Welcome to something of the “Main Feature” for the month I’ve spent reviewing Muv Luv properties – Muv Luv Alternative, Anime Version. Technically, this is only season 1, which is something of a shame but the decision to do January as Muv Luv Month was made before the fact this show was getting a Season 2 was announced.
So, a couple things to make clear right at the start. For one, I am going to be a little more sparse on the plot summary here than I usually am because I already went into great detail on Muv Luv Alternative earlier this month. It should still be more than enough to follow the story if you don’t already know it, but I will try to keep more to significant events. Second, since this is a review of Season 1 with Season 2 announced, it should be clear that this show doesn’t cover the entire running time of Muv Luv Alternative, so there’s a degree to which I can’t say how well it does justice to certain elements. I can speculate, and will try to do so where a logical guess can be made, but certain things just haven’t gotten to the screen.
Now, I’m going to wax a bit long about the process of adaptation, so if that’s not what you’re in for, scroll on down to the “Review Proper” header and go from there, from which point I’ll mostly be on-topic.
Before I start running through the show in earnest, I have to say that right when the first episodes of the Alternative anime were coming out (or even right before they dropped, when we were getting teasers and character designs), I experienced a quaint feeling not unlike nostalgia for the response. Specifically, the anime version of Muv Luv Alternative brought out a certain character in fans and purists that produced rage of a quality I’d not seen since Peter Jackson first put The Lord of the Rings to film. This is not a mark of intensity, mind you – there have been more hostile fandoms and worse receptions than either LotR or Alternative got – but it is a precise flavor of anger, where I got the feeling that there was a sector of fans of the original who desperately wanted the adaptation to be bad specifically because it would be more insulting if it were merely lackluster or mediocre, because they could discard and cut loose on something truly heinous but something that was just “not quite right” would be no less disturbing, harder to bury beneath fury, and was seemingly on the table.
It seems strange to say this as an author, but when it comes to adaptations I actually favor ones that are at least a little pragmatic – Lord of the Rings (for all that I love the original books) being one good example. Different types of media have different needs, and while missing the point of the original or losing what made it great might be the more common failure, in some ways adaptations that try to be excessively faithful are the more disappointing. I don’t need a shot for shot, scene for scene remake of Muv Luv Alternative. I have the original for that. It’s even voice acted and (in a sense) animated so I didn’t want the anime to just be the HD version of the game. The briefings and lessons that I eat up in a VN, absolutely love, would be slow and lame exposition dumps and would ruin the pacing in a show. I like those exposition bits because I can sit down with them at my own pace and delve deeper into the world. In a show, nobody (not even me) wants to sit through a class lecture. At least have the characters doing something while the information is being dumped. To adapt media well, what you want to do is tell the same story in a way that makes sense and fits the new format like it was always meant to be in that format, and sometimes that means things have got to change.
Now, a lot of times, I like to look at adapted material (where I know the original source) as its own thing, independent from and without drawing reference to the source material. In a lot of ways, that’s the fairest way to do it. Whether Muv Luv Alternative is a good anime or not isn’t ultimately predicated on whether or not it does justice to the Visual Novel; it can be a good or bad show on its own merits, as it would have to stand if it were the first thing Muv Luv someone had ever seen. But, for the sake of this review and knowing that Alternative is one of those rare pieces of work that really has a number of people who love it invested in its purity, I feel like I need to address how I see the VN being adapted into this anime as well as how the anime works on its own, including what changes, when those changes are to the material’s detriment, and when, perhaps, they’re to its advantage.
Since it’s something that can be noticed as early as the poster, let’s talk about one contentious element of the adaptation, the character redesigns. Muv Luv has a fairly “distinctive” style to its characters in the original VNs – they tend to be “loud” designs with some very angular components and particularly insane hair, even by Anime standards. By contrast, the Alternative anime really tones it down, a move that was sure to annoy the purists. Now, while I’ve made my stance on the originals pretty clear, namely that I enjoyed the hell out of them, this was probably something of a needed move in abstract. In my mind, VN character designs probably have to be loud in part because they can’t move a whole lot or even be depicted in too many different poses or angles, so they need to look immediately characterful when “at rest”.
In an anime, though, characters have to move around with flow and inhabit space which makes things like Meiya’s giant ponytail or especially Tama’s bizarre style rough to do. You might be able to get away with some of the original designs, but these characters have to be able to actually fit through doors, they can’t always just appear and disappear in the view of the “camera” like they can in a VN. So what the Anime needed to do was capture the feeling and character of the original designs while updating them to forms that you can actually block scenes around and, to a lesser extent, that fit more into what an audience is liable to accept in a gritty war story. By those metrics, how’d they do?
In general, I think they did pretty well. After a few episodes with the old cast, it no longer threw me how different they could be. Sure they didn’t look the same as they did in the game, but they had the right attributes in the right places, so you can ‘read’ them as the same characters. Still, there’s some granularity to be had in the individuals.
Ayamine in particular is a good update. Her original hair had the angular stiffness of most of Muv Luv’s hairdos, but it didn’t really go “out there” or have a strong theme. Her four downward points have been reinterpreted as a messy mid-length style that’s not quite a bob cut and not quite a mullet, which actually fits her lackadaisical-seeming persona very well; much better than plastic spikes would. Chizuru for her part had an easy job. Her braids and glasses shrank to mortal sizes but her design was basically able to be left untouched, minus the general art style differences. That’s the solid good, and I’m aware that it’s somewhat ironic that the eternal rivals are placed together in that.
