History Anime / SixteenBitSensationAnotherLayer

** [[spoiler:Heavily implied to be the result of Alcohol Soft's magnum opus. While they enjoyed success with Konoha essentially bringing a 2010s experience to the 1990s, no one could replicate that--and thus, nobody could compete. Otaku culture as it's now understood (moe, anime, and manga dominated) never had a chance to flourish. This is averted when Konoha and Mamoru make a second game and bring it back to the 90s, as now the rest of Japan is convinced they can make something like it. As a result, the 2023 Konoha comes back to is much more advanced.]]

* MergedReality: [[spoiler:By the finale, both main timelines have been combined into one. Akihabara remains as the nerdy capital of Japan and Konoha is the exact same, but Alcohol Soft still made Konoha's game and left for America. Essentially, the whole group gets what they want, with zero drawbacks.]]

* OtakuSurrogate: Zigzagged with Konoha, who's a huge fan of bishoujo games. Despite how said games are typically aimed at men, the fact that she wants to be an illustrator for those games is TruthInTelevision; plenty of bishoujo games have had female illustrators and character designers, including those by Creator/KeyVisualArts.

* RetGone: [[spoiler:Each time Konoha returns from the past, she notices that some of her games have disappeared, and that she can't remember what they were. This causes her enough concern that she genuinely considers not going back for a third visit, and when she does, she initially goes out of her way to interact with Alcohol Soft as little as possible for fear of doing anything that might erase any further games.]]

** By 1996, the rest of Alcohol Soft are ready to jump ship from Platform/PC98 to Windows 95, but Mamoru is so attached to the PC-98 that he refuses to do so. After an entire episode's worth of persuasion, and coming to terms with the PC-98's impending obsolescence, Mamoru eventually agrees to a compromise: release the game on ''both'' platforms.
** [[spoiler:Konoha can't stand to live in the soulless Akihabara she accidentally helped create, but she can't stand to undo ''The Last Waltz'' and the massive success it brought everyone else in Akihabara, either. She and Mamoru decide to create a third timeline merging the best of both: Alcohol Soft remain successful enough to move to America, but a rival visual novel ensures Akihabara remains the focal point of otaku culture. It works like a charm.]]

** Played with. From Konoha's perspective, [[spoiler:her creation of ''The Last Waltz'' led to a BadFuture where Akihabara is a soulless residential district and {{Moe}} (now called "cuu") is in the hands of the Americans, and game development is now largely AI-generated]]. However, everyone else at Alcohol Soft has had their lives improved in every measurable way by it, and Konoha can't stand to rip that away from them by setting things right. Mamoru has to point her in the direction of [[TakeAThirdOption a third option]].

* FreezeFrameBonus: When Konoha wakes up back in 2023 in the final episode, you can see a billboard advertising a "PC98ZX", claiming it to be "the standard". Looks like Mamoru finally got his wish after all.

* TimeTravelRomance: Teased between Konoha and Mamoru. Through her time leaping, she first meets Mamoru as a younger teenager and ends up bonding with him at several points in his life, until she discovers him as an older man in his forties in the present day. [[spoiler:They give each other affectionate glances after they've reunited in the last episode.]]

* BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor: [[spoiler:While Konoha finally got to make her dream bishoujo game and helped Alcoholsoft rise out of their debt, she returns to her home time to find that their game kickstarted a gaming revolution early...in the United States. Akihabara itself remained a business district instead of the otaku hub of Japan it's normally known as, while the rest of Alcoholsoft moved onto America to continue gaming development. And more importantly for Mamoru, the PC-98 is deader than ever, with no one but him showing any interest in the computer.]]

* HowDoIShotWeb: Konoha has no idea how she ended up in 1992, and after arriving back in 2023, she sets about retracing her steps to try and figure out how it could have happened, eventually realizing that it was the video games she was given. The third time around, she's able to not only do it on purpose, but also control what year she'll end up in.

* IWillWaitForYou: [[spoiler:Mamoru in the final timeline owns Alcoholsoft, but after the original team dissolved and left for America Mamoru maintained it for years in anticipation for Konoha to join up again.]]

* MergedReality: [[spoiler:By the finale, both main timelines have been combined into one. Akihabara remains as the nerdy capital of Japan and Konoha is the exact same, but Alcoholsoft still made Konoha's game and left for America. Essentially, the whole group gets what they want, with zero drawbacks.]]

** This goes double for Mamoru. [[spoiler:The future Konoha came back to only happened because he told everyone that Konoha had ''gone'' to America shortly after her disappearance, and the Alcoholsoft members decided to follow suit to find her again. This wasn't merely the result of them wanting to expand their horizons--this was because Konoha's so beloved and important to them that they wanted her there with them.]]

* RippleEffectProofMemory: {{Zigzagged|trope}}. Konoha can't remember the titles of the games that vanished, but does remember that Akihabara was an {{Otaku}} mecca in 2023.

