Deca-Dence key visual The kinda blobby mascot dog of Deca-Dence

Deca-Dence: Really needed an editorial round

Deca-dence is a regrettably-named, generic-ass post-apocalypse story about a mostly-extinct humanity trawling about a ravaged desert earth in their colossal mobile fortress.

There are only about a thousand humans left,

They’re attacked daily by subterranean monsters

And defended by sorta-magic-warriors

Our protagonist wants to be a warrior pretty bad, but can’t because she has a prosthetic arm

I sure wonder if she’ll somehow end up becoming a warrior by the end of the show.

But the twist is that the entire thing is a competitive MMO for higher-planar beings

Control chips are installed in every human at birth

The monsters are made in a factory and released at specific times for “events”

The Highdwellers remotely pilot humans for their entertainment

Human law enforcement is directly controlled by the Highdwellers to ensure that everyone keeps the giant fortress in working order

And despite that cool twist it’s still kinda lame

Really just…needed an editor.

If you’re going to have a generic-ass anime setting be your setting (as a deliberate design choice because the real setting is a larger universe which contains that setting) then you ought to reveal that in episode one

I abandoned this anime because its first episode was so generic, and I only came back for a second look upon reading the wikipedia

And even so, there’s just a bunch of design choices that are…regrettable.

The mega-trawler, which contains the entire bastion of humanity, sometimes fires up its reactor core in order to rocket-launch a giant fist and sock the monster in the face.

The Highdwellers, when they’re in their natural, digital universe, recharge themselves with some kind of green fuel rods. There’s a very dramatic moment in which our secondary protagonist, an assassin working for the Game Corp, has decided to commit suicide by starvation, by not eating fuel rods. However, upon interacting with our primary protagonist, he decides he wants to live again, so he shoves a fuel rod in his ass and charges up.

  1. Why did someone decide that these creatures would have little butthole charging ports
  2. And why did someone greenlight this dramatic Not Suicide moment being so highly anal

The mascot character is an ugly mutant dog—but it’s not so hideous that it’s a thing, y’know? Made In Abyss had a really grotesque character that kinda hurt to look at, but that was the point. This is just a…kinda blobby dog. (Pictured above, for reference.)