I think the worldbuiding in that otome game isn't catering for realism but for certain vibe to exude towards players of the game. Just like in some media that has weak worldbuiding with things that exist in the world because they are cool. I would think that abascus desn't exist just because it isn't romantic and it doesn't fit.
The game likely does not have any math in it anywhere, so the world does not include any of the tools that would be required to even have things like buildings as that's not part of the sexy magic vibe.
Yeah, that's a bit strange. By the time a similar time period came like in the anime, the abacus was already pretty ancient, albeit not in the form we're familiar with (though that definitely existed in Europe too by then)
All of this happening from the old guy's perspective before the accident should've been in the premiere episode,
but they did it at the start of this one instead. He's fully committed to playing the villain, but his actions say otherwise—he’s totally blowing his cover! 😂
The supposed romantic pairings have shown up, so who’s going to be their target? Anna or the old guy/Grace? 😂😂
All of this happening from the old guy's perspective before the accident should've been in the premiere episode, but they did it at the start of this one instead.
I noticed that when it's the conventional way, the anime tend to show how the protagonist's life sucked (read: protagonist is a loser) before getting isekaied, which is a huge turn-off.
Decided to give this another chance and it's sort of amazing how much better of an introduction this episode was than the actual first episode. I feel like we got a lot more depth from all the characters (including the absent real Grace) and more variety in the jokes as well. If this is how the rest of the show goes, I'm definitely in.
I think that format is made specifically to combat modern watchers that need to decide what to watch just from first episode. It felt more like a pilot episode than proper introduction to the character.
If so, I think it failed at that job, because I'm one of those people that decide what to watch from episode 1 and I was going to drop this until i found a spoiler that made me give it a second look.
From episode 1: Ojisan talks about the Shirley Temple-curled hairstyles of villainesses from classic shojo manga from the 1970s, which he would be familiar as he was growing up at that time: