So I just recently read through the finally fully-translated manwha Yureka. It was weird to see that it actually got compeleted— I had assumed a decade ago that it was canceled or in eternal hiatus hell. Hard to believe that it’s been over twenty years since it was first published… I remember furtively reading it on the computers at my school library, hidden in the corner.
Honestly, it was a better read than I was expecting? You know how it is with childhood stories, you go back to them and discover that they were a lot worse than your little kid brain remembered. Which is not to say that it didn’t have flaws— a lot of the translation work, especially early on, does not exactly reflect the kind of quality that we tend to see these days, and goodness knows that there are plenty of tropes that would now be considered cringe or cliche. But it’s nothing unforgivable.
And more than that, I was really surprised by just how… adult the story was. Rather than a VRMMO LitRPG story (which is so much more common these days and is what I half-remembered it being), it’s more like a cyberpunk/sci-fi story that happens to use a VRMMO setting as its main stage. It sincerely attempts to tackle questions about the personhood and rights of Artificial Intelligences and the dangers of the Net. Undeniably there were many flaws in that attempt (not least of which was a rather rushed-feeling ending), but it was heartfelt and earnest and tied with an interesting plot, and I was impressed.
What a pleasant surprise, to have come back to a thing after so long and still find it good.