In the alright, we can start with Mikoto. Her redesign is fairly minor, all things considered, but in just restyling her hair a little, she comes off as wildly more feminine than her original design ever did. That’s broadly fine since we’re in Alternative but it would kind of mess up Unlimited if they tried to work with the same look (to say nothing of Extra). It’s odd in that it only works for the adaption because of the limited scope.
Sumika (as much as we see her this season) has a similar issue, oddly enough. In the games, Sumika has a really notable ahoge (sometimes referred to as her “Antenna”) which does the usual comedy ahoge thing of being shown in different shapes depending on her mood; standing up straight like an exclamation point if she’s surprised, curling into a shape suggestive of a heart if she’s talking romance, and so on. Naturally, that had to go, or at least get significantly reduced. And even aside from the classic “lovable idiot” design element she tends to make a lot of dorky faces. She’s a very lively character who does everything big so in the rare moments she’s calm and earnest (almost but not quite restricted to CGs rather than standard talk images) you can actually be kind of blindsided by how pretty she really is, and when she’s not all there it really hurts to not see that life in her.
The redesign, by contrast, makes her a lot softer and more obviously “The pretty girlfriend”… which fits when you restrict her role to Alternative, where you don’t see as much of her bratty side. Much like the slight changes to Mikoto, making her more obviously feminine, work because we’re not terribly concerned with He-koto in Alternative, it kind of makes sense to look at Sumika through rose colored glasses because of how much of the story she spends being Takeru’s dearest wish and lost Lenore rather than his bratty childhood friend… but there’s still a degree to which it does a disservice to the character by smoothing over what was unique about her.
Then, we come to Meiya. Like most of these designs you can see her original notes but a lot of the louder features have been “nerfed” to relative normalcy. There’s just one problem doing that for Meiya: she’s supposed to stand out. Especially from the front, she kind of doesn’t come across as terribly special in her anime form. Sure, she has the high ponytail but she still seems like the kind of character you could lose in a crowd, and that’s not who Meiya Mitsurugi is. Meiya is grand, and regal, and always stands out even when she doesn’t want to. If anybody was going to keep a really excessive design, it should have been Meiya. She’s sort of the opposite of Ayamine in that where making Ayamine’s style more common and relatable actually allowed it to communicate more of her character, making Meiya stand out less at a glance loses a bit of hers.
Yuuko is an interesting case. For the most part, her redesign is both much more minor than most of the others and very much on point. I love the diabolical smirk she has in the opening, and many of her expressions in the episodes as well. But one thing I never quite got used to is that they actually gave her a number of soft expressions as well. Yuuko in the games is often difficult to read because she always has a high degree of intensity, especially in her BETAverse incarnation, and even her resting expressions are more in the ‘knowing smirk’ category with very sharp eyes. Seeing her give a soft expression, especially a smile, is not something you ever really are ready for.
Lastly, we have Tama. Poor Tama. Tama was in a no-win situation where her entire visual design was by far the craziest in Muv Luv. Her angular boomerang spiral twintails may have made her wider than she was tall in a lot of scenes and her cat-like appearance and mannerisms were really played up even outside of Extra, which doesn’t jive with what Alternative (as a self-contained piece) is trying to do. On the other hand, her style is so loud and so memorable that it’s distinctly weird to see a Miki Tamase who isn’t patently absurd. If they kept her design it would both look awful next to most of the revamps and be hard to work with. If they updated her, as they did, they lost a huge amount of personality. There really was no escape from some sort of fault. To that end, I can kind of credit the creators here for taking the route that would at least be consistent as its own thing. I mean, Tama still has the “cat mouth” and her hair is still powder pink, she does kind of get the idea across. What really pushes me, though, to think someone cared about Tama despite her troubled redesign is that she is animated differently from the other characters, and makes much more over-the-top and cartoonish expressions, which does a lot of work to cover what her appearance in still normally would.
On the good sign of the changes pretty much throughout, though, we have the voices. If memory serves, literally none of the original voice actors from the VN reprise their role for the anime; for whatever reason (and I’ve heard many explanations, the most critical being that some of the originals aren’t even part of the industry any more), it’s an all-new cast, and one that includes a lot of fairly short resumes… but they largely either picked sound-alike actors and/or directed their new cast to deliver performances as close as possible to the original. Some of them are a little different. Meiya and Takeru, for instance, you can tell are new actors if you’re used to the original… but they do a good job at representing the characters they were given. On the other hand, when it comes to Tama and Ayamine I didn’t hear “Oh that’s a new person doing that character”, I heard Tama and Ayamine. Their performances are pretty decent too, particularly Yuuko. Shirogane himself could use some work; I don’t know if it was the VA or direction but he’s permanently set to 100% agitation or on a hair trigger to jump there. And they should have hired one more voice actor – there is a flashback to Takeru as a kid and he has the exact same voice he does as an adult, making it seem like he’s talking down to Sumika as a much younger little kid rather than as a peer. Guys, even the game got somebody else to do the kid voice.
Though, for all I talk about hearing the characters when it comes to Takeru’s squad, it’s not as though I hear them much. Meiya, Sakaki, Ayamine, Mikoto, and Tama did, legitimately, have smaller roles in Alternative than they did in the other games. Not that they necessarily have fewer lines, but they’re not viable love interests and are less central to the plot, so there’s not a lot of “natural” time to work in their arcs. The anime adaptation had two choices – either it could spend a little extra time with them in order to make sure they were still developed despite not having two whole games backing them up, or it could treat the girls like extras. It went with the latter. Meiya gets a little work and basically everyone else provides their one note as mauve shirts.
