Just to quickly check: the opening song to Comic Party is also called ????? (Kimi no mama de), the same as Amagami anime OP (second OP to Amagami SS), which is now going to be a bonus track for the fifth volume home-video release for 16-Bit Sensation ~Another Layer~. It’s a new TV anime airing on a streaming service near you.
I am not too sure how to view this. Personally watching the first episode felt not so much a huge nostalgia trip, but witnessing necromancy. It’s triggering memories from not from a past life, but two past lives ago. Looking back, my journey as a person and as a fan in respect to “otaku culture” and contents has definitely, well, gone to places. Maybe another way to say is that I’ve grown old, grown up, grown tired, or just put it all past me to a degree, so much so, that I am even a bit guarded about my nostalgia and just how much of it is worth recalling.
It’s not an exaggeration to say I was really into some of this stuff back then; but we all were. I don’t find that aspect particularly notable, even in 2023, when those of us back then are now, at least, middle-aged men and women. Personally, I was most intrigued by memories of being into I’ve Sounds, which was part and parcel with Kanon and other older Visual Arts titles. I never really was into the games short of Type-Moon’s, maybe… the aesthetics was more what spoke to me, and in some ways the core desires about having some character put into that position, the main girl in the galge, that Konoha somehow stated in ep1. I think there’s an undeniable attractiveness which centers the classic moe idea that just is not really talked about this day and age, which is not about the gap so much or what defines moe itself, but the always-changing ways in which that is brought forward in a fictional depiction.
Which is to say, Type-Moon actually is way too new for 16-bit Sensation. I think while I was still living my first life, as continue to lean on this metaphor, that title came towards the latter part of it. Maybe this is why I don’t hate vampires so much. Which is just to say, I probably have a bigger problem with necromancers, because fundamentally what dead creatures resurrected differ from the same creatures when they were alive. It’s not to say 16-Bit Sensation did this, or aspire to recreate, or anything along those lines, but invariably it’s got to ward off the smells of inauthenticity by suspending our beliefs somehow. It would be a logical thing to do: let old timers nitpick how the anime got it wrong to distract them from the ludicrous time-traveling premise. Certain forms of inauthenticity are features. But we need not to get too bogged down on this; just by actually having graphical assets from Grandpa’s eroge closet in the anime is powerful enough of a dose.
And I think this is also the only sensible way to approach 16-Bit Sensation; the story is about an otaku-joshi illustrator who suddenly traveled back in 1992 so she can make the galge that she dreamed of making. That is pretty wild, by 2023 lingo, and really not at a point where we can take it on after 1 episode.
Leave a Reply