I’ve talked a few times in this blog about imitations, the usually lesser offspring of greater progenitors. Yuki Yuna is a Hero from Madoka Magica. RahXephon from Neon Genesis Evangelion. And, in my previous takes, I’ve often pointed out that it’s not always bad to take notes, even heavy notes from something great just as long as the new work brings something legitimate and innovative to the table, a test that both Yuki Yuna and RahXephon passed with flying colors.
Muv Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse (from here on to be called simply Total Eclipse) is in a somewhat different place when it comes to that. For one, it’s not exactly a sequel (taking place at a similar time to Alternative itself), but because it’s part of the same franchise it does operate somewhat on sequel rules more than the rules for (dubiously) original works. For another… it’s much more overshadowed and clearly imitative than those others I’ve addressed.
It also has an interesting place for me in that, barring vague memories of a Manga version that only resurfaced when I was playing Alternative and were so scattered that I think they may have come from a different world line, Total Eclipse was actually my introduction to all things Muv Luv. This was the entry that I went into blind. And I can say with absolute certainty that this show ‘reads’ a lot different having played or not played the original Muv Luv games, because it makes loads of choices that are outright baffling if you don’t know what it’s trying to do.
Because of that, I will be drawing on material from core-line Muv Luv in this review. I’ll try to keep the spoilers restricted essentially to Total Eclipse, referring to the events of Extra/Unlimited/Alternative carefully to avoid giving too much away. If you want the full details and don’t have them yet you can see my last two reviews (Here for Extra & Unlimited and Here for Alternative), but that shouldn’t be necessary.
In any case, the show starts with an arc set before the proper meat of the material. It stars Yui Takamura, a young woman of noble birth in Japan, who is training to become a Surface Pilot, one of the elite soldiers with the most potent and prestigious role in humanity’s ongoing war with gribbly aliens known as the BETA. At first, things look pretty nice for Yui. Sure, she’s technically training as a soldier, but she has a very nice life and some very nice friends and classmates. Everything changes, though, when the BETA attack. The girls are part of the defensive lines, albeit deep in the reserves, and things do not go well. As the BETA overrun the defenders of Kyoto, Yui is forced into retreat, and to watch all her friends who we spent most of the first episode getting to know be killed in front of her in incidents ranging from fireball explosions to being messily devoured while begging for a quicker and cleaner death, Yui unable to take the shot. Yui is very nearly on the BETA menu as well, but is saved at the last minute by the arrival of more military sweeping the area.
Now, if you’re a Muv Luv veteran, you probably expect that this is, essentially, a flashback – the fall of Kyoto takes place three full years before the events of Alternative, and the sequence around the BETA invasion of Japan is fairly well known. If you’re a newcomer watching this show for itself, however, you’re probably pretty invested in Yui, now the lone survivor of her peers, and the grim world of lethal warfare that her struggle has shown off, which makes it pretty jarring when none of the emotions or plot elements from these opening episodes are followed up on. True, Yui appears, but she’s both more of a side character and a completely different person after a three year time skip, so I hope you weren’t looking forward to seeing her grapple with her grief and feelings of helplessness and grow into being a stronger soldier and better person as the fight against the BETA continues, because we pick up at a UN base in Alaska, with the arrival of our actual main character, a Japanese-American elite Test Pilot fresh from Area 51 named Yuya Bridges, and follow him as he’s assigned under Yui’s command and meets some of the other base residents (including his new squadmates) and gets to know them through mostly low-key and somewhat comedic training interactions, albeit at times with hints of darker material beneath the surface.
And now’s as good a time as any to give a quick line up of who’s who… by which I mean, who’s in this show and in many cases, what Muv Luv Trilogy character are they trying to be a slightly modulated version of.
First, Bridges himself is basically a dry knockoff of Takeru. He’s an insubordinate jerk who likes to run his mouth, much like Takeru and a great pilot much like Takeru, but lacks Takeru’s irrepressible goofball humor, bouts of staggering incompetence, and universe-bending plot relevance. On the whole, he’s much less distinct than his predecessor while still playing in the same general area. Amusingly, in one relatively irrelevant moment in Unlimited, Takeru basically steals this guy’s identity (claiming to be a super elite soldier trained at Area 51) while trying to make up whatever nonsense off the top of his head will get him out of trouble… which tells you about how good Yuya’s background is. Yuya’s one claim to solo fame is that he’s half-Japanese, born to an American mother and an unknown deadbeat Japanese father, and has a pretty big chip on his shoulder about his heritage, seeing as it caused him problems early in life. This might have let him actually step out from Takeru’s shadow, but as it turns out Yuya was quite comfortable in Takeru’s shadow and decided to not address how he feels about the matter very well. Enough to mention it, but not enough to really count as a character arc.
