Fumie helps Yasako
A new science-fiction anime from NHK, broadcast on the NHK Educational channel. Judging from the characters it is meant for Japanese elementary schoolers rather than otaku, but it throws in some quite grown-up concepts in the first episode. It’s tough to take it all in, in just one viewing, but the young heroine Yuko Okonogi, nicknamed ‘Yasako’ has moved to the fictional city of Daikoku, a centre of Augmented Reality development with an emerging city-wide virtual infrastructure. The virtual world is superimposed on reality with a pair of viewers looking like ordinary spectacles.
The story follows a group of children as they use their AR visors to unravel the mysteries of the half real, half Internet city, using a variety of illegal software tools, techniques, and virtual pets to manipulate the digital landscape. If you watch closely, there is a scene where the younger sister (looking a bit like Mei in “Tototoâ€) drops her bag on their cyber-pet, and instead of squashing the dog, the bag just goes through it. And it seems something is going a bit wrong with the infrastructure, for there are rogue things roaming about, and holes where cyber-pets vanish.
Yuko’s cyber-pet disappears, and in the process of getting it back she encounters Fumie Hashimoto, a member of the Denno Coil Investigation Agency, and also the powerful “encoder” Yuko Amasawa, nicknamed ‘Isako’. At school Yuko (Yasako) encounters Daichi, the brattish leader of the Daikoku Hackers’ Club, and on the second day Isako turns up as a transfer student. Daichi challenges Isako to a denno duel, rather unwisely as it turns out, as his group end up getting beaten and using up all their cyber-credits.
Production values are high, as one expects with NHK, and no doubt this will be very popular.