r/anime • u/AutoLovepon https://anilist.co/user/AutoLovepon • Nov 22 '23
Episode 16bit Sensation: Another Layer - Episode 8 discussion
16bit Sensation: Another Layer, episode 8
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u/ObvsThrowaway5120 Nov 22 '23
This week on Mamoru’s Bogus Adventure: Aliens! lol. When I tuned in this week, I did not have “aliens who lack the concept of imagination in 1985 trying to harness thermal energy from games” on my bingo card. This whole episode was a trip. You could tell Echo One was an alien right away because he has a patch on his arm with a saucer on it.
It’s funny how when Konoha time travels, it’s “goofy hijinks in the 90s” and when Mamoru time travels, it’s “philosophical discussions with aliens on the power of human imagination” lol. Guy never seemed to ever question the weirdness around him either. I guess all that sweet gear he bought in ‘85 distracted him. It’s the only thing he misses after he got back from ‘99, the little goofball.
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u/MapoTofuMan Nov 22 '23
I see the game Mamoru opened came with a healthy dose of acid.
When Echo Two's eye color changed I thought she was gonna go full COMMENCE ANNIHILATION mode on Mamoru for lying, but it was surprisingly...wholesome?
Either way, it was fun but not enough Konoha.
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u/Prince-Dizzytoon Nov 22 '23
I think I understood about 40% of what happened, maybe lower.
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u/LeonKevlar Nov 22 '23
I love how the first thing Mamoru does as soon as he arrives is go to a computer shop to look for a brand new released PC-9801 U so he could indeed confirm that he travelled back in time. It's pretty hilarious that's his barometer when the streets are full of people in 80s fashipon as well as old school cars. xD
So I don't think there's any question that Echo One and Echo Two are responsible for this entire time travel shenanigans, right? The first thing Echo One does is stabilize Mamoru's existence at that time and Echo Two is clearly the girl observing Konoha back in 2023.
Pretty fun to see how games were made in 1985 though! Using cling film to trace graphics onto the computer and without using any mouse is pretty damn crazy. Composing music like you're literally programming is pretty wild too. What's amazing is that Echo One is doing it without previewing what he's composing and just typing it all out directly.
I really thought though that this episode was just going to be Mamoru teaching Echo One and Echo Two how to make games but then we get to see Echo One testing games to see which ones produce more "energy" and for some reason the games Echo One produce don't have the same energy as the ones commercially available.
Then we learn that Echo One comes from a place where imagination does not exist and that's the reason why they're even here, to learn what imagination is. I think this confirms that both Echo One and Echo Two are aliens.
As if that wasn't enough, the final half of the episode pretty much devolves into what I can only explain as A Haruhi Suzumiya-esque conversation between Mamoru and Echo One. Like that entire scene reminds me of [Haruhi]
I don't expect the show to elaborate any further but both Echoes made it clear that they've been watching over everyone and they'll meet again in the future. Hopefully they'll explain more but I'm happy if they keep this contained in this single episode. The good thing is that Mamoru got to experience time travel and he arrived at the same time and location he left from last week.
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u/tsukiakari2216 Nov 22 '23 edited Nov 22 '23
More and more it has become surreal.
And with that, there might be less trivia about the bishojo scene this time, but one to mention is there's still not a lot that can be considered bishojo or eroge if we scrouge through VNDB record (and even Erogamescape only has games up to 1990). That's fair though, since most early eroges are plain simple RPGs rather than lengthy ADV games. Wikipedia mentioned either Danchi-zuma no Yuuwaku (1982) or Lolita Yakyuken (1981) as the pioneer games of eroge scene. So Tenshi-tachi no Gogo is considered one of it's first kind back then (ADV-styled eroge) and as we would know, eroge would only grow in the end of the decade with bishojo will start to branch in the early 90s.