Then, we consider who Yui has become. She has, essentially, grown up into most of Meiya Mitsurugi with extra Chizuru Sakaki parts. Which is to say, she’s an uncompromising and proud woman and also someone in a relative command position who spends a lot of time mostly just getting mad at her underling(s) for not taking her and her authority seriously. Despite that, I think Yui might be the best character in this show, because they do develop her more over time. She’s mostly borrowing Meiya’s charm points and moments, but they’re still at least a little charming on Yui. I just wish we could actually see her big transition from green schoolgirl to hardened lieutenant in a way that would make us privy to her thoughts and feelings and struggle rather than just the trauma that acted as the hammer for her.
Sticking with obvious Alternative copycats, we have the Scarlet Twins, a pair of Russian pilots who together fly a special two-seater TSF. The elder of the two, Cryska, is a strong, gruff woman of few words who often acts standoffish (much like Ayamine in the core games) while the younger, Inia, is an adorable little girl and becomes very much attached to the lead, and is otherwise essentially a clone of Kasumi from the core games.
From there, we start to get into the places where Total Eclipse did more of its own work. Yuya’s squad has his mechanic friend, Vincent (who serves the story role that Mikoto did in Extra, but otherwise has little in common with him) as well as his thinly sketched fellow pilots Valerio Giacosa (the Italian skirt-chaser), Stella Bremer (the motherly one), and Tarisa Manandal (the small, loud, perpetually angry one). These characters aren’t much like any of the Alternative characters… but to be fair, I think that’s because Alternative has higher standards. Tarisa has her moments but when she’s not having them she ranges from barely tolerable to tortuously annoying, and while the others don’t have quite the watchability lows she does, they don’t have the heights either, essentially acting as scene-fillers and extras. Maybe the characters would be better in a VN, with more room to grow, but Total Eclipse is 24 episodes and the cast isn’t that big, they should have been able to fully develop their lot.
The first arc at Yukon Base involves Yuya’s integration as a test pilot. Yui has him flying the Shiranui Second, a new edition of the TSF you might remember as the “nice” one of the lot the characters had in the core games. Yuya, as a test pilot, has some complaints. He finds the controls too loose and floaty and overall thinks it will be far too difficult to use the Shiranui Second to its potential. Yui gets very upset hearing this and tears into him, insisting that it’s a poor pilot who blames his TSF and that he should think and fight more like a Japanese person, becoming one with his weapon and all that. This pretty much makes them both look awful and builds up quite a lot of ill will towards everyone in the show.
On one side, Yuya is needlessly abrasive. He’s trying to be Takeru Shirogane, who talked back to his superiors a ton, but doesn’t have Takeru’s excuse of being an ordinary high school student seeing the people around him as people he should be able to talk back to. Yuya is a trained soldier, he ought to know better, and he certainly picks fights with Yui over this.
On the other hand, Yui comes off as absolutely insane. Yuya Bridges is a test pilot, not a combat pilot. His job description is not to adapt to the machine, it’s to push the machine to its limits and provide feedback about what doesn’t work, whether through his own observations or just through how he manages to break the damn thing. Yui telling him to not complain about the TSF is the absolute wrong direction to take specifically with a test pilot. And you know what? His complaints, while delivered in a nasty and insubordinate manner, are the sort that would kind of need to be sustained in testing. If Yuya, a fairly skilled test pilot, can’t tame the Shiranui Second in a decent time scale, how exactly does Yui expect the soldiers dealt them from a future mass-production run to be ready to face the BETA at 100%? Dial it back or go back to the drawing board, because the ultimate weapon is only a great build on paper if people can’t actually use it.
We also see in this the first of many plot points that make you think “Oh, that’s like that one bit in core line Muv Luv.” Here, the Shiranui Second is basically just a knockoff of the “New Operating System” arc in Alternative, where Takeru and Yuuko developed a new OS for TSFs that would change how they handled. Both the Shirnaui Second and New OS feature drastically increased speed and mobility, but while the Second is notably hard to control, the New OS made TSFs easier to control, allowing even less than amazing pilots to achieve much better results, while also being a fairly quick to apply upgrade compared to building an entire line of new mechs. So, our drama here is basically working with a project that’s like that other project from Alternative but worse in every way.
