Anime / 16bit Sensation: Another Layer

Konoha Akisato is a massive fan of Bishoujo Games, and aspires to be an illustrator for them someday. However, the market for them in The New '20s is almost non-existent, and she finds herself working a dead-end job as a sub-illustrator for Blue Bell, an ambitionless developer cranking out dime-a-dozen eroge.

One day, while on lunch break, Konoha stumbles across a mysterious store selling dozens of classic visual novels. When she comes back the next day, the store is gone, but the proprietor has left a bag of games for her to keep. When Konoha opens one, she finds herself transported back in time to 1992, during the "golden age" of bishoujo games.

With nowhere to go and no-one to turn to, Konoha heads to her old employers to find the lot occupied by a different bishoujo game company, Alcohol Soft. They agree to hire her as a part-timer, and so her journey to start making 16-bit games begins.

16bit Sensation: Another Layer is an original anime produced by Aniplex and animated by Silver (We Never Learn). It's based on the manga 16bit Sensation by Tamiki Wakaki (The World God Only Knows, 365 Days to the Wedding) and stars most of the same cast, but is more of a Spin-Off than a straight adaptation, and features an entirely original storyline written by the same author.

---

The series contains examples of:

• Adaptation Expansion: Compared to the original manga, Another Layer doubles the size of Alcohol Soft's contingent, adding Mamoru's father Masaru, script-writer Kiyoshi, and of course, Konoha. Then there's the whole time-travel aspect, which is nowhere to be found in the original manga.
• Age Lift: Mamoru eventually gets to high school age in the manga, but he starts out as a ten year old boy there. Here, we meet him at 15.
• All There in the Stinger: The First-Episode Twist that Konoha is traveling back and forth between the Nineties and the present day, instead of remaining stuck in 1992, is revealed in The Stinger of Episode 2. Episode 3 begins with her having already adjusted to life back in 2023, and comes out of absolutely nowhere if you missed that stinger.
• Artistic License – History: It's implied that YU-NO is one of the games that Konoha accidentally causes to be Ret-Gone due to the release of The Last Waltz. YU-NO came out in 1996, three years before The Last Waltz, so its release shouldn't have been affected by The Last Waltz' history-changing impact (its long-term popularity, on the other hand, may have been).
• Art Shift: The closing credits, and parts of the opening credits, are rendered almost entirely in 16-color pixel art.
• Ascended Extra: In the original manga, Mamoru was still important but he was mostly a side character. Here, since the anime is less about Alcoholsoft than it is about Konoha and he's in on Konoha time travelling, he's upgraded to the Deuteragonist.
• Aspect Ratio Switch: The Cold Opens of Episodes 1 and 3 are both rendered in 4:3, whereas the rest of the show is in 16:9.
• As You Know: Played with when Glenn explains to Konoha about the rise of generative AI, and the Creative Sterility problems it led to, as the backstory to his CI system. He assumes Konoha knows all this already, not realising that she's from an alternate 2023 where none of this ever happened.
• Bait-and-Switch: In Episode 7, before presenting her game proposal to Alcohol Soft, Konoha says she has something to tell them, and begins to confess to being a time traveler... but cuts herself off at the last minute to instead "confess" to having been working in the US during her prior disappearances.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: While Konoha finally got to make her dream bishoujo game and helped Alcohol Soft 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 Alcohol Soft 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.
• Big Damn Reunion: The final scene has Konoha giving Mamoru The Glomp upon reuniting with him in the present.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Konoha is right to criticise Blue Bell for churning out unimaginative bargain-bin games that (from what we hear about them) seem to focus on titillation over story-telling. However, her manager has very good reasons to shoot down her own proposal: it's far too grand in scope, and the company simply doesn't have the time or resources to devote to such an undertaking. Essentially, Blue Bell isn't being ambitious at all, but Konoha herself is being too ambitious.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Mamoru 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. 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.
• Canon Foreigner: Konoha is entirely fabricated for this show. Post-airing, she wraps around to becoming a Canon Immigrant in the final installment of the original 16bit Sensation manga.