… It occurs to me at this juncture that some readers might not know what a “Mauve Shirt” character is. One might remember, or at least be aware of, the original Star Trek, and how the security officers, with their iconic red shirts, tended to be essentially faceless bodies that could be killed off by the monster of the week. This leads to such characters, nameless voids of personality that exist only to just fill space or maybe die, being referred to as “Red shirts”. Mauve Shirts, then, are somewhat more colorful alternatives to Red Shirts. They usually have a name, a unique appearance, and maybe one flat character trait so that the audience knows them. However, they’re still fundamentally expendable minor characters; whether they meet their demise (where you’ll feel more than you would for a red shirt) or not, they don’t get growth, development, or enough notes to really be rounded characters. There’s nothing wrong with mauve shirts; in fact they are quite good for most stories when used well, since you do get something of a connection to them and thus care about their outcome. However, it’s still a pretty harsh demotion for what were main characters and at one point potential love interests.
And, to be fair, the show reaps some benefit from tightening the focus on Shirogane, Yuuko, and Kasumi. For one, you actually feel more of a connection to Kasumi, because she’s got the most presence rather than being an also-ran. For another, you can (despite the compressed format and the fact that she has to use much of her screen time to shout exposition) understand Yuuko’s complexity and struggle. You get that she’s a troll to her friends, you get that she’s capable of extremely ruthless action if it’s needed, and you get that she’s not as heartless as she might appear despite that. Keeping the other girls out of focus also allows the show to be more about Sumika, despite the fact that she hardly appears, because she gets more lines in Takeru’s dreams and memories than most of the girls get in the present.
This is one of the cases where judging something on its own merits versus judging it as an adaptation is difficult. On its own merits, Alternative has done nothing wrong by having Takeru’s friends as a small crowd of characters with distinct voices and not much else to them, because the story as the anime tells it doesn’t actually need them. On a personal level and speaking only of technical events that the show (rather than the game) wants to indulge in, the squad other than Meiya could pretty much just be grunts Takeru happens to get along with, and things would play out mostly right.
But, on the other hand, it is downright painful to see a cast of characters who were so special reduced to roles that are so minor. All five of them were deep, complex, personable, and well-explored characters while still having their quirky and distinct voices. Having a deep attachment to all those girls from tens of hours of gameplay in Extra and Unlimited was a big part of what kept Alternative alive. Stripped down to its core, Alternative is a very basic science fiction war story, the likes of which have been told a million times before and will be told a million times again. It does have some more unique notes, like Takeru’s status as a time/dimension hopper who knows a Bad End is coming unless prevented, but even that has fairly basic drama that is done well elsewhere. In one episode of Madoka Magica, Homura generates more pathos with her quest to change a bleak future than Takeru does in twelve episodes of howling about Alternative V. What pushed the original Muv Luv Alternative over the edge, earning its broad praise and impressive staying power, was the emotional investment you have with the cast, the fact that there were so many lovable characters who you wanted to see happy, and that you could quite legitimately fear that they might not make it to the end. The fact that this lot was more than just extras (along with the Valkyries and Misss Kyouzuka) is what made Muv Luv great.
I understand why they did it. I see the logic in the choice to shove Takeru’s friends and classmates pretty much into the background. But if you adapt something and you lose the heart and soul of it in the process, if you miss why people loved the original and would want to see it again in another form, can you really say that a good job has been done, even if what’s left is a basic, competent effort?
And, even standing on its own, there is a problem with having Sakaki, Ayamine, Tama, and Mikoto stand as mauve shirts – the plot still ultimately expects you to have a connection to these girls that the the show forgot to build. Things happen, and you’re called on to care about what that means for Takeru’s squadmates, and if you’re an anime-only viewer, I don’t think that you would by the time it’s needed. But we’ll come to that when the time is right.
Still, this show, like all shows, needs to be analyzed on its own. As we go through that, we’ll see where the adaptation element left its mark.
Review Proper
So the show, oddly enough, starts years before Muv Luv Alternative, with the BETA (alien swarm and winner of “most forced acronym” award, for the uninitiated) attack on Sadogashima. We see some minor elements that will come back much later in Alternative, and are otherwise concerned with trying to hold off the alien onslaught or, when that becomes clearly impossible, get as many people out alive as possible. This takes up the whole first episode, giving us an introduction to Muv Luv Alternative that suggests we’re in for grim warfare against giant monsters all the time, including some pretty good displays of what the BETA are capable of and a few images that seem to be paying fairly direct homage to Attack on Titan… which kind of annoyed me because I’ve heard people call Muv Luv an AoT clone when Muv Luv came first, dangit, but that’s beside the point.
This episode immediately shows the anime version’s biggest strength, the action. The TSFs (Mechas, for the uninitiated) look great, the BETA look great, and they fight really well. However, it’s also staggeringly irrelevant. Technically the main character of this episode does come back later in the show, but it’s in a bit role that doesn’t matter because she wasn’t in the original VN. So, despite the fact that this is probably the single best episode of the season, with solid action and a strong and well-constructed plot that has its own stakes and drama, it’s in other ways a sloppier version of what was done with the first arc of Total Eclipse, where we followed Yui (who would go on to be a secondary character and love interest, not a lead) through the Fall of Kyoto. At least there we ultimately did care about the character we opened with the struggle of. Here… um… the BETA fight is cool.
And I think that was very much why they did it, because, since this only adapts the first part of Muv Luv Alternative, we will not be seeing the BETA again for the entire show, at least not in the same serious front-and-center manner.
