In the grim future of 1999... When civilization collapsed, the Net went offline while most people were still plugged in, and the minds of these many millions were trapped. These lost souls are scattered across this fallen world, encoded onto harddrives now called Nodes. All that remains of humanity are the Otaku, who are desperate scavengers that worship technology, and the Samurai, who are wasteland warriors that serve their masters with savage devotion. A psychotic warlord known as Demagogue has ordered his android Shinigami enforcer and his loyal samurai to claim the Nodes, and is building a network hellscape over which he rules as a digital god. In the face of this oppression Otaku prophets preach about a ghost in the machine, a spirit of hope and resistance, the Kami of Wires. The Otaku hide. The Samurai hunt. The Spirit rises.
—Sean-Michael Argo