The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

16bit Sensation: Another Layer

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Sent to the year 1992, this game illustrator will be ahead of the nerd curve when she joins a game company!

16bit Sensation: Another Layer is based on the 16bit Sensation: Watashi to Minna ga Tsukutta Bishōjo Game manga by Misato Mitsumi, Tamiki Wakaki, and Tatsuki Amazuyu. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

Over the years, I've probably played more visual novels than most people—including some of the ones we see in this episode—so on that level, this episode was an enjoyable ride. It's clear that Konoha loves the visual novel genre and feels that the story she wants to tell can only be told properly through that medium. Moreover, on a personal level, she's completely relatable. I've known many people (especially here in Japan) that want to quit their dead-end job and pursue their dream but know they don't have the guts to go for it.

And now, Konoha has basically become a 90s visual novel heroine—a seemingly normal girl with a supernatural secret (i.e., time travel). I mean, she even literally collided with (who I assume to be) the main protagonist while running down the street. It can't get much more cliché than that. But while Konoha traveling into the past is the story of the episode, that's not what it's really about. Instead, this episode is really just an exercise in nostalgia.

Gaming nostalgia is an interesting thing. Look back to the past, remember all the great games you played and the fun you had. Now, games are different. Nothing seems to live up to those classics and time has moved on. But, of course, here's the thing. While 16bit Sensation: Another Layer banks hard on how great the past was, the games we remember and revere are the exceptions—the best of the best. Even back in the magic year of 1992, for every good game produced there were 100 utter garbage games better left forgotten.

More specifically, the fact of the matter is that there are tons of terrible visual novels out there—and even in the early days of computer games, there were titles just as blatant as “MILF Hypnosis Salon,” it's just that few now remember them. The thing is that, compared to many other types of games, visual novels were easy to make. You didn't need a large team or millions of dollars. You just needed a writer, an artist, and a programmer. For many of the ones remembered fondly to this day, the team would go all out with creating a memorable story—and then throw in some porn to draw in the horny otaku. This is true not only of Kanon but massive continuing hits like Fate/stay night.

So, all in all, I look forward to seeing Konoha deal with the difference between her nostalgia and reality—and how she changes and grows from the experience. From the trailers, I can see she begins working with the characters we are introduced to in the final scene. I almost hope they are working on a game just as pandering and low-effort as “MILF Hypnosis Salon.” What a rude awakening that would be.

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James Beckett
Rating:

I'm honestly of two minds on 16bit Sensation: Another Layer. On the one hand, the protagonist of this time-travel, sexy-game nostalgia adventure, Konoha, is a lot. Her single-minded obsession with sexy dating games is a little exhausting just in and of itself, but when you add that on top of her incredibly loud voice and mannerisms, and you get a main character who is likeable enough on paper, but could very easily become insufferable when you're exposed to her for too long of a time. Also, I harbor a personal grudge against 16bit Sensation for portraying the year of my birth as a fundamentally alien (yet idyllic) long-ago time of ancient technology and classier porn. All of this may well be true, but I refuse to acknowledge the encroaching specter of age out of pure, cussed spite, and so I scoff at any of these here modern cartoons that try to tell me that the new millennium didn't only just get started, like, a few years ago, tops.

Then again, Konoha also spends her free time growling at posters for gacha games like she was a mean little Chihuahua standing guard at her master's heels, which is a feeling I can personally relate to very much. Also, the crappy game that her modern-day employer is called “MILF Hypnosis Salon”, which is a joke so stupid and funny that I nearly shot my carne asada dinner out of my nose as I watched this episode. Point being, despite my initial aversions to the main character and general concept of 16bit Sensation, it won me over enough with its earnestly relatable writing too at least see the potential in the project.

