curtains and how we just blindly accept it as the truth or as the right thing. Regardless, I’m likely giving it more thought than the writers were.

A less faulty aspect of this show were the visuals. As I mentioned earlier, we see these projections of a fabricated reality that’s appeal determined by the amount of “love” someone has. Despite this, the viewer can still see the reality faintly hidden behind the projections and I think this a good example of how the bright and gradient effect of heavy colors add to the show’s theme. Even with that aside, I found the visuals on their own pleasing. I’d hesitate in saying that it looks like a western cartoon, but it is visually distinct from its contemporaries. So much so that it was the visual style that initially grabbed my attention. An often overlooked aspect when discussing the visuals, are the 3D backgrounds that are heavily used in the hyperverse. In fact, just about every scene that takes place in the hyperverse takes full advantage of the show’s eccentric artstyle. From CG books, to the way the color palette is used, I always found these scenes to be a place where the show’s visuals truly lend themselves.

The last bit worth touching on is a component that excels and falls in a similar way to the show’s story/message/theme. What I’m referring to are the characters themselves. The interactions and banter between Berry and Hack was another aspect of this show that kept me coming back. I found their conversations and the situations they’d find themselves in to be fun and engaging. Their dialogue was usually silly, juvenile, and full of miscommunication, but that was the beauty of it. I suppose it felt natural and slightly more developed than that of the rest of the cast’s relationship with one another. That’s not to say the other characters are all terribly written, but I felt that the cast was too big for its own good. Despite their creative and cute designs, they don’t nearly get the same amount of development that the two main characters (plus their mentor, Finn) receive. In fact, I think the show would’ve greatly benefitted had it just followed Berry, Hack, and Finn to even better develop them and their relationships with each other so that the audience could grow more fond of them. Because I’m sure I speak for most when I say that none of the other characters felt necessary to the story, like at all, which only helps Finn’s “antifamily” argument in episode eight. Regardless, for the most part the characters felt very flat and underdeveloped. Had the show cut down on the cast, it would have benefitted from having a smaller, yet better cast the audience could actually empathize with. Interestingly enough, I found the Watson and Nue episodes to be my favorites despite them being heavily focused on side characters and being their own self-contained stories. But this is due to them showing off what the show does best, which is using its creative world building to critique ideals that are embedded in our world, rather than the way the characters are written.

Style over substance is a phrase I’d never use to describe Yurei Deco. That’s not because I think it does or does not have either style or substance, but because it manages to have both, yet doesn’t know how to utilize them to their fullest capacity. Given the artstyle, use of visuals, and worldbuilding, was Yurei Deco able to deliver on my expectations or did I set the bar too high? Though I enjoyed my time with this series, I felt that by the time we reached the halfway point, the show had narrowed the scope of its story, message, and character developments and in part so did I with my expectations. It doesn’t help that by the end of the series, the status quo is mostly left the same and the way it deals with the “antagonist” is almost comical. Though certain episodes reminded me that this show did have the ability necessary to do something truly groundbreaking, it largely restrains itself from unleashing its full creative capacity save for a few episodes and moments littered throughout. So sadly, I’d say I set the bar too high, though I’d also say it was still one of the better shows this season.

In the world of anime, the sky's the limit for creativity, for the ones that are created in its original structure with no source backing it up. But focusing on this season alone, while at most times with originals like the A-1 Pictures Saturday shows of Lycoris Recoil and Engage Kiss beckoning both form and function, together with style over substance (one good, one bad), where then should we draw the line between the two? And that my friends, is how Yurei Deco is constructed to be just that: a somewhat "style over substance" show that has a unique take on advanced technology.

Through the watchful ... eyes of director Tomohisa Shimoyama and creator-cum-scriptwriter Dai Sato that involves little to none of either Masaaki Yuasa nor Choi Eunyoung's planning stages, Yurei Deco tells the audience about a world so far-fetched into the future, where VR and AR a.k.a Virtual and Augmented Reality plays a huge part into ordinary people's lives. The gimmick about this Tom Sawyer Island (which I think it's ingenious incorporating the "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" novel for a fascinating story plot) is that everything is done transactionally, by that which I mean that "Love" is the currency, and they are able to exchange it via this "Deco" device which allows free reign over their personalized avatars, governed by a strict system to ensure its safe use. But just like any well-oiled system, nothing is perfect, and the people that fall outside of this specification are labelled as "Yurei", people-defect within the cracks of a well-governed system. And to make matters worse, the Trojan Horse comes in the form of Phantom Zero, which robs people of their Love, allowing it to garner to a status of a game called the "Phantom Zero Nation" to lure normal, typical citizens into a wild goose chase of getting their own money stolen.