• Chekhov's Gun: Konoha's tablet, which she tries to use to show her drawings to Alcohol Soft when she first arrives in 1992, only for it to be out of battery. When she returns in 1996, Mamoru takes a closer look at the (still not working) tablet and realizes that Konoha is telling the truth about being a time traveller - even without turning it on, he can tell it's far beyond Nineties technology. It comes back again in 1999 when, thanks to Mamoru jury-rigging a power source, Konoha finally does manage to show her drawings to Alcohol Soft as part of her game pitch.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Toya shows up in each of Konoha's first three visits to the past, but doesn't have much of a role in the story - she's just kind of there. When Konoha returns to the alternate 2023, Toya becomes a much more important character.
• Crazy-Prepared: Downplayed. Upon returning to 2023, Konoha begins lugging around a supply of food and drinks in her backpack at all times, so she won't be caught short if she's sent back in time again. She's also shown making sure that her phone and tablet remain charged so they won't immediately die on her again. She is not, however, prepared for the possibility of time-leaping straight into a swimming pool, which shorts out her electronics anyway.
• Creative Sterility:
  • 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.
  • 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.
• Deliberate VHS Quality: Used several times, including the Cold Open of Episode 1 in which Konoha realises she's in 1992, and during the closing credits, which are largely rendered in pixel art.
• Deus ex Machina: Konoha and Mamoru are trapped in a broken-down elevator, surrounded by armed men, with nowhere to run. Cue Echo arriving in a Flying Saucer, knocking them all out in one go, and beaming Konoha and Mamoru to safety.
• Eagleland: Glenn in Episode 11 is depicted as a Boorish type, screwing over Toya over a business deal and using her voice for some men to kidnap Konoha.
• Evolving Credits: Starting with Episode 7, the crowd shot of Alcohol Soft changes to show their 1999 office and extra staff, and the pixel art cast shot at the end changes to show how Mamoru and Touya look now.
• Eyes Always Shut: Kaori goes around like this until she, and everyone else, sees Konoha's art program in episode 7.
• First-Episode Twist: The series makes itself out to be a straightforward Fish out of Temporal Water story, with Konoha stranded in 1992... until the second episode ends with her waking up back in 2023, at the exact moment she'd left it. From there, Konoha traveling back and forth between the Nineties and the present day, and trying to figure out exactly how and why it's happening, become an integral plot point.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: 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 PC-98, and she constantly makes references to things that don't exist yet which confuse everyone around her.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Ichigaya arrives at the Alcohol Soft office, Meiko and Kaori are shocked that someone so famous would visit them, but Konoha has no idea who he is, which catches Mamoru's attention. He turns out to be a serial fraudster who's arrested and jailed shortly afterwards, hence why Konoha wouldn't have heard of him in the present day.
  • An anchorwoman heard in the background of one episode is heard mentioning something about 1985. Episode 7 ends with Mamoru opening one of Konoha's games and getting sent to that exact year.
  • Mamoru explains to Konoha that in the alternate 2023, use of generative AI is widespread in video games, for every aspect of production. Later in the episode, Glenn uses an AI that imitates Toya's voice to lure her into his clutches.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: 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.
• The Glomp: Upon reuniting with an adult Mamoru in the fixed 2023, Konoha does this with him.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Last Waltz, the game Konoha makes with Alcohol Soft to rescue them from financial peril, proves to be incredibly popular, not just in Japan but in the US as well, and ends up becoming the Trope Codifier for an American-led genre known as "cuu" that completely displaces visual novels. Alcohol Soft moves to the US, pretty much every other bishoujo game company follows suit, and the result is that by 2023, the global bishoujo game industry (or rather, cuu game industry) is far bigger than it was in the original timeline, but the Japanese bishoujo game industry is practically non-existent, and all the games Konoha grew up playing no longer exist. Oops.
• Hero of Another Story: Meiko, one of the illustrators at Alcohol Soft, is actually the protagonist of the original 16bit Sensation manga. Here, she's very much a supporting character, with the focus very much on Konoha and (to a lesser extent) Mamoru.
• How Do I Shot Web?: 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. By the third time around, she's able to not only do it on purpose, but also control what year she'll end up in.