The main question, now, is whether or not the story will manage to make much of its wistful time travel premise now that Konoha has been whisked back to the actually-very-recent-so-I-don't-know-what-the-big-deal-is year of 1992. Aside from the grumpy programmer boy who looks like he'll end up being our deuteragonist, the crew of designers working on the old-school dating game only just barely get introduced before Konoha comes literally crashing into their lives, so it's hard to say if they will be lively and likeable enough to carry the show alongside their leading lady. I hope it all works out, though! If 16bit Sensation can prove itself to be worthwhile in the coming weeks, it could end up being one of the surprise successes of the season.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Nothing makes me feel as old as 90s nostalgia, and this is the second series I've encountered in the last month. But where the title covered in the Manga Preview Guide traded in nostalgia for the entire 1990s otaku landscape and what it meant to be an otaku at the time, this one is about nostalgia for one particular area of otakudom: bishoujo games. Our heroine is employed as a game illustrator in 2023, but she yearns for the days when big-budget bishoujo games dominated the field. She yearns for it so much, in fact, that she somehow manages to go back in time to the manga series this is spun off from, and I admit that I'm curious to see how she's going to navigate the world of 1992 when I suspect she wasn't even born.

As a hook, that's not a bad one, especially since I'm not terribly invested in her dreams of bishoujo game greatness – it's never been my preference in games. Time travel stories have a very specific set of issues to navigate, to say nothing of whether or not the traveler will eventually return to their present day. Is she going back to a time period that suits her better? Or is she there to learn the skills to recreate the heyday of bishoujo games in 2023? Either could work, but in this episode, the story is much more invested in indulging in name-dropping series and attempting to play on viewers' nostalgia with close-ups of classic game boxes and the dream of finding a first edition of Kanon with all its original goodies for 100 yen. My biggest concern is that the show will revolve more around nostalgia than a plot.

This episode is still pretty enjoyable, though. It does a solid job of setting things up, and I loved the game proposal for a game that's more convoluted than a nine-year-old telling you about their dream. And the nostalgia factor allows it to get away with things like the meet-cute at the end, which we can write off as indulging in an old trope rather than a lack of creativity. This is good enough to merit the old three-episode test.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

This was a premiere where I wasn't sure what to expect. Rather than a direct adaptation of the source material, this seems to be a kind of sequel/sidequel/companion piece – introducing a new main character who time travels from the present day to 1992 to join the cast of the manga. It's an odd choice but one with its own merits, and while I'm still not entirely sure where this is going, I'm interested in finding out.

I'll admit, it was a little hard to focus on the actual story of this premiere since the part of my brain that recognizes other anime/game crap I've seen before kept pinging every ten seconds. Konoha is a true otaku, and this being an Aniplex production allows the show to reference tons of real-life anime to demonstrate that. Our heroine's apartment is smothered with real-life anime merch, from Madoka Magica to Saekano to Lycoris Recoil, and that's to say nothing of the nostalgia buzz I got when it started showing real bishojo games from the turn of the century. It can be a sensory overload, especially if you were around when Key visual novels were in vogue, but that serves a good purpose. Between her spending habits, fretting over her illustrations' rankings on pixiv, and the way she can go on for hours about her hyperfixations, Konoha feels like a pretty authentic modern nerd. Making most of her interests be actual anime the audience has also seen makes her much easier to relate to. It also makes it much more jarring when she's hurled back 30 years and finds herself surrounded by a different media atmosphere.

It reminds me quite a bit of Anime-Gataris, another show that sought to capture the appeal of modern anime fandom by being as contemporary as possible, with an added supernatural twist. Like that show, I hope Another Layer can also build a more robust identity beyond its references. There's undoubtedly good material for it to explore, like the differences in game and art creation across three decades or the changes within the industry that evolved from enthusiasts programming porn on a 9801 to disillusioned artists pumping out much staler porn that goes straight to the bargain bin. The fact that the show is unabashed about the sexual aspect of these games is also pretty refreshing, and having Konoha as the protagonist offers some interesting opportunities. Plenty of prominent women in the industry made their name by drawing sexy anime girls, and it'd be cool to see that perspective explored rather than defaulting to the stereotypical horny male otaku.

Those are all potential possibilities, though, and it's hard to say where exactly the show will go from here. We only get a short introduction to the rest of the cast before the episode ends, so it's anyone's guess what their overall dynamic will be. Presumably, Konoha will end up working with them, but how anything else will work out is a mystery. Still, this episode was unique and charming enough to hook me, so I'll gladly stay up to play one more chapter.