* TakeAThirdOption: By 1996, the rest of Alcohol Soft are ready to jump ship from Platform/PC98 to Windows 95, but Mamoru is so attached to the PC-98 that he refuses to do so. After an entire episode's worth of persuasion, and coming to terms with the PC-98's impending obsolescence, Mamoru eventually agrees to a compromise: release the game on ''both'' platforms.

* FishOutOfTemporalWater: While Konoha generally seems to adjust well to life in the Nineties, she's utterly confounded by the (from her perspective) extremely outdated technology that Alcohol Soft works with, such as the UsefulNotes/PC98, and she constantly makes references to things that don't exist yet which confuse everyone around her.

* NewbieBoom: InUniverse, this is one of the reasons Mamoru is so disdainful towards UsefulNotes/MicrosoftWindows. With the PC-98, you had to really understand computers to be able to use it properly, but the convenience of Windows' added GUI means anyone can use a computer without really knowing anything about them. He proves his point by holding up a PC-98 and asking Konoha (who grew up using Windows) to name what each of the ports on the back is for: she gets as far as the power socket before drawing a blank.

* TakeAThirdOption: By 1996, the rest of Alcohol Soft are ready to jump ship from UsefulNotes/PC98 to Windows 95, but Mamoru is so attached to the PC-98 that he refuses to do so. After an entire episode's worth of persuasion, and coming to terms with the PC-98's impending obsolescence, Mamoru eventually agrees to a compromise: release the game on ''both'' platforms.

''16bit Sensation: Another Layer'' is an original anime produced by Aniplex and animated by Silver (''Manga/WeNeverLearn''). It's based on the manga ''16bit Sensation'' by Tamiki Wakaki (''Manga/TheWorldGodOnlyKnows'', ''Manga/AreYouReallyGettingMarried'') and stars most of the same cast, but is more of a SpinOff than a straight adaptation, and features an entirely original storyline written by the same author.

* BunnyEarsLawyer: [[TeenGenius Mamaru]] is genuinely talented with computers and electronics, fully capable of making PC-98 games entirely on his own, and successfully managing to use AA batteries to successfully fix and charge Konoha's tablet despite it being nearly three decades ahead of his time. However, when Konoha' first meets him, he is ''obsessed'' with the PC-98, which makes him resistant to Alcohol Soft's transition into more modern computers to continue their game development, and even after Konoha manages to convince him to accept the change, that's not to say he's dropped his love for the device. [[spoiler: This carries on even into Konoha's time, with him later revealing that he has an entire warehouse filled with PC-98s that he's collected, admits to practically living in said warehouse due to having nothing better to do at his apartment, and he even ''listens to sounds of them on a music player to relax''.]]

** [[spoiler:Heavily implied to be the result of Alcohol Soft's magnum opus. While they enjoyed success with Konoha essentially bringing a 2010s experience to the 1990s, no one could replicate that--and thus, nobody could compete. Otaku culture as it's now understood (moe, anime, and manga dominated) never had a chance to flourish.]]

* CreativeSterility: [[spoiler:Echo has no concept of imagination (or, from what we see of them, any other human emotions). While they pump out games at an alarming rate, their lack of imagination means those games are dull and uninteresting, and it takes Mamoru having to explain the concept to them before they finally understand it. It's implied that they're the ones responsible for Konoha (and later, Mamoru's) travelling back in time, in an effort to learn more about imagination]].

* MergedReality: [[spoiler:Bu the finale, both main timelines have been combined into one. Akihabara remains as the nerdy capital of Japan and Konoha is the exact same, but Alcoholsoft still made Konoha's game and left for America. Essentially, the whole group gets what they want, with zero drawbacks.]]

''16bit Sensation: Another Layer'' is an original anime produced by Aniplex and animated by Silver (''Manga/WeNeverLearn''). It's based on the manga ''16bit Sensation'' by Tamiki Wakaki, and stars most of the same cast, but is more of a SpinOff than a straight adaptation, and features an entirely original storyline written by the same author.

* NiceJobBreakingItHero: After making the amazing game ''The Last Waltz'', When Konoha returns to 2023, Akihabara is just another office district. Neither the Otaku capital nor the Electric Town, in an extreme version of RetGone, below.

* BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor: [[spoiler:While Konoha finally got to make her dream bishoujo game and helped Alcoholsoft rise out of their debt, she returns to her home time she finds that their game kickstarted a gaming revolution early...in the United States. Akihabara itself remained a business district instead of the otaku hub of Japan it's normally known as, while the rest of Alcoholsoft moved onto America to continue gaming development. And more importantly for Mamoru, the PC-98 is deader than ever, with no one but him showing any interest in the computer.]]

* OtakuSurrogate: Zigzagged with Konoha, who's a huge fan of bishoujo games despite how said games are typically aimed at men. However, the fact that she wants to be an illustrator for those games is TruthInTelevision; plenty of bishoujo games have had female illustrators and character designers, including those by Creator/KeyVisualArts.