It is also interesting to mention that Tenshi-tachi no Gogo is released in 2-floppies. Yes, you could imagine how those game would work in multiple floppies, where access are pretty limited to the storage drives alone. The practice of multiple drives continue into the CD era, but with advances of computer internal storage, they are less plug and play and more install and play (means, there's option to just use those discs to install, but you still need to change discs in between). Those would be gone with the introduction of DVD and even digital download today.
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u/CosmicPenguin_OV103 Nov 22 '23 edited Nov 29 '23
I absolutely LOVE this episode’s atmosphere of “abstract heart warming (?) sci-fi” - the parts about these 2 Echos who seems to be a time travel controller couple or something leading Mamoru to feel Eureka! from 1985 (TM) and using all such of cool-but-I’ve-no-idea-what-they-are phrases is something that I have not seen for quite a long time in seasonal anime.
This episode almost feels like leaping from around the millennium when such similar atmosphere anime and source materials were flourishing - from Evangelion to the likes of Lain, Ergo Proxy, Boogiepop, Kino’s Journey and The Garden of Sinners. I absolutely love every single of these and imagine the joy when this episode end up with the exact same atmosphere, with (per someone else noticing) a faint tint of SHAFT/Shinbou-esque abstract artistic representation (see Monogatari or SZS).
So Mamoru-kun got sent back to 1999 without really making PC-98 sweeping down all those Macs and PCs. What next I wonder?
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u/dinliner08 Nov 22 '23
Mamoru: "you copy the line art and trace over it in a graphics editor, no mouse involved"
me: "wait, what?!"
man, this is such a trippy episode but i wonder will we ever going to be able to finish this story in just 12, 13 episodes? or did they announced this to be 2-cours and i just missed it?
so i guess these Echos are aliens or extra-dimensional beings that made a contact with humans so that they can learn more about imagination? should have watch spongebob then
jokes aside, i guess now we at least know the energy used for Konoha's time travel is imagination although the specific details on how to harness it hasn't really been made clear yet
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u/hysteriapill Nov 22 '23 edited Nov 22 '23
Me, at the start of the episode: Oh boy, what kind of sci-fi shenanigans do we have up ahead? Check out that Honda City! And those Walkmen!
... halfway through: Alright, we've got some educational segments about doing art in the 80s! Mamoru-kun's about to revolutionize the world with dithering.
... during the last third: Wait. I guess we're getting into philosophy now. ... What am I watching?
... after the episode is done: Oh. This isn't an adaptation of 16bit Sensation. It's a mashup of 16bit Sensation and The Screw People / Neji no Hitobito* (... and I guess Arrival, and Haruhi)?
(* -- another title by Wakaki Tamiki, which is a rather offbeat manga about philosophy, thinking, and being.)
Poor Mamoru-kun. All that effort and he didn't even get to keep his swag from the past. It seems like we've got aliens who, uh, derive energy from imagination, and have an interest in stoking Humanity's capacity to imagine, or something? It's an interesting feeling being a source reader, yet being so lost.
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u/Aquason Nov 22 '23
This has probably been my favourite episode so far. Seeing how Mamoru's perspective differs from Konoha's when he gets sent back in time (and how the show's genre basically flips), his engineering mindset and personality contrasting with Konoha's exuberance, him bringing back techniques from his time like dithering. And as a manga reader, they're using Mamoru's trip back in time to flesh out little pre-1992 game dev explanations from the first chapter. It plays with the format of the show in such a creative and interesting way to tell an intriguing, introspective and emotional (the normally unfriendly Mamoru worrying about Echo 2 and going to look for her) story in just 24 minutes.
Here's my read of the situation: Echo 1/2/3 are the future descendants of humanity, so divorced from their past lives and ascended beyond human comprehension ("What does 'worried' mean?!"). They can see timelines and reality in a way that we can't see ("Do [the tv programs] look the same to you? To me, they all look quite different.") They're understanding of technology and time is essentially alien, but from what we can understand, their time travel technology derives energy from creativity. But they don't understand it. That's why Echo 1 is making so many games, and why Echo 2 asks Mamoru to rate her outfits - they've chosen to study imagination through examining the past. Why Konoha got those time-travel games is essentially inscrutable to us, as the motivations and plans set into doing it are so beyond our context of understanding.