Yurei Deco's focus stems on Berry, whom has a glitch in the Deco accessory installed in her right eye, and she's able to see things that normal citizens can't, which makes her more of an anomaly within her social settings. And that same anomaly is how she met Hack, a fuzzy-looking gargle-looking kid who is able to hack and traverse the Hyperverse looking for the next prank to bait. With Phantom Zero's appearance, things go heinously wrong for the duo, and with the team of rag-tag unusuals, this is the expedition of the Yurei Detective Club and their quest to subdue Phantom Zero and save the Tom Sawyer Island from further disintegration.

For a start, Yurei Deco inches in on its fantasy and mystery elements well just like another Science SARU show (that's "Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!"), and though the tingling bears on my tongue to say that this show is not for everyone, it certainly was that to take a grain of salt to believe that anime could be anything the creators desired it to be. And that message certainly wasn't an afterthought, for it purposefully takes its time building up notes to create a cohesive story plot, even when it feels like watching episodes that are partial disconnects to the wonky direction of where the plot was going at times. But if there's one bad thing to point out of the entirety of this original anime, is that it can feel like it's a "style over substance" show that's a nod to Science SARU's unique visuals.

And for a story to connect, it must have compelling characters to boot, and most certainly each of them has SWOTs in their own regard. The Chinese-looking Finn as the head of the Yurei Detective Club is smart and intelligent, but while his words are few and concise, he often works like a lonewolf, putting his trust on himself alone and looking at the others like they are tools for his greater purpose. The African afro-looking Hank is there just for show, though he keeps the Detective Club together as his motive. Smiley and Madam 44 aren't just members guiding Finn, Berry and Hack along, but they're family too that occasionally helps in times of trouble. And last but not least, there's Mr. Watson, though peculiarly dressed in a suit and donning a large cat mask that is a being of few words, that is unless he needs to talk through his notepad. A few fair chances of charismatic characters like Finn, Berry and Hack which allows for more of the childlikeness to come about, though it can feel flat at times. But aside from Hack being the most animated out of everyone who's unafraid of showing his likes and dislikes, a rag-tag team of misfits with an aim to expose the greatest danger that threatens theirs and everybody's home, it's a Tom Sawyer adventure that's worth the ride, both in and out of the Hyperverse.

It's not surprising that for Masaaki Yuasa's own studio that is Science SARU, anime tends to go ham and wild, because it's a very distinct style that you would not find anywhere else. It feels animated and surreal of a world being guided by both VR and AR, so much so that it feels like a peak into the near "future of the past" like richness that can be made a reality. Yurei Deco definitely portrays itself as like Western-made cartoons, shows made to appeal to the younger audience, that it goes underappreciated at times. What can I tell you, it's Science SARU, so expect the unexpected and let the world just vibrate in all of its glow and wonder, which the show did good on that promise.

The OST could've been better for Yurei Deco being a very imaginative, whimsical, yet down-to-earth, fantasy-like show. You don't always feel the effect of background music a.k.a BGM in many shows, but some take it to a more prudent level of priorities, and unfortunately in this case is where the anime suffers from retaining its uniqueness. While the ED that's a duo collab between Hack'nBerry's VAs are just decent, it's Clammbon's OP that really shouts creativity in the most psychedelic way (aside from sounding good) of engagement, popping out at where it matters most. It's unironically one of the better OPs of the season in my humble opinion, and I would gladly stand by it.

All in all, Yurei Deco could've been a standout show with the likes of Science SARU's influence, but it's the storytelling that really matters, and this is kinda of a mixed bag between decent to good in spots. It definitely feels like a Dai Sato conceptualized anime that's just as bonkers coming from someone that's a creative madman, but here's some advice: Being complicated and being complex, doesn't mean the same thing.

Recommended or not, just give this a try and see whether it does for you.