In some ways, it’s a shame, but I guess the same technique of keeping the BETA back that worked to maintain their menace in the VN wouldn’t work in the Anime if you didn’t at least see how dangerous they could be once, and this does accomplish that. All in all, it’s not exactly an episode of Muv Luv Alternative, but it is an episode well spent.
Episode 2 launches us into the story we procrastinated as we meet Takeru Shirogane, a young man who wakes up in his bed having been through two worlds already, the peaceful world of his origin and the ruin of a world where Humanity gave up the war against the BETA, sending a small number of migrants off to the depths of space while the bulk of the human race was abandoned to horrific ends. He finds, very shortly, that he seems to be at the beginning of the war once again, and resolves that if he has the chance, he’ll set things right and ensure that the plan to abandon Earth, called Alternative V, never comes to pass. He has to act quickly, though, as it’s October already and he only has until Christmas Eve to change the future, as that’s when Alternative V was formally decided on and humanity’s dark fate written in stone.
Takeru’s best hope for that is Yuuko Kouzuki, a scheming mad scientist who was his high school physics teacher in his original universe, but who in the war-torn universe (which I’ll refer to as the BETAverse due to the presence of the BETA being a big difference) is the executive officer and second-in-command of the United Nations Yokohama Base (which stands where Takeru’s school was in the prime timeline) and the head of the mysterious Alternative IV project that was canned in favor of Alternative V. Takeru doesn’t know much about Yuuko’s project, though he has a few bits and pieces gleaned from across timelines, but he does know that if Alternative IV meets with success, Alternative V won’t move forward, meaning that helping Yuuko do whatever it is she’s trying to do is Takeru’s apparent purpose.
Listening to Takeru’s tale and choosing to use, if not trust him, Yuuko places Takeru with a certain trainee squad, made up of the alternate universe versions of his classmates Chizuru Sakaki (Squad leader, Class Rep, and kind of a stickler for the rules), Miki “Tama” Tamase (nervous, pink, catlike archer/sniper), Kei Ayamine (the quiet weird one), Meiya Mitsurugi (Enigmatic rich girl, in this life said to be a distant relative of Japan’s Shogun), and initial absentee Mikoto Yoroi (positive and energetic survivalist, who was a guy in Takeru’s first world). Takeru also renews his friendship with Yuuko’s assistant, a strange and quiet little girl called Kasumi
The next couple episodes are on fast forward. Takeru and squad train for the CCSE, a test that they must pass if they want to start actually training with the TSF mechas they’ll ultimately use. Technically there’s a lot riding on the CCSE, especially when it comes to the squad’s hopes and dreams, but we don’t really hear or feel what. Takeru impresses his squad with his competence, since his cover has him as a green cadet rather than a two-year veteran of all this training, and on the side remembers a few bad events that hit in prior loops, which get defused to greater or lesser degrees by Yuuko being made aware of them.
Ultimately, the squad faces the CCSE, which is a long and grueling… um… montage. I guess without the other components of Muv Luv there’s not really the same satisfaction in seeing the CCSE, but it is kind of a big capstone to a major movement in the existence of these characters that we’re pretty much bypassing. Even if I ignore my knowledge of other timelines it feels… a bit rushed. We hardly know who any of these people are and already they and time are racing onward.
One thing you’ll also notice in this section is the animation. The TSF action and (when we see them) the BETA look great, as I said. When it comes to bringing the warfare side of Muv Luv Alternative to life, the visuals are perfectly on point. The same, however, can’t be said for the characters when they’re on foot. Even though I kind of like the redesigns in abstract, the animation varies between kind of acceptable at its best and downright bad at its worst. Sometimes a character doing something other than just talking or reacting in closeup will look nice, but at other times a character will be sobbing her eyes out and her trembling will be depicted by taking the paper cutout of her upper body and vibrating it up and down. The show tries to hide the cheapness and animation-budget-saving tricks, but if you’re watching with care it’s pretty clear that they blew every yen they had on the action and did not leave enough for the ordinary stuff. That ordinary stuff is a solid half of Muv Luv if not more, even in the anime version, so while this is a survivable problem it really shouldn’t have been cut as harshly as it was.
In a lot of ways, Muv Luv Alternative (the Anime) seems like the bizarro version of Pilot Candidate. Both shows feature a headstrong young man entering training to pilot a mecha against an alien threat, with a significant focus, at least technically, on the fact that the lead characters are trainees and aren’t expected to just get in the robot and get out there and fight aliens. But while Pilot Candidate had a freakishly slow pace, filling up episodes perhaps with character but also with way too much stuff for the plot to move forward, Alternative has a problematically fast pace, leaving character growth for most of the cast by the wayside in order to rush headlong into the plot. Alternative is set in 2001, Pilot Candidate was from 2000. Pilot Candidate had awful dated Gamecube-tier CGI mechas and aliens but traditional animation for the characters on the ground that was, if not great, at least fair for its day; Alternative has absolutely gorgeous CGI mechas and aliens but traditional animation that’s noticeably cheap and crummy for when characters are on the ground. And while Pilot Candidate had some heart and charm and passion to hold together what was otherwise deeply troubled Material, Muv Luv Alternative instead has a solid gold source to draw on, attempting to channel quality from above rather than produce it from the ground up.
It’s actually a fascinating comparison, even if I do die a little inside as a VN-reader having to liken Muv Luv Alternative to Pilot Candidate.