• How We Got Here: The first episode opens with Konoha recording a video on her phone, explaining that she's been transported back in time to 1992. From there, it flashes back to her humdrum life in 2023, and doesn't actually show how she ended up traveling back in time until about two-thirds of the way through the episode.
• Human Resources: How do you solve the problem of Creative Sterility in generative AI? If you're Glenn, you solve it by hooking two hundred people up to an AI and using their combined creative potential to guide its output. And if his kidnapping of Konoha is any indication, those people aren't in there willingly...
• I Will Wait for You: Mamoru in the final timeline owns Alcohol Soft, but after the original team dissolved and left for America, Mamoru maintained it for years in anticipation of Konoha joining up again.
• The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday: Konoha stumbles across a retro game store she doesn't recall seeing before and is amazed to see dozens of famous bishoujo games being sold there for 100 yen each. When she comes back the next day, the story is empty save for a bag full of bishoujo games and a note addressed to her. Those games end up being the catalyst for Konoha's time-travelling adventure.
• Living Legend: The release of The Last Waltz turned both Konoha and Meiko into living legends. The former ended up on the cover of Time magazine, and the latter - due to her reclusiveness - is so legendary that Glenn is willing to kidnap her and hook her up to an AI to harness her potential.
• Look Behind You: Konoha manages to do this completely accidentally at the end of her stay in 1999. While walking with Mamoru, she suddenly points to something in the sky, and when Mamoru looks back, she's disappeared back to 2023.
• Merged Reality: 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.
• Newbie Boom: In-Universe, this is one of the reasons Mamoru is so disdainful towards Microsoft Windows. 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.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • 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 Ret-Gone, below.
  • This goes double for Mamoru. The future Konoha came back to only happened because he told everyone that Konoha had gone to America shortly after her disappearance, and the Alcohol Soft 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.
• Otaku Surrogate: 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 Truth in Television; plenty of bishoujo games have had female illustrators and character designers, including those by Key/Visual Arts.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Played for Drama in the alternate 2023. When Konoha makes a passing mention of "world lines", Mamoru asks what the hell she's talking about. Konoha explains that it's like Steins;Gate and YU-NO... then realises that those games might not even exist in this timeline.
• Ret-Gone: 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.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Zigzagged. Konoha can't remember the titles of the games that vanished, but does remember that Akihabara was an Otaku mecca in 2023. In the final episode, before Konoha leaves to fix the timeline, both she and Mamoru worry that the trope might be averted, and they'll forget their time with one another. Fortunately, when they reunite in the fixed 2023, they still remember everything.
• Shout-Out:
  • The 2023 scenes are filled with advertisements and merch for Fate/Grand Order, Lycoris Recoil, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story. At one point Konoha even plays the Madoka Magica theme song to herself for motivation.
  • The anime is filled with prominent shots of famous Nineties Bishoujo Games, to the extent that naming them all would take too long. Kanon, arguably the most famous of the lot, gets an extended shout-out in Episode 1 as Konoha gushes about it to the elderly shopkeeper, up to an including quoting Ayu's famous "Uguu~" Verbal Tic.
  • During the Comiket scene in Episode 4, the members of Alcohol Soft are shown cosplaying as characters from Neon Genesis Evangelion (which, from their perspective, has only recently aired). Kiyoshi even stays in character as Gendo Ikari the whole time, complete with his iconic pose.
  • When trying to explain the concept of parallel timelines to Mamoru, Konoha uses YU-NO and Steins;Gate as examples.
• Stable Time Loop: The game Konoha makes in the final episode turns out to have been what inspired Echo to learn about human imagination, thus leading to the events of the entire series - including the time-travelling shenanigans that led to Konoha making the game in the first place.
• Take That!: Nerd culture in the alternate present day has taken a bit of a nosedive; while America is at the forefront of bishoujo characters now, their versions of medium-defining franchises has the women look far more masculine and aggressive rather than the softer and cuter features defining modern bishoujo design.