This is the demise of Total Eclipse, not on its own merit but rather as an entry in the Muv Luv Franchise. It desperately wants to do things just like Alternative (or sometimes Extra or Unlimited) did. It knows it can’t literally repeat those elements, and it also feels like it can’t go bigger and bolder, so instead we get watered down Muv Luv beats with their order shuffled around and perishingly little content that’s genuinely original rather than pathetically attempting to imitate its greater predecessor.
But, alright, judging Total Eclipse as its own thing… well, after a great first couple of episodes, the Shiranui Second arc does not make a good impression, mostly because it’s so difficult to follow what we should be feeling. Scenes are framed to make it seem as though Yuya needs an epiphany but the scenario makes it look like Yui needs a reality check. The Shiranui Second seems like an alright machine I guess (though Total Eclipse on its own, unlike the core series, doesn’t sell the need for speed and agility in TSFs rather than armor and firepower very well), but it also seems like it’s kind of done and ready, which means our characters are doing what, exactly?
After some time doing whatever the hell they were supposed to do, the Yukon Base team (including the Russians, who seem to be half part of the base and half not) are sent to a tropical island for a paper thin excuse reason. Something about morale and publicity that justifies putting all the girls (and the guys too, I guess) in swimsuits. The place in the story and sudden transition to the tropical island setting is reminiscent of the CCSE in the proper games, but the scenario is inverted. Here, it’s supposed to be fun swimsuit times, and the tropical island survival that happens when Yuya, Yui, and the Russians get stranded on a small outlying island in a heavy rain storm is the ‘surprise’ rather than rainy survival hell being the expectation and swimsuits the surprise.
The big problem with this arc, both as a series entry and on its own, is that there are no stakes in this arc. The away team is probably less than an hour from land and people should know where they are. Even if nobody precisely knows, it would be fairly trivial for the authorities to guess and find their missing pilots long before hunger or dehydration became more than a nuisance. This is bad enough on its own, because the show was hurting for stakes through the last arc, but when you have the original to compare it to, it’s just insulting.
The main purpose of the arc is, I suppose, to build the relationships between Yuya and the girls in a more positive manner. Up to this point Cryska has been very standoffish, even hostile, and he’s fought with Yui in most of the scenes they’ve shared. Here, he has some alright conversations with Cryska, learning more about her situation (not that he understands it) and shares some tender moments with Yui. The tender moments with Yui involve her hurting her ankle (Just like Meiya does at one point in each of Unlimited and Extra) and Yuya having to give the highborn lady with a temper a piggy back ride to safety despite her initial protests and attempt to stand on her own, just like the scene between Takeru and Meiya in Extra, and ultimately tending to her hurts, just like a scene between Takeru and Meiya in Unlimited.
Watched without knowledge of “Core” Muv Luv, the scenes with Yui and her hurt ankle were a little unnatural, but mostly alright, and you accept that she kind of has to be put in a literally vulnerable state in order to start opening up, and that Yuya probably has to see Yui’s human side rather than “his commander, the obstacle” in order to start being nice to her. So, in isolation, the little island episode actually plays fairly well. In my mind, that makes it the most forgivable “we just lifted these bits from the last one” sequence… but the lifting is even more direct than most of the other comparisons that can be made and thus, if you do happen to be in the know, it’s kind of painful.
Yui has the makings of a good character, and she shows it occasionally. She does have a lot in common with Meiya, but she’s been through the first arc of Total Eclipse as a trial by fire and while she mostly acts like just the tough squad leader, Yui is technically aligned with R&D and doesn’t pilot much despite owning a Takemikazuchi, when Meiya (while by no means dumb) is certainly more of a fighter than an egghead. If the show allowed Yui to delve more into her own, unique, personal traumas, as well as the skills and interests she have that are, if not her own, at least lifted from somebody else like Yuuko rather than Meiya, it would be a lot stronger, since we’d be watching a character study without such obvious training wheels, and she’d have a consistent persona for other characters, notably Yuya, to play off. However, Total Eclipse is so afraid of the fact that it’s not just Muv Luv Alternative that it constantly shoves Yui into a Meiya-shaped box, whether she really fits or not. It’s like half the show’s writing staff wanted to create a new original character, Yui Takamura, and tell her story while the other half just wanted to have Meiya Mitsurugi in their fanfic, but called her Yui Takamura because canon Meiya was canonically elsewhere.
