I will start my review with what is in my opinion the main theme in this series. You have to pursue reality at all cost even if it is sometime quite harsh. The majority of the cast fall into the illusion of that virtual reality depicted in this series. I will go into more details later on.
The story is all about growing up from your childhood and being confronted with reality for the majority of the cast. It tells the story of a young girl and her young sister that arrive in a new city where augmented reality is completely established. In fact, augmented reality is all around town and is making a complete network trough everything. The glasses that connect your brain to the network make possible for you to see the different things that exist only in the virtual side of the city. Things like virtual animal, hacking, false walls or even invisible walls are completely common.
The first part of the anime will only present the different aspect of the city and will give the initial basic background of the different character and their interactions. It will slowly build upon these interactions to something much more interesting and deep than what you may think with the four or five first episodes.
The second part will be about the different difficult pasts of the entire cast and their pursuit of different illusions they have. This part of the show even goes through some terrifying moments for a general quite dramatic atmosphere. Telling more than that would be spoiler.
The art and visual effect inside this anime are remarkable, the virtual side of the city really comes to life and you can easily understand why the children start to believe that these virtual things are as real as the normal world. There's a brilliant use of distortions when some of the virtual things are bugs created by a low maintenance rate. These distortions are also absent when the object has been updated properly. That means you can easily identify a threat to the safety of the children when you see the distorted objects because these objects are borderline always quite dangerous. That is also why some parts of this series are spooky.
The different actors are quite good and credible for making you believe that there are indeed children in the show while there's actually none. The sound effects are always effective and the soundtrack is always in line with what goes on screen. Even the lyrics in the opening section of the show are actually so valid that they are a small spoiler by themselves.
The character all have quite a steep learning curve about accepting their past and present. In the lapse of half a year, they started as people that only wants to escape reality to people that have come full circle with themselves and their past. Traumatic accident and different secrets regarding the new technology present in the city truly make them the only people that can and actually want to find the truth about what has happened in the last years.
All characters go through much development in the course of the show, but five characters go through a lot more than the others. Daichi and his rival seem like a total imbecile, but will be way more than it seems for about half the show. Yasako will, of course, being the main character, have a lot of development, actually way more than one may think. Isako seems selfish, but is actually quite caring. Haraken seem to be quite the normal boy, but knows certain things that will make a lot happening by the end of the show. These three all pursue illusion in the form of memories of a dead someone that have been imprinted inside the network.
They will of course have to accept these death has been reality instead of relying on that false memory imprint.
My personal enjoyments toward this show comes from the fact that I never think how far the subject of augmented reality could go before watching this series. I learned a lot about how this could be real later on. I also like the mature themes present in that story and I actually liked the fact that the series pretty much put a big middle finger to all those that were thinking that this show will be gentle and relax all the way through.
In conclusion, I recommend this flick for fans of sci-fi and fantasy and also to fans of serious story that have a lot to tell.
