Hey, It’s (once again) been a little bit since I’ve gotten something past the initial drafting phase and posted it here.
If you’re reading around its posted date, I hope you had a calm and enjoyable start to the year, however you may have spent it. I went back to school at the beginning of last month. It’s been good, but my workload for the semester has been surprisingly light, so I wanted to get to writing about something that’s been stewing in my head since I finished it.
Over my winter break, I got around to finishing an anime I had been watching weekly last season, 16-bit Sensation: Another Layer. It wasn’t anywhere near the greatest anime I’ve ever watched. Its animation obviously lacked the budget other things airing at the time had, and its story wasn’t the most ambitious, but to my surprise, bits and pieces of it continued to stick their way into my brain during the weeks it aired, and of the things I was actively doing at the time, tuning in every week to see the plot develop was one of the things I looked forward to most.
To give a little context as to what the show is, it’s an anime-original story, branching from a web manga (with the same title, minus the subtitle) written and drawn by the same guy behind The World Only God Knows (which I haven’t seen myself).
It follows around this girl named Konoha, an eccentric 19-year-old artist working for a game company in current-day Akihabara. She loves cute girls and fun games, dreaming of having her art appear on the shelves of her local game stores and in her massive collection at home, but wastes away her days working on MILF hypnosis games (I’m not joking lol).
From the start, the show references many beloved eroge and bishojo games. It’s obvious the people behind the show know their stuff about the history of the industry because it flexes hard that it has the street cred for it. See the pics below, all from the first episode.
The whole hook of the show comes a bit later in the episode, when Konoha opens one of the game cases in a little cafe, and it transports her back in time to 90s Akiba, before it was invaded by cute anime girls.
By the second episode, Konoha finds residence (quite literally, she sleeps on the floor) in the small game company, Alcohol Soft, which is currently taking up the space that would come to be used by the company she works for in her current-day timeline. Alcohol Soft, a small group of devs, made up of a couple artists, a scenario writer, a programmer, and a manager, are all in the process of making a game.
Light shenanigans happen, and Konoha eventually finds herself hired to work with the team as an artist. Konoha, the underappreciated modern-day prodigy that she is, finds herself effectively lost in working the PC-98 she’s found herself employed with.
What I really love about seeing her shock towards the methods of the time is how often it’s used to show how dedicated many of the workers from back then were to their craft. You’re telling me they drew all of those cute, pixellated, surprisingly detailed CGs with only 16 colors and a mouse?
They regularly go into a lot of the small details you’d only really know about if you were directly in the industry back then. At certain points, it almost feels like a historical documentary as it shows all these clever, primitive tricks that devs (and especially artists) used to use when making the games we all came to love.
Methods such as adjusting the darkness and scanning the original hand-drawn line art in grayscale. This made it stand out more when transferred over to the PC-98 paint software. Once on the software itself, it was then converted to black and white, and the artist would manually redraw the entire picture using a mouse.
That’s just one example, and the anime honestly explains it a lot better than I could. As the show advances in its time period, it covers a lot more ground than just the simple PC-98 days. Over the course of the first half of the show, Alcohol Soft attends their first Comiket, switches entirely to Windows, expands their workspace and workforce, considers making a console port, etc.
It’s quite endearing to watch the small group grow into somewhat of a groove as they establish themselves in their niche, but still growing industry. It also helps that their personalities and dynamics are super charming.
I felt that all of the honest characterization going into the niche little world of bishojo culminated into one very unique episode around a third of the way through.
Episode 8
Episode 8, “Echo,” was a bit of a jarring experience at first. The general discourse around the episode was also noticeably more negative, with people questioning its purpose, etc.
It’s a fair reaction, as the episode is a bit more of a side story from the main plotline the show had been following. Konoha doesn’t ever appear, and instead, the focus is put onto Alcohol Soft’s resident programmer, Mamoru, who had just time-traveled to an undisclosed timeline at the end of the previous episode 7.
As Mamoru wakes up, he is told by one of two “Echos” that he’s found himself in the year 1985, which he definitely finds to be the case. Where else would you find cute girls walking around looking like the pic below?
The “Echos” are a bit of a weird thing the show introduces, being a couple aliens that very much look human. They currently reside in the building that’d later become home to Alcohol Soft and request Mamoru’s help in making games.
Echo 1 (whose design reminds me of the characters fujoshis seem to eat up), has a bit of a knack for making games. He produces them at insane speeds, but the whole point of him requesting Mamoru’s help rests on one thing. Echo 1 has a little machine where he can effectively test the games he drops into it for the “energy” they hold.
Long story short, the games he makes are completely devoid of any energy, and he can’t seem to figure out why, as he comes “from a place where imagination doesn’t exist.” To try and match the games he admires, he follows the methods like a science. He does “correct” calculations and creates “objectively” good art, but when it comes down to it, the games he makes don’t have any of the energy he expects them to.
Echo 1 is creating these games in an attempt to learn about this thing called imagination, which seems to create so much of this energy.
It’s pretty obvious that “energy” is a metaphor for the “soul” behind a game. To put it into perspective, if Echo 1 tested the latest Call of Duty game with its massive corporate backing side-by-side in his machine with something like Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, the latter would probably have loads more energy inside of it due to how much of Team Reptile’s personalities went into the game as described by the director himself.