So, after the Island mishap is cleared up and we’re allowed to go out on a fanservice/comedy note, the uninitiated viewer might think they have a new handle on Total Eclipse. You write off the first arc mentally and emotionally as just a hook for the world so that we, as the audience, have some idea why anything is happening. After all, those episodes starred a different main character and took place three years earlier; Yuya’s story is about test pilots, who quite naturally are stationed in the back line away from any killer aliens. It has some political intrigue with the Russians and is otherwise basically like The Right Stuff for mechas rather than the infancy of the space program and with more romantic drama. It’s not exactly what you were promised, but it is shaping up to have a theme.
Honestly, if they had kept to that, it would have been alright. Sure, it wouldn’t have any alien battles, but not every core entry did, and it would be different and interesting. However, astute readers will recall that this show is trying its damnedest to be a scaled-back and watered-down version of Muv Luv Alternative in particular. This means that we are going to jump from the pleasant training and build-up arcs into an arc with real combat.
In contrast to the island arc, this is something that works better as “A Muv Luv show” rather than as its own thing. As its own thing, this is the second time the show has made a jarring transition between tones and scenarios, and it won’t be the last. That wasn’t awesome when they did it in Full Metal Panic and it’s not awesome here. As a Muv Luv entry, though? As much as I may be criticizing Total Eclipse for trying too much to be Muv Luv rather than itself, one part of the original’s charm that was certainly available for imitation was the fact that Muv Luv was a scifi war epic that glued itself to a romcom dating sim. One problem with consistently dark shows is that you quickly become fatigued by the relentless pessimism and suffering, where as if you get nice stretches of down-time to get to know the characters when they’re more relaxed and able to interact as people rather than being focused on the mission, you ultimately feel for them more.
But, while there is something admirable about the mix of tones in Total Eclipse, and Muv Luv in general, Total Eclipse can still take a strike against in that its tone shifts are about as graceful as a TSF with a disabled engine. The games knew how to move between scenarios, even when they sometimes did it very suddenly. Total Eclipse doesn’t; we more or less just appear in a different bloody show, having swapped out between episodes.
So, we arrive at show #3, where Yuya, Yui, and friends are deployed to the Russian-controlled Kamchatka Defense Line, which holds down the northern end of the far east defenses (As you might expect if you ever played Risk when you were a kid, the only other place “Kamchatka” tends to be mentioned). They’re here to test a new superweapon, an electromagnetic cannon they refer to as a “railgun” despite it not really resembling a railgun (it’s a lot like the Charged Particle Cannon from Alternative, only lesser in every way) on live BETA targets, which seem to be softest here in the northeast. However, it’s clear pretty early on that the Soviet authorities are doing some very dodgy political deals and may not have our team’s best interests or even survival in mind.
While there, Yuya meets and weirdly bonds with a group of Soviet pilots who, because they aren’t ethnic Russians, are treated as disposable by the Soviet authorities. Still, they fight for their country, and the best deal they can get – a lot like some of the American pilots we meet in Alternative, who enlisted to gain citizenship, but more transparently black and white.
This arc is, on the whole, one of the more original. Yuya goes out to test the new weapon on the BETA and ultimately gets the chance to pull the trigger despite the Russians trying to prevent it with boneheaded tactical choices, and while I did say it’s a watered down version of the Charged Particle Cannon and also flagrantly not a Railgun as we think of one… it’s a pretty cool superweapon, able to mow down BETA by the herd and earning Yuya a dubious new record for “most enemies killed on your first deployment”.
Servicing everything for a second test, though, gets subtly sabotaged… as does the general defense of the Kamchatka Line. The basic plan from the Russian authorities is to manufacture the fall of the forward operating base where everyone is stationed to the BETA, because the BETA are fundamentally unpredictable and thus no one can really blame them if an outpost gets overrun. As they do, they’ll run the evacuation such that the cool gun gets left behind. Then, after clearing out the BETA using bomber planes (possible because the Laser-class BETA, which otherwise reliably shoot down all aircraft making planes useless, don’t seem to appear in Kamchatka) they’ll pick it out of the ashes while writing it off as lost to the UN, allowing them to get the jump on making production models.
