Yurei Deco is a funny sort of show in many ways.  It’s certainly not cookie-cutter anime by 2022 standards – you won’t see a lot that looks or acts like it does.  Yet, oddly, it does feel sort of generic where Science SARU is concerned.  This is certainly a studio with a signature style, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  But in much the same way some P.A. Works series play like someone trying to make what most people’s idea of a P.A. Works anime is, Yurei Deco comes off as an attempt to execute a certain creative profile.  That can work, but it can also seem very calculated.

The challenge with Science SARU often comes down to whether they can capture the magic without the direct involvement of Yuasa Masaaki (or even Eunyoung Choi, his former disciple and successor as president of the studio).  Yurei Deco does have Satou Dai (Eureka Seven) as its creator and main writer, and his bona fides certainly speak for themselves.  But he hasn’t done much of note in the last decade, so to an extent the burden of proof is on him.

Things start promisingly enough – starting with Miyu Irino is always promising – as we get a narrated origin story about a sleepless giant who ends up as the “eyes” on the peacock’s tail feathers.  Just how that story connects to the main plot isn’t yet clear, but there’s a lot we could say that about so far.  This is a world where the currency is “love”, which seems to be a sort of karma/internet reputation thing.  Called “Tom Sawyer” it’s largely a virtual world, with kids attending school in avatar form and hyperspace bubbles everywhere playing with perceptions of reality.

Berry, the main character, is a bratty girl of 14 or so who’s obsessed with finding “Phantom Zero”, a legendary underground figure whose capture would bring a huge inpouring of love.  She crosses paths with Hack, who tricks people our of their love savings and constantly speaks in a singsong manner which gets a bit annoying pretty quickly.  Berry initially thinks Hack is Phantom Zero but quickly realizes that isn’t the case – Hack certainly knows about him, however.  There are some others who are going to be part of the circle (including a character played by Irino) but for now the focus is pretty much on those two.

This is pretty much the Science SARU template at this point – cute girls who never shut up, futuristic surrealism, lots of insistent techno BGM.  It works fine for what it is – there are a lot of obvious nods to the era in anime when Satou was in his prime (Hack especially seems ripped straight from 1999), and Yurei Deco seems quite overtly trying to create that vibe.  It has the feel of a show I’ve seen before even though I haven’t, and that’s a syndrome with both positive and negative facets to it.

For all that it has a by the numbers quality to it, Yurei Deco is sort of interesting.  The look may be signature SARU but that’s not a look you get from anybody else, and the manic energy of the piece does have a certain pull to it.  The plot is pretty much a jumble at this point but I’m curious enough to see what it all means and how it fits together.  I sense that it’s the sort of series that needs the touch of genius on it to make it really work, and I’m not sure that’s in the cards, but I’d hate to miss out just in case.