That aside, once Takeru and team start training with actual TSFs, he’s got a few matters to bring up to Yuuko. On one side, having been an avid gamer in his first world, Takeru wants TSFs to move a little more like the mecha fighting games he played, in particular wanting to capture the freedom of recovery canceling and the convenience of combos. He talks to Yuuko about it, and she manages to, based on his input, prepare a new Operating System for TSFs that incorporates versions of those features. This allows Takeru, already a skilled if unorthodox pilot, to really up his game by being able to aim and shoot while flying or jumping and perform complex stunts with relative ease. Early testing even suggests that other pilots, with minimal time and training to adapt, can reap much of the same benefit.
On the other side, Yuuko can only do this because her proper work is stalled, and in one charged scene, Takeru hears this… and spots a flaw in her brilliant plan. Or at least, he sees enough of what she’s working on to remember that the Yuuko in his original home universe was working with many of the same equations until she had an epiphany that the entire thing was approaching the problem the wrong way, causing her to interrupt her own class to draw up a new theory on the topic.
Alternative Yuuko, of course, becomes quite desperate to get that theory – so much so that she devises a scheme to send Takeru back to his original universe to acquire it for her.
This draws on a couple things. First, Takeru still has ties to his original universe, as indicated by the fact that he has dreams (or perhaps visions) of that life, particularly centered around Sumika Kagami, the girl he was in love with back there who doesn’t exist in the BETAverse like his other friends do. In fact, it seems like Takeru’s mind partially travels worlds when he sleeps, resulting in his dreams of Sumika.
This can be confirmed largely by Kasumi. It turns out the little girl is a psychic, one of many made for the Alternative III project. This gets us some of the history of the BETA war and the attempts to circumvent it. Alternative I was an effort to decipher the BETA language, but drew an absolute blank. Alternative II vivisected a lot of BETA to learn more about their species on the biological level, but the results were also frustratingly sparse. And Alternative III was a renewed effort to communicate with the BETA, utilizing genetically engineered telepaths to contact their minds directly, which ended up with a lot of dead telepaths and the knowledge that the BETA don’t see humans as living things, making proper communication protocols difficult if not impossible to establish.
So, if Alternative V is the abandonment of Earth by a select few space colonists, what is Alternative IV? That, I’m afraid, won’t be answered in this season.
In any case, with Kasumi to track Takeru’s mind across dimensions and a little engineering magic from Yuuko, they’re able to produce a device that sends Takeru to his original world. There he contacts the other Yuuko (who is thrilled to hear this, since it confirms some of her dimensional theories) who says he can come back to pick up the work her Alternative self needs in about three days. Takeru also runs into Sumika, and has a hard time facing her, which is a pretty decent scene even if it is quick.
If you’ll permit a brief digression into how this is adapted rather than just how it plays out live, it’s time to talk about Sumika Kagami, and the anime’s priorities.
In the show, Sumika is… sort of half a character. We mostly see her in Takeru’s dreams and memories, and only briefly in his visit to his original universe. However, in that time she does manage to have something of a character. It’s clear that she’s a little bit eccentric, and that she and Takeru had a close relationship even if one that was kind of prone to childish outbursts. It’s not a whole lot, but you do sort of have a handle on who she is and can guess that there’s more to her as of yet unexplored, since her “present” time is so little.
This is, oddly enough, sufficient to get her secondary character status; between all the flashbacks and visitations, Sumika gets more meaningful screen time than Chizuru, Ayamine, Mikoto, or Tama, coming in between them on one side and Meiya, Kasumi, and Yuuko on the other. This leaves Sumika in a decent place to be a character we’ll care about as Muv Luv Alternative moves forward from this season.
This does bring me to something I discussed in more depth in the full adaptation comment, namely where the focus of the show lies. Takeru is our main character, but the anime presents as not being overly much about his own growth and feelings, at least at first. There’s enough there to care, but he is still something of a generic protagonist as presented here. Yuuko, on the other hand, is a character who gets a ton of development. In fact, they’ve even planted the seeds of some of her more nuanced traits earlier than the games themselves do, letting you get a decent picture that she’s probably something of a scheming spider while also being a decent and caring person at heart. It’s a dynamite dynamic and the show gives it to you obliquely, as it should. It’s up to the viewer to make heads or tails of whether Yuuko is more noble, what with her noble far-macro scale goals and very human micro reactions to people close to her suffering or getting in trouble (as we briefly see her barely restraining a very bitter reaction to a casualty-including report from her personal squad, the Valkyries), or more villainous, given how strongly it’s implied that no matter what she feels when it happens, she’s willing to sacrifice anyone to give herself the best chance of success. As her assistant, Kasumi also gets some degree of focus, and we learn pretty well that she’s lived a very deprived existence, with little to call her own in the way of experiences and memories. Despite that, she seems to be a good if quirky kid who genuinely tries to make people happy. There’s certainly more room for exploration there, but what we have is pretty decent in abstract, and quite similar to what the original would give through about this point.
By contrast, Takeru’s squadmates, with the exception of Meiya, don’t have a lot going for them. Tama is a little memorable because she gets some over-the-top reactions, and the other three have nothing to recommend them. Relative to the rest of the cast, Sumika is actually a quite meaningful presence, as perhaps she should be when she’s Takeru’s not-quite-lost love. It honestly makes a lot of the flow of Alternative read a little different to say she’s a focal character at this juncture.
I bring this up, though, not just to talk about Sumika, but because we’re about to launch into the last arc of the season. This happens at what is, essentially, the halfway point in terms of episodes. After the transfer experiment and an incident where Takeru has Yuuko load the rest of the squad up with the new OS to skip an annoying event, he also pushes another event out of place, ensuring that when a local volcanic eruption triggers a forced evacuation, he and Meiya are not deployed to help since the two of them lost gear and time the first time around.