The plan goes swimmingly for the Russians until a few small hiccups appear. First of all, Yui ditches her evacuation escort in order to make sure she can trigger the self-destruct on the fancy gun, preventing it from falling into BETA (or Russian) hands. Second, Yui’s squad goes to the base essentially against orders in order to rescue her. Third, the Laser-class actually come out to play, meaning that all forces have to scramble to take out the pack of them so that the bombers can fly.
This is a pretty long arc, all things considered, and the action is actually decent. The action, mind you, not the military tactics. Muv Luv’s core entries show decent intelligence, and make it clear that humanity uses everything at its disposal wherever it would be useful in order to just hold ground against the BETA. TSFs in Muv Luv have an assortment of very important roles, but they’re supported by armored units, battleships and static defenses, and so on in a way that feels very much like a military epic. Total Eclipse treats its setting more like a “Super Robot” setting in that the mechas do anything and everything else jobs for them… without the mechas actually being properly Super. The army looks stupid (more than just the intentional mismanagement by the Russians), the TSFs look stupid, and even the BETA kind of look stupid. It reads a little better if you know the main series, but it doesn’t convey the ideas very well. In terms of action, though? There’s some good flashy movements, some clear views of what’s going on, and some real stakes.
Of special note is Yui in the hangar, trying to destroy her awesome gun. She’s helped by a random mechanic who had the same idea she did and hid from the evacuation, and they try everything to get through the thing’s protective layers and the sabotage that disabled the easy self-destruct, but the BETA are closing in, and soon have the pair pinned in the hangar, drawn with ravenous hunger to both humans and advanced computers. The mechanic checks out an access shaft at one point, and is ambushed by the human-scale Soldier Class BETA, at which point Yui is able to give him a clean death before slamming the door and preparing for what she thinks is going to be her own.
It’s not heavily discussed, but this is actually a good payoff to the end of the first arc, where she wasn’t able to pull the trigger and thus had to watch as one of her friends was torn apart and devoured in horror. If the show had more time for Yui, her dealings with our brave, friendly, doomed engineer could really have been the culmination of a growth arc with meat to it. As it is, it almost gets there, but the show isn’t interested enough in Yui to quite sell it.
Of course, Yuya arrives in time to clear out the BETA at the hangar and get Yui out, dealing with the cool gun in the process. On the way out, Yui gets transferred to one of the other squad-mates because Yuya’s TSF is damaged, and he’s ultimately left to fend for himself, which should be a death sentence, only to manage to drag himself and what little is left of his TSF back to the fallback location in the end.
Along the way, the Laser-class are also dealt with by the Russian squad. The effort, though, ends up costing all of them their lives, which ultimately haunts Yuya and causes him to flash back to their brief time together in a way somewhat reminiscent of some of Takeru’s growth in Alternative.
So… I actually think this arc is the best in Total Eclipse. The BETA are great at making a mess of things, and seeing our characters struggle just to survive in said BETA-made mess has its appeal. The tone isn’t quite full “PTSD-causing side of Muv Luv” dark, resting more on the dark end of heroic action where redshirts and tertiary characters can die but real characters have decent plot armor, which is eminently watchable. It’s also the arc that is, I feel, the most unique when compared to what was done in the core-line games. It has shades of some of the big battles in Alternative as well as some of the political backstabbing, but it’s ultimately doing its own thing, which given how often this show reaches for the security blanket of Alternative’s movements, emotions, or even scenes is at least a little commendable.
That said, there are some things worth complaining about. The political backstabbing is a big one. If you know Alternative, you kind of know you’re in for some of that. There’s a major theme in the core games, starting as far back as the first couple days of Unlimited, that the threat of the BETA, and even agreement on the threat of the BETA, doesn’t stop nations and political factions from having their own objectives as well, which may cause conflict even in the face of armageddon. This is established well before it’s needed, so that you believe it when various factions try to stab each other in the back over their petty differences, and we see that new advances can and in some cases be used for political gain, with some innovations being traded for consideration in other matters while others are held back entirely in order to prevent rivals from abusing them towards disagreeable ends. If you’re not primed from Alternative, though, Total Eclipse doesn’t do any work to get you to understand this as the state of the world.