• Take a Third Option:
  • By 1996, the rest of Alcohol Soft are ready to jump ship from PC-98 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.
  • 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.
• Take Me Instead: Toya attempts this, asking Glenn to hook her up to the CI system instead of Konoha. Glenn laughs her off, bluntly telling Toya that she isn't worth the trade.
• Technology Marches On: In-Universe, this is a frequent plot point:
  • When Konoha first arrives in 1992, she figures that her present-day art skills would make her famous in the Nineties. She quickly realizes just how wrong she is: graphics technology has progressed so much in the intervening decades that practically none of her skills are transferrable, and she has to essentially learn how to draw all over again.
  • Episodes 3 and 4 take place in 1996, with the PC-98 that Alcohol Soft were using in 1992 being inexorably supplanted by Windows 95. When Mamoru is finally persuaded to make the switch, he takes note of the fact that Konoha, a time-traveller from 2023, had no idea what the PC-98 even was: technology had, by then, marched on to the point that the PC-98 was not only obsolete but had been forgotten about entirely by most people.
  • In Episode 7, once Konoha finally persuades Alcohol Soft to develop her dream game, they're shown running into multiple technical speedbumps. Konoha's vision is based on what's possible in 2023, but Alcohol Soft are still working with Nineties technology, and it's only thanks to Mamoru's technical wizardry that they're able to pull any of it off.^note For a specific example, Konoha mentions using 200 layers in Photoshop - a lot but doable in 2023. In 1999, photoshop would run out of computing power with more than 8-12 layers.
• Teen Genius: Mamoru. He's skilled enough to program PC-98 games all by himself at the age of 15, and when confronted with Konoha's tablet - a device almost three decades ahead of his time - he's able to jury-rig a way of powering it using ordinary AA batteries. Then, just barely out of his teens, he is able to cobble together scads of PC-98 machines as jury-rigged 8-core processors to create Konoha's ambitious art for her game.
• Time-Travel Romance: 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. They give each other affectionate glances after they've reunited in the last episode. Outright confirmed to be romantic with supplementary merchandise, which shows Mamoru and Konoha in wedding outfits together.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: When Mamoru quits Alcohol Soft in protest over their decision to move from PC-98 to Windows, Konoha's last resort to get him back is to camp outside his apartment in a sleeping bag and refuse to leave until he changes his mind. It sort of works - while she's asleep, Mamoru finds her tablet and realizes that she really is from the future, and since she's totally unfamiliar with the PC-98, that must mean it's doomed to obsolescence.
• This Is Going to Be Huge: When confronted about his dealings with Ichigaya, Mamoru's father mentions how "dot-com companies" are booming in America, and that the video game company he and Ichigaya are investing in will be massive business, even reciting the trope name almost verbatim. If you're at all familiar with the dot-com bubble, you'll know this won't end well. It doesn't, but not because of the dot-com bubble bursting: instead, Ichigaya is arrested and the whole thing turns out to have been a massive scam that's cost Alcohol Soft one billion yen.
• This Is Reality: In Episode 4, as Mamoru warns Konoha not to change the future in any way, Konoha argues that in pretty much every time-travel movie ever, the protagonist ends up doing exactly that. Mamoru retorts that she isn't in a movie.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Played with. From Konoha's perspective, her creation of The Last Waltz led to a Bad Future 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 a third option.
  • In a way, Ichigaya could be considered this, as him scamming Alcohol Soft out of one billion yen is what prompted the creation of The Last Waltz in the first place.
• Wham Shot:
  • The Stinger of Episode 2. Having helped Alcohol Soft finish their latest game, Konoha topples over backwards, hits her head... and wakes up back in 2023, at the very instant she'd left it, completely changing the dynamic of the series.
  • The final shot of Episode 7, in which Mamoru opens one of Konoha's games and gets transported back in time himself.
• What Year Is It?: Konoha asks this of a pair of random strangers when she arrives in 1992, and of a group of swimmers at the pool she falls into when she arrives in 1996. Averted when she travels back to 1999, as by that point she's figured out how the time travel works and knows exactly when she'll be arriving.