However, between this and possibly the behind-the-scenes results of previous meddling, we see the arrival of a major event that did not happen in Takeru’s first time through the BETAverse. For better or worse, the future has changed, and there’s no more walkthrough to guide our hero. Unfortunately, this new event is a particularly frustrating incident: a coup d’etat against the Japanese government, performed by a group of self-styled patriots and elite TSF pilots from the capitol garrison (and other Japanese forces), against the elected government and the fear of global interference through the UN trampling national rights and liberty, with the forced evacuation as their last straw.
It’s lead by a fellow called Naoya Sagiri, who hasn’t been introduced before but we’ll be hearing a whole lot of in the episodes he and his coup drag on for. His right-hand pilot is a woman who wasn’t in the VN. Supposedly she’s the main character of Episode one, but I’m not so sure – she has black hair, glasses, a tough nationalistic military demeanor, and an uncanny ability to survive things that normally kill people stone dead in this universe, so I think she might be Gretel from Schwarzesmarken (Notice: this is a tongue-in-cheek observation. She’s the girl from episode 1. Seriously. I guess somebody involved with the franchise just has kind of specific tastes.)
The interesting thing about the coup d’etat (at least on paper) is that every member of Takeru’s squad has ties to someone deeply involved with one side or another of the factional pile-up that’s developing. Chizuru, for instance, is the daughter of the Prime Minister – former Prime Minister seeing as Sagiri murders him (along with other senior members of the government), meaning that she has to handle the upcoming mission while grappling with the very fresh loss of her dad. Ayamine’s in deep too; she’s the daughter of a disgraced general, and Sagiri and many of his top men were her father’s proteges, who’ve been trying to tell her for some time that her dad’s sentence was unjust. It’s even faintly implied (more in the source material) that she and Sagiri knew each other personally and may even have had a budding relationship before her family life went to hell. Tama, meanwhile, is the daughter of a UN undersecretary (met earlier in the show during an averted crisis) and heir to much of the very globalism Sagiri is trying to fight against, with decent odds that he may even be guilty in some abstract sense of the charge of selling out his homeland for the sake of the world. Mikoto doesn’t know what her father does for a living and so isn’t as personally affected as the others, but her father is, in fact, an Intelligence chief under the Shogun… and possibly a double agent working for Yuuko even against the Shogun’s best interests. And speaking of the Shogun, that brings us to Meiya, who we’ve been told is a distant relative of the Shogun and who seems to be mightily preoccupied with her relation’s present struggle.
The problem is, since we barely know any of these characters, we don’t really feel much for the fact that they’re each trapped in solo battles between a rock and a hard place. I’m pretty sure that Chizuru, Ayamine, and Mikoto have averaged less than a line per episode until this point, and most of what pushes Tama over that threshold is in funny reactions. And, okay, perhaps that could be because they’re going to use this time, basically half a show dedicated to just this one arc, to do the development of the characters. They actually develop Takeru here, and Meiya (who wasn’t that far ahead going in) gets the focus to really kick her up a notch. To a lesser extent some work is done for Tama, but the other three languish entirely. I’m not sure you would miss anything if you dropped Mikoto entirely from the show, and Chizuru and Ayamine wouldn’t exactly be great losses either.
If their parts of this arc were going to pay off, they needed to be set up. We needed to see Mikoto’s oblivious and kind naivete which might be shattered by the questions surrounding her dad’s involvement. We needed to see Chizuru’s stern command, so that we could really understand how she’s being tested by having to go through a harrowing time under such incredible stress. And above all, we needed to have some kind of connection to Ayamine, so that when she drops the bombshell about her connection to the Coup’s mastermind, and when it’s briefly feared later that she might be a traitor, we can actually experience strong emotions about it in some direction. As it is, you can’t really fear that Ayamine is sketchy enough to sell out her friends, nor can you get worked up in her favor with an ardent conviction that she never would, because you don’t know her enough to really care one way or the other. This gets extra problematic when the fact that most of them have conflicted feelings about the coup (mostly understanding the motivations but abhorring the means) while Takeru comes in with a fairly simplistic “greater good” point of view is supposed to be a subject of drama.
And, I understand. This is ultimately a twelve-episode anime, it only has so much space. If you’re playing through the VNs, you may have spent upwards of 50 hours with these characters. Even if you’ve just played Alternative, you’ve probably spent ten hours or so with these characters by the time the coup starts, when the anime can only let you have them for something like two and a half hours up to this point. Something has got to give. On the whole, I actually think that the creators of the Muv Luv Alternative anime chose how to spend their limited resources wisely – Yuuko, Kasumi, Meiya, Sumika, and Takeru were not bad places to invest. But, and this is very similar to the issue with the janky ground animation, I think they could have spared just a hairsbreadth more effort. If Mikoto, Chizuru, and Ayamine were on the same level as Tama, or the three of them and Tama pushed up just a little over where Tama is in the final product, it would make a world of difference. The rewards for finding them just a little more time would have been greater than the cost to the better-developed piece losing it… or, to compound the frustration a little, we could have cut the anime-original first episode focused on a character who doesn’t matter in a scenario that doesn’t matter to get more than enough screen time to pull the squad up to tolerable levels, either cut into the current episodes (that largely don’t have great cuts, and thus could be fairly easily rerouted) or in a first episode showing us either of Takeru’s past worlds and, in that world, the characters that actually matter.