As Mamoru helps Echo 1 with his game and they chatter about small happenings, it becomes clear the Echos are devoid of emotion in general. Mamoru greatly struggles to teach the Echos imagination because they don’t experience any worries, they don’t feel happiness, they don’t feel anything. What they probably see imagination as is just a means to an end. They see it as something simply there to create the end product.
But as things develop and Mamoru continues to help them out, it becomes obvious he is trying to teach the Echos about everything that comes before that end product. The games Echo 1 was making had no cover art, no development struggles, no writer’s blocks forcing him to sit back and really think about what he was putting on the screen. Again, this is all just a science to Echo 1.
From being around a real, imaginative human, Echo 1 starts to realize some of the gaps in his behaviors and mindset. As he watches Mamoru run out of the room, who is a bit flustered by Echo 1’s lack of worry for the missing Echo 2, you can tell Echo 1 is starting to question his methods.
The episode also builds up a small dynamic between Mamoru and the small Echo 2, who dresses in cute costumes for Mamoru to rate on a 0-100 scale. Anytime Echo 2 asks Mamoru for a rating, he in a very half-assed way throws up a random number, one that seems to go up every consecutive time he’s asked.
Echo 2 comes to look forward to this every time, building up a bit of a routine in anticipating him increasing the rating. When Mamoru finds Echo 2 after her disappearance (which turned out to just be her going on an extended walk), he tells her he was worried about her.
Echo 2 doesn’t know what being worried means, and Mamoru doesn’t really explain it to her. He instead somewhat offhandedly suggests she should come back to the office.
As Mamoru walks off, Echo 2 gets a glimmer in her eye. She’s an integral part of the office environment that Mamoru comes to expect. When she isn’t there, Mamoru still thinks of her presence. It’s the first hint of her seeing a bit of that imagination she and Echo 1 have been pursuing.
Upon her return to the office, she presents a duplicate costume in hopes of getting a high rating. Mamoru sighs and gives her a rating of zero points. She’s shocked by this, and her expectations are diverted, but it’s through this shock that she has a eureka moment. She realizes she was experiencing imagination all along.
She already pictured Mamoru giving her a high rating, and through her excitement, tried to make it happen. Her looking forward to Mamoru’s ratings and building up the expectations of them growing higher was all just her picturing a fulfilling future.
The difficulty of her realization is that imagination isn’t something you can perfectly describe, calculate, or replicate to a T. It’s simply, but also convolutedly something you just feel.
In the final stretch of the episode, the Echos (1 and 2, merged into one person now) are on a roof with Mamoru, looking out at 1980s Akihabara. Prior to the boom of the game industry across the world, he can sense the energy of the place. He can tell that everyone is excited for the future and what is to come, and that is a large part of imagination, as the episode (and episodes prior) has built up.
Echo describes the imaginations of humans as what sets them apart. It’s through us creating the fantastical worlds of fiction that we do, imagining things that don’t yet exist, that we push ourselves to become better. Through our imaginations, dreams, and fantasies, we are subconsciously creating the things we desire, whether they are physically possible or not. In that way, we are manifesting the things we want out of our future, and the things we want to do with our lives.
By this point, the Echos have accomplished their mission. They understand imagination, and how it sets humans apart, and with that, send Mamoru back to his timeline with a trippy yet beautifully animated sequence.
I remember the first time I watched the sequence, it made me oddly emotional. I had to sit there for a minute letting the entire episode simmer in my brain because of how dense and indirect it felt.
I also spent a lot of time during the writing of this post struggling to think how I could write about the whole final stretch of the episode in a way that made sense but also didn’t come across as boring. The final couple of minutes are so well done that I really didn’t think it was quite possible to replicate purely in text. If it worked out, only one of y’all could say for sure. I’m not really an unbiased source here.
With the maybe month or so of various writer’s blocks I hit, in an ironic sort of way, my struggle reflects a bit of the thesis behind the episode itself. I had this little anime I watched and a specific episode that I thought really stood out. I wanted to talk about it. It’s kind of the reason I do any of this, really. I just love sharing things I find special with people that care enough to listen. I want to share the things that have an impact on me in hopes they leave even a fraction of that impact on anyone else.
The Rest
Following episode 8, maybe give or take an episode or two in-between, 16-Bit Sensation: Another Layer takes a bit of a turn toward a more serious story. It may come across as a Steins;Gate ripoff to some. I’d somewhat agree, to say the least (lol). It goes from the small, charming 90s setting to a dystopian, cyberpunk future.
It’s kind of jarring and I disliked where it took its story in the end. It wasn’t really a “bad” ending, it was more one that made me think, “Well, cool I guess.” Even if it still held a little bit of a strong, meaningful message toward the appeal niche art has against mainstream, sterilized, mass-produced art, it lost a good bit of the initial appeal I felt from the charming character dynamics (Konoha and Mamoru were the only characters still present for most of it) and its story focused around the joy of game development.
But I’m not here to critique where the story went. That’s not why I wanted to write this. Besides my complaints, I still did get a lot of enjoyment from the anime as a whole. It was a very fun little watch.
I recommend anyone with any sort of connection to classic eroge and bishojo games to check it out. I’m only really connected from being a huge fan of Key’s anime, and even I still got a lot out of it. I felt like I learned a good bit about some early influences of anime culture in Japan, and all presented through the lens of a small group of devs making porn games. Again, highly recommended.
Hope this little post finds you well. If not, then I hope tomorrow’s a little better. Thanks for reading.
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