peak, sovl, kino, whichever

people are going to have gripes about how they twisted the 16bit adaptation but I’m kind of enjoying that they’ve chosen to make it this weird pastiche of eras. wakaki said in an interview recently that there are probably more than a few good reasons to introduce time leaps in the adaptation, but mainly it’s just more interesting this way. most of the people watching this show will probably struggle to contextualize developments in eroge funneling into the modern day, so it’s actually decently valuable to have a zoomer girl around to boast about how akiba’s going to be filled with cute girls in the future. if not that, she can still make funny faces and use slang like マジ天使 that you could grok in the nineties, but no one was using until angel beats.

there’s probably no purer an example of this than the ED. kotoko wrote the lyrics, while shinji orito (key) composed it and tomoyuki nakazawa (I’ve) arranged it. poyoyon rock (bandaid fetishist) drew the original illustrations and chipushishi adapted each into the faux PC-98 style. poyoyon is squarely a name of the aughts, and chipushishi pretty much only developed prominence in the last few years on SNS with his uma musume art in the same style, which makes this more like having a lens to the PC-98 era through a kaleidescope than even rose-tinted glasses. none of the adaptation is strictly that authentic for the era it’s emulating, and sometimes it’s more obviously anachronistic. even if it may have been forced into being this meta, it also feels more convincingly like a melting pot celebration of the culture.