So, how does the coup go? After the rebels make quite a show in the capital, they begin to call on the Shogun for her blessing, surrounding the palace to demand as much. A provisional government establishes itself in opposition and tries to maintain order, while American forces are poised to intervene. Yokohama base’s UN contingent is in a tight spot, but ultimately squad main characters, along with a small group of Royal Guard pilots there for Meiya (due to her heritage) head out to what should be a very minor defensive posting at an old castle. Once there, though, Takeru finds Mikoto’s dad, who hands off to him for safekeeping none other than Yuuhi Koubin, the Shogun of Japan and spitting image of Meiya, probably because the two of them are actually identical twins.
While riding in Takeru’s TSF, Yuuhi manages to talk with him a good deal, particularly about Meiya. It seems that the high families of Japan have some dark superstitions about twins, which resulted in Meiya being adopted out by distant relations, but also that Yuuhi still feels a deep kinship with her sister (as we’ve seen Meiya feel towards her) and that she’s tried to reach out in order to offer some sort of connection to her wayward twin. This includes having sent Meiya a next-gen super ace custom mech earlier in the show (Meiya never uses it in the show), and giving Takeru and incredibly personal trinket to hand off to Meiya, reckoning that she’ll accept it delivered by him as a friend rather than through royal authority.
The goal is to get the Shogun to safe territory at Yokohama Base, where the full might of the UN can protect her, but it’s not too easy as the rebels have intel on exactly where the Shogun has slipped through their net to, meaning that they’re coming hot on the squad’s tail. Also present in the field, though, are Japanese forces loyal to the provisional government, other UN forces, American forces at the head of the UN, and (unknown to all others) Yuuko’s private ace squad. This ends up with a major rush to break through a critical choke point which, thanks to the help of an American team that links up with Takeru, his friends and teacher, and the Royal Guard, they manage.
However, all the excitement has not gone too well for the Shogun. Without a proper pilot suit, she starts suffering from motion sickness, despite taking basic medication for it. As more desperate maneuvers are needed, her situation worsens, ultimately resulting in her passing out from acute motion sickness, which Takeru recognizes as potentially fatal if allowed to progress any further.
Now, I do not know if, in real life, the kind of bumpy ride depicted here could give someone who isn’t normally prone to it motion sickness, particularly to the degree that it reaches mortal danger even with some degree of treatment. However, that doesn’t actually matter – the situation is sold well, so that you believe that she’s in legitimate danger. This is something that’s worth being aware of in fiction; if something is not extremely common knowledge, it doesn’t particularly matter how accurate it is rather than just how well you sell it. Since I (as the viewer) don’t know how motion sickness in an extreme situation like this actually work, if it’s told well and made believable I’ll accept it even if it’s inaccurate, where as if it wasn’t well-expressed I wouldn’t take it even if it was true to life.
Just when it seems like the team is away and will be able to rest and let Yuuhi recuperate, Sagiri has one last play up in his sleeve, using transport planes (an insane measure) to air-drop himself and his elites in front of the main group once again. Sagiri personally goes to challenge our main characters, while his lieutenant ends up fighting with Yuuko’s squad in a largely irrelevant battle.
This means that the party has to move fast with the Shogun still out of commission. The ranking officer is the American leader, Major Walken, orders Takeru to dose the Shogun with a particular sedative as the standard treatment for motion sickness so that they can get moving, while Takeru remembers that it can have dangerous side-effects and should be a last resort. Thus, he hesitates to potentially OD a head of state, which gets the Royal Guard leader, Tsukiyomi, as well as Takeru’s instructor, Marimo, in on a lengthy debate over what should be done.
This takes long enough that the Shogun comes to enough to beg Takeru for the sedative, at the same time as Walken catches on that Tsukiyomi and Marimo were stalling. However, the stall is too long already as Sagiri’s forces have encircled the combined American/UN/Royal Guard team. Sagiri offers them an hour ceasefire to decide what they’ll do with his demand to have the Shogun transferred to him.
During that time, we visit with some of the other characters, particularly seeing a conversation between Tama and one of the American pilots (actually a Finnish refugee, enlisted to earn citizenship and a better life for her family), where they bond well as friends. We also get another talk between the recovering Shogun and Takeru that’s followed by Yuuhi addressing the entire assembled group. Meiya is the exception, lurking just out of sight even though it hurts her to not really meet her sister face to face. At this time, Yuuhi gives them all important pep talks (not that we care about most of them) and presents a plan, that she wishes to take a TSF and go talk down Sagiri personally, since while he’s taken unforgivable measures he does seem to be honest in his fealty, and thus the Coup could be resolved without further combat. Meiya takes this moment to speak up, saying that she should stand as Yuuhi’s body double and deliver her words without risking her person, so that if things go south Yuuhi will still be able to be taken to Yokohama base.
Ultimately, the idea everyone goes with is Meiya in Yuuhi’s clothes addressing Sagiri from Takeru’s TSF. After an uncomfortably long and rather poorly animated sequence of the sisters exchanging clothes as seen by their shadows cast on a tarp, contact is made with Sagiri and the meeting set.
At first, all seems to be well, with Meiya doing an excellent job of becoming the voice of Yuuhi, such that Sagiri is prepared to accept her judgment. Though I will say, Sagiri seems like more of an idiot here than even before, as he seems to be aware that his actions are playing right into the hands of the very forces he hates. However, an unknown force mind controls the poor Finnish girl and causes her to open fire on Sagiri and Meiya. Walken is horrified by this sudden and bizarre treachery and Sagiri is incensed, retreating into his TSF to fight it out to the bitter end.