Yui repeatedly points out that if it works out well, her cool gun will be mass-produced and make its way to battlefields the world over. In Alternative, similar claims are made of some fancy toys, but always with the caveat that it will happen when the time is right or when a certain schemer finds the proper opportunity to get the most benefit out of the rollout. Yui is much nicer, though, and not the same kind of scheming spider. With just the information in Total Eclipse, you’d think that Yui’s gun would be on the fast track to a lend-lease sort of agreement, meaning that the Russian officials are scrubbing one of their own outposts and getting a lot of people killed for… early access to the unfinished prototype that they’d probably be given proper versions of in as much time as it would take them to reverse engineer said damaged prototype. For all the perspective we’re granted, they might even get a usable number of awesome guns faster if the testing goes smoothly than if they go with plan “steal the prototype so we can get a head start on building our own”.
This honestly seem like another way in which Total Eclipse leans too much on Alternative. On one side, it mimics Alternative in the desperate hope that even a degraded hit of that greatness will please people… and on the other, it sometimes seems to take for granted that you’re familiar with the better version and will therefore understand and carry over some of what was established in Alternative to Total Eclipse.
In any case, once Yuya is back alive and Yui overjoyed to see him, we cut abruptly to another arc which is completely different from the last arc and has a wildly different tone. In this arc, we’re focusing on a competition at Yukon Base between a number of groups trying to prove they have the best next-gen TSFs in mock combat. This features the arrival of two new annoyances (each with a team of their own). One is Leon, an old rival of Yuya’s from back at Area 51 who arrives with a massive chip on his shoulder directed at Yuya and… I think he’s dating Yuya’s ex? The character in question, Sharon, seems to have deeply unresolved feelings about both Leon and Yuya but if it was ever said if she was more than a mutual friend and peacemaker with Yuya, I missed it. The other new annoyance is Yifei Cui. Cui is a representative of whatever’s left of Chinese forces (Honestly, having gone through Alternative proper I’m shocked they exist as a solvent political interest), looks like Hatsune Miku, and immediately after declaring Yuya to be her rival decides she has the hots for any guy who can take her on instead and thus aggressively pursues him from a romantic comedy angle.
I hate Cui. She says nothing interesting, does nothing interesting, and distracts from the actually dramatic triangle and chemistry between Yui, Yuya, and Cryska. Yuya never gives her the time of day, so we’re under no illusions that he might actually go for that, but she keeps pushing her way into scene after scene basically just to cockblock Yui, who has taken up a much more shy and maidenly attitude now that she’s admitted to herself that she’s into Yuya.
What I think is going on with her is the fact that, as I mention earlier, Muv Luv was a deliberately cliche-heavy romantic comedy to begin with, so when they reached the point in Total Eclipse when characters were actually confronting their problems and the on-base downtime looked to have some serious notes often rather than occasionally, the show felt naked and decided to import a cliched romantic comedy character in order to gracelessly cover that up. Thus we have Cui who throws her hat in the ring out of nowhere, gets to keep being relevant despite the fact that the lead, who has no reason to be humoring her, not considering her seriously, goes way more over the top than anything else in Total Eclipse (she calls Yuya her husband, like she took her dating tips from Arin in Trinity Seven. Arin, by the way, is a better character than this), and really when you think about it shouldn’t exist in her current form.
We had good drama in the romance arc already. Yuya clearly feels drawn to both Yui and Cryska, but neither girl is uncomplicated. Yui is his commanding officer, and they got off on a very wrong foot, so even if their relationship has become one of mutual respect it makes sense that it’s difficult to look any further. Cryska is mysterious, which is appealing but also its own problem, and is in a politically complicated situation given her allegiance to the Soviet Union. Most of their bonding isn’t as a man and woman for their own sakes, but over Inia, who’s a cute little girl (as well as some sort of psychic clone that’s explained in Alternative), which kind of changes the equation. For the girls, Yui I think would have some natural hesitation, given how these things have built up for her across extreme circumstances. Cryska, meanwhile, is kind of weird and doesn’t really understand what love and romance are the way most people do. Between these factors, we had a good recipe for keeping a love triangle going for a bit.
In comes Cui, and she does seem to make Yui feel uncomfortable – what with Yui treating her as a legitimate rival despite there being no reason to do so – causing Yui to back off just because, well, Yuya was approached by Cui and that makes Yui sad. Because the tough, stern, proud Yui we thought we might have known has melted into a spineless puddle of schoolgirl at the first whiff of romance. I’ll give that credit in that it’s not what Meiya would do, but it loses more for being somehow worse for Yui than just going with “What would Meiya do?”.