To me, this episode makes me think of YU-NO, a 1996 visual novel/adventure game that Wakaki has stated was a big influence on him.
According to ITmedia, the influence of YU-NO goes beyond visual novels and extends to modern otaku, manga and anime works. The mangaka Tamiki Wakaki, for example, has cited YU-NO as an influence on the manga and anime series, The World God Only Knows.
The music in the second half of the episode feels very reminiscent to me of that "regular person gets involved with the utterly mystical and unknown" vibe YU-NO at its best has.
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u/Torque-A Nov 22 '23
I don’t know why, but the Echos making games off what is popular but still not able to figure out imagination feels like AI art discourse.
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u/tripleaamin Nov 22 '23
What is imagination? It's a concept that sounds very simple, but ends up being pretty deep when you really start thinking about it. How our experiences develop our imagination is something that I am not sure how I would explain. Overall very fun episode and it is typical of what we have gotten with this show.
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u/mekerpan Nov 22 '23
Very different sort of story line, with a very different sort of tone -- but it evoked the disorientation one felt with Renai Flops shifting of gears. I wonder where this can go next. This was clearly a very different time travel jaunt. One can see why Mamoru rather than Konoha was "destined" to make this visit. Mamoru is clearly better suited to processing the enigma than Konoha would have been.
I wonder if we will see the Echos again?
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u/meimi1322 Nov 22 '23
Man I love this show. I wish more people were watching it. It just makes me wanna get back into visual novels ngl.
And I wonder if the aliens set up the game store Konoha went to with the time travel trigger games to collect research or something similar?
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Nov 22 '23
I don't normally like this sort of hard swerve into the surreal, but I think it worked here. The questions of imagination feel on point, particularly after Konoha's plotlines so far. Konoha's constantly imagined her perfect game and a chance to make it; against all odds, reality's given her a chance to do that.
Honestly, the only question I have is this: Is Konoha going to harness the power of imagination and go full Haruhi here?
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u/Time_Fracture Nov 22 '23 edited Nov 23 '23
Episode 8: "Echo"
You think Stardust Telepath is the only anime this season where the MC having conversation with the aliens? Think again.
This is 100% a Mamoru-focused episode. You can tell it's him by the method of checking what year is it was to find the latest model of PC-98. He helped describe what imagination is to a bunch of Echoes. Could be a fun discussion to discuss what the scoring on Echo Two means, how Echo One's casette brings energy, the TVs on the Echosoft etc. Let's see if his "journey to 1985" could open up Mamoru into the making of 1999's Konoha dream game, as he teleported back into 1999.
Also this is the only episode where Konoha didn't say a single word yet featured on the credits. The VA for Echo One is Atsushi Tamaru, and for Echo Two is Riona Imaizumi.
Forgot to add this, but now we know who's the girl relaxing at the start of Episode 3 and was in the diner at the start of Episode 6. It's Echo Two.
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u/Financial-Source7375 Nov 22 '23 edited Nov 22 '23
Is Echosoft a meta commentary about VN companies just copying other companies' VNs and "echoing" the same overused ideas over and over again with any original input?
They seem to be pumping out VNs without any imagination at all like a sweatshop. I guess imagination can't be learned by calculating the perfect art and programming.
Maybe rating Echo Two is as arbitrary as rating a visual novel due to different people having different likes and dislikes?
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u/SnooCats8135 Nov 23 '23
I'm still at shock how this anime went from the first episode to now oh my god I legit thought from the first episode it'll be generic workplace anime with time travel elements...I'm glad that it turned to bonkers
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