In the battle between the Valkyries and Sagiri’s right hand, the rebels (mostly the lady herself) manage to kill the Valkyries who didn’t appear in Alternative and thus VN readers kind of knew had to die, before being wiped out themselves, with the Valkyrie leader, Isumi, taking on our mini-boss in a fairly cool if meaningless fight.
At the main event, the Finnish-American pilot comes to horribly disoriented and gets killed, much to Tama’s horror. Walken finds he has another traitor in his ranks, about which he’s admirably furious, but Sagiri kills Walken’s lead on what the hell is going on before Walken can take the man down and in. Sagiri then fights Walken, and wins thanks to the traitor having sabotaged Walken’s weapons, marking the end of the US team. I’ve got to say, for a show that gives a lot of weight to Sagiri’s rhetoric, they did at least also make Walken (who espouses the same “for the good of the world” view that Takeru does) an honorable class act in his own right. Sagiri continues to rampage blindly, damaging Chizuru’s TSF and almost killing Ayamine of all people before Tsukiyomi intercepts him and more or less talks him into dying in battle against her. Not that there’s any indication that Sagiri is fighting at less than full, but he clearly thinks he’s getting a ‘good death’ that way.
With Sagiri dead, the remaining rebels either break or surrender, their morale obliterated as seen through the last few of his cronies present and his oddly still living right-hand woman weeping over the news as it comes through. From there, Yuuhi can get to Yokohama base with no further incidents. She makes a big ending speech, basically blaming herself for everything and saying how much she’s learned from this tragedy, more or less trying to redirect any remaining anger and nip in the bud any possible recurrence, and says a good goodbye to the squad. Takeru delivers her present to Meiya, who has a good cry, Mikoto is detained for reasons of her dad being under suspicion of being something like a triple agent, the team are declared graduates and full surface pilots, and Yuuko ominously declares that “she” will be here soon. The end.
So, at this stage, I’ve pretty much gotten most of my praises and complaints out. The action is brilliant, it looks exactly how you want the TSF combat in Muv Luv to look when fully animated. The character animation is a mess, with some scenes honestly being on par with the original VN rather than anything that a modern and clearly decently budgeted sort of show should look like. Yuuko, Kasumi, Takeru, and to an extent Meiya are brilliant; they really do come to life and prove why they’re considered good or great characters. Chizuru, Ayamine, Mikoto, Marimo, and to an extent Tama are done dirty; they’re about as dimensional as Popsicle sticks and a fraction as interesting. The story is rushed, until we hit the coup d’etat and suddenly it takes its sweet time with everything, possibly to the point of over-correcting and being problematically slow. The creators clearly knew where they wanted to splurge and where they could cut corners, but they overdid it in both directions, resulting in a production that, for lack of better terminology, was far too min-maxed for its own good since balance is needed to make a story flow.
It’s a bizarre, lopsided viewing experience, and there are some ways in which I absolutely despise it, but… when I pull back, and try to look at this show from an objective perspective, when I judge it solely on its own merits and not compared to the complete and original Muv Luv Alternative? It’s got problems, but it’s really not bad, all things considered. It has a stronger narrative and a better control of its tone and pacing than Total Eclipse did, but doesn’t quite have the strong plot and immersive atmosphere that Schwarzesmarken managed; it’s firmly between the two. And in the grand canon of mecha anime, or anime in general, there are certainly a lot worse. I compared the Muv Luv Alternative anime to Pilot Candidate earlier, and while it is interesting how similar yet opposite their failings are, Muv Luv did get the much more tolerable version and sorts out to being the better show between the two by far. In the end, I’d rate Muv Luv Alternative (the Anime) at a C+.
But, there is one other thing that Muv Luv Alternative’s anime outing shares with Pilot Candidate: I want to see more, and where it’s going, because I honestly think that there’s good reason to hope for some kind of upward trend from the initial, troubled outing. In Pilot Candidate, that was because there were strong characters and a clear passion for them that suggested that it might have been unfairly killed by being forced into a pace and structure it wasn’t suited for. In the case of Muv Luv Alternative, it both is and isn’t that I’ve read ahead and know what’s coming.
One of the biggest issues with this season of Alternative is the rushed first half, which denied us the opportunity to really build up interest in the characters. The coup d’etat, while my least favorite arc of the source material, was done very well, explored sufficiently and even expanded in places and ways that while not necessary were at least a little clever. I love that they kept in Tama making friends with the Finnish pilot, giving the scene of the two of them talking the full time it needed to actually forge a connection both between the characters and to the viewer, and I at least like the dialogues we had around Meiya and Yuuhi that helped to bring Meiya more into focus. For this reason, while the initial stumble is problematically critical, it’s not necessarily a lost cause going forward.
And, in my mind, when you speak broadly about it there are four arcs left in Muv Luv Alternative. The show has been confirmed for a second season; if it goes for a third, it can do two of those broad movements in each season, letting each of them take as much time, effort, and focus as the coup d’etat did. While some famous moments are already pretty much doomed to bomb because of the poor opening, the longer we go along from that the more chances we have to correct and re-calibrate for what’s coming. Muv Luv Alternative, the twelve-episode anime that covers the game through the coup d’etat and graduation day, was worth as C+ and my sincere frustration as a VN reader. Muv Luv Alternative, the thirty-six episode anime that does the whole thing, could be a fair bit better than that. The ship has sailed on really living up to the original, but not on being quality in its own right. Of course, if they try to cram the entire rest of the story into twelve episodes, or don’t manage to rectify the faults they’re building on, it could also go belly up… but until the time comes where we see which it is, I choose to be cautiously optimistic.