It wasn’t needed. Cui is a third wheel in the romance, a jobber in the mock battles, and in terms of her personality she steps on Tarisa’s toes as “the loud annoying one” while being more annoying and less endearing to the audience than Tarisa was, which is saying a lot.
Anyway, we spend a goodly amount of time puttering around with Cui and Leon, watching Yui make big sad eyes and Yuya and for the Russians… alright, they’re actually being vaguely interesting as we learn more about their past as clones and status as artificial humans, including what they mean to each other as “sisters” and what the Soviet Union is to them. It’s all in brief scenes, but it plays well enough.
In any case, since the whole built up mock battle doesn’t have a lot of drama riding on it (the Americans as represented by Leon’s team are far and away favorites to win because their stealth Raptors, which you may remember seeing live combat in Alternative, are specialized for fighting other TSFs), it’s time to consult our Muv Luv Alternative Bingo Cards and find what arcs haven’t yet had heavy notes pillaged from them! The mock battle event in Alternative is a shoe-in, and indeed they do take its outline of events, but bigger and more important is Alternative’s big Coup arc. We haven’t seen anything like it in Total Eclipse, so if that brings you to expect that we’re going to get some TSF-on-TSF fighting with a load of militants that have a point but are also bloody insane in terms of the practical side of their efforts… Yeah, that’s exactly where this is going
The out-of-nowhere bull this time is courtesy of the Refugee Liberation Front, a group displeased with the treatment of refugees from the BETA front-lines, and who thus prove easily led by shadowy puppet masters to take to terrorism with really no goal or endgame in mind. They manage a fairly sophisticated infiltration of Yukon Base and its supporting town, eliminating most of the guards and many pilots, hijacking TSFs, taking ranking officers hostage, and generally raising hell, but there’s a palpable sense of “what now?” around them that only gets answered when they’re inevitably betrayed by their backers. Oops.
One of those shadowy puppet masters is a slim redheaded man we’re shown very clearly, and yet who isn’t given any sort of introduction or backstory. The show treats it as though you’re supposed to know who he is, having him give cryptic yet oddly specific talks and showing him off with such menace and detail despite the fact that he’s not actually present for any of these events that I was sure, watching this the first time, that this was a transplanted character from Muv Luv proper.
He’s not. This guy is a literally who and never appears in Extra, Unlimited, or Alternative in any way. For that matter the Refugee Liberation Front and the weird implied BETA cult that’s also said to be dancing on Mr. Redhead’s puppet strings? Never even hinted at. In fact, if any thing the only hint of refugees we get in Alternative suggests they’re in a complicated but not so-abject-it-makes-sense-to-form-a-global-terrorist-organization position. To be fair, these things weren’t hinted at in Total Eclipse either. They come right the hell out of nowhere, and honest to Haruhi I still don’t know why the friendly barmaid, who never had any trauma explored or any hints given as to the fact that she might have divided loyalties, turned out to be a terrorist plant and then got herself shot for tipping off Yuya about what the terrorists were planning. Was she a refugee? Was she being blackmailed? Is she with the redhead for some reason? No idea! It’s never explained or explored.
As for the redheaded puppet master himself, I decided to do some digging, thinking that if he wasn’t in Alternative, he might be better explained in one of the other side materials. His appearance in the narrative is so baffling that I needed to know where he came from, because if the answer was “nowhere” then he might be one of the least competently written villains I have ever seen.
Well, at the end of my research I found out that in addition to his general appearance, he shares his national origin, some of his mannerisms, and his voice actor with Theodor Eberbach, the main character of Schwarzesmarken (which I will be reviewing next week), leading many fans to believe that this guy is in fact the same person – driven to apocalyptic myopia by the ultimate failure and loss of everything he worked and sacrificed for in the years after that show, so that now, about 20 years later, the man who was once a hero has lost all hope and just wants to see the world burn, while retaining the wit and skill to possibly do just that. If that’s true, it would be kind of brilliant, and material for a deep study of a twisted psychology… but again, this is only a theory, not something that’s written out and canonized anywhere – in terms of who he actually is and what his presence does for Total Eclipse… yeah, you could put pretty much anybody with no connection to Muv Luv in his place and it would make as much sense. Tell us that he’s Yukiteru Amano, or Gendo Ikari, or Kermit the Frog and it would be as consistent and satisfying as the nobody he is. So that’s a major strike against Total Eclipse and one of the least competently written and implemented villains I have ever seen, even if the expanded universe could maybe bring it back in the future.
At least after this final swerve with the emergence of the terrorists, we are well and truly in the end. We get some decent action as everybody not killed or taken hostage tries to fight back, some decent drama as one of the leaders of the Refugee group (which like their Alternative equivalent and unlike their masters has their heart in the right place even if they’re doing everything 100% wrong) finds that one of the UN officials we’ve had as a tertiary character is actually someone she deeply respects and even idolizes, causing her to have second thoughts about the operation. Though some of the technical aspects are off (The terrorists are able to remote-control TSFs in combat – something that threw me when I watched blind because why the hell do you have human pilots if you can use them as drones and threw me a different when when I went through the core games. TSFs in the core material can be put on remote autopilot, but it was never indicated that they could meaningfully fight that way).
Just as the idiot terrorists are getting burned at both ends, we learn the Mastermind’s real play – a US research facility had a bunch of captured BETA in suspended animation, and the bad guys want to set them loose (yeah, at the end of the mock battle arc, fancy that). What that’s supposed to accomplish is a bit bigger and more climactic than the Alternative bits for once, though, as apparently America, after giving half of Alaska to the Soviet Union, went and built a secret line of nukes under the border to literally shear off the red half of Alaska if too many BETA were detected crossing the line. The massive bomb yield would surely mess up the whole world that’s left, but of course it’s meant to only be deployed in a situation where nuclear winter or worse is a case of acceptable losses. And, because nobody watched Doctor Strangelove, it’s a totally automated system that will blow the line if too many of the BETA released from the secret research facility get too far.
Thus, the fight is on one way to call in the cavalry and another to thin out the BETA herd and stop them from crossing the nuclear line in the sand. During this you can scratch such entries as “Someone is brainwashed and crazy” off your bingo cards, and while Yukon Base is left in a massive mess, the day is of course saved, with the biggest drama being whether the Scarlet Twins would succumb to that “brainwashed and crazy” or pull out perhaps because of their feelings for Yuya.
Finally, at the end, Yui is recalled to Japan (temporarily; she has a report to give about this bull). She manages to not make moves on Yuya before departing, though there’s certainly tension, but she gets her spine back for her last conversation with Cryska, recognizing and stating openly to a confused Cryska that their relationship is one of rivals in love. You can go ahead and pull out your Extra bingo card for that conversation, but it’s where the show ends.
When I first watched Total Eclipse, I thought it was insane in its pacing, schizophrenic in its tone, and sometimes prone to making baffling choices, but actually fine to good on the micro level, with a lot of decent movements on the level of episodes or scenes, or even just the individual arcs. There were, of course, things that just flagrantly didn’t work, but there were also things that worked fairly well. Coming back to it with Alternative proper under my belt, it still has problems where I thought it has problems before, but my view on those has largely softened. However, in that process, Total Eclipse sprouted a whole host of new problems, all of which amount to being too derivative of its parent story, a problem that’s particularly grating on the more micro levels. Any forgiveness it earned for its broader choices, it lost for its smaller ones.
That said, for all that I have problem after problem with Total Eclipse, I can’t really bring myself to hate it. Yuya shapes up and stops being as huge a git as he started being, so that he’s a watchable character for most of his run. Yui, Cryska, and Inia are totally acceptable in their own ways, and could even be intriguing if you’re in a generous mood. Some of the tertiary characters that don’t do a lot for the story and this aren’t really worth mentioning in the recap, like the Scarlet Twins direct commander or the UN badass who the Refugee lady looks up to, are pretty good for the limited screen time they’re given. And while I had a lot of complaints for a lot of the show, I don’t think any of it, even the most obnoxious periods of Yuya and Yui fighting at the start or the pointless grating Cui scenes at the end, was really awful in the way that would make me want to quit.
Tack on to that some decent action and a lot of borrowed scifi, and you have a recipe for a show that’s not good, but is tolerable. It’s the iron pyrite to Muv Luv Alternative’s gold, a fake that could never in any world achieve what the real thing achieves… but on its own, it’s no worse than C- fare, watchable if you’re in the mood but not really one to recommend.