Well, I always seem to get myself into something mammoth for January, and this year it’s going to be a big, long look at the Muv Luv franchise. In its most basic form, Muv Luv is a trilogy of Visual Novels that, together, tell the story of Takeru Shirogane across time and dimensions, ending with the insanely popular and acclaimed Muv Luv Alternative. Of course, the franchise is much larger than just that, including tons of side-stories, alternate versions, and of course a few anime outings that are why I’m doing this. That said, while VNs aren’t usually what I draw attention to here, I feel like it’s important to go through the source material of Muv Luv as well as the shows.
A big part of this is that the only entry in the main series that’s been put to Anime is Alternative – the third in the series. I’ll be getting to that at the end of the month, but right now I want to lay the groundwork by addressing the chapters of Muv Luv that didn’t get to the screen, Extra and Unlimited.
Before I really dive in, a word of warning. If you are the kind of person who would enjoy a VN, or if you’ve thought about trying one out and maybe playing Muv Luv for yourself, stop right here. I am not kidding, stop reading this review and go read/play Muv Luv. I’ll short cut the fact that I usually leave verdicts for the end and say that it’s worth both the time invested in getting through the darn thing and the money the game costs. It’s on Steam with English text, you’re reading a massive block of English text right now, you’ve got no excuse to not just go and experience the real thing.
And I know what you’re thinking: don’t I spoil everything I review on this blog? How is Muv Luv any different? Well, I put the extra effort into this warning because this is a case where I think the spoilers actually matter. While the main purpose of me going into the kind of detail that I usually do in these reviews is to explain everything for the sake of discussion and so that these reviews are fully informative to non-viewers, it’s worth noting that I’m not the kind of person who typically cares all too much about being ‘spoiled’. For most shows and films and books even if I have a good idea what’s going to happen, that doesn’t lessen the enjoyment very much. So normally when I review a bad show, I think it’s fine to not put in extra effort to warn folks about the fact this is (as it says in the title) a Spoiler review, because it’s bad and they might as well not watch it, and if it’s a good or worthwhile show, then it’s still good or worthwhile even when you know what’s coming.
But a Visual Novel, at least one like Muv Luv, is a different beast. It is an interactive story experience that you explore from the perspective of the main character. It thrives on you learning more about the other characters and the world they inhabit by doing, and thus while some basic understanding of the outlay of the game is harmless, the details really are best found out by discovering them in an organic fashion. I’m still going to go into full detail, so that I can talk about details without having to allude to them or assume the audience remembers them precisely, and so that readers who haven’t read the VN and don’t believe they ever will (which is something I respect, as much as I’d recommend the VN) can still follow, understand, and enjoy this review.
So this is your last warning: if you want to have the full Muv Luv experience, do it now. You should still be able to enjoy the VN after this if I manage to convince you, but it’ll probably shine a little brigher if you don’t have this review behind you.
With that clear, a little in the way of definitions. Muv Luv Extra is the first Muv Luv game/scenario, Muv Luv Unlimited is the second, and Muv Luv Alternative is the third. I’d say chronologically, but that gets… complicated. The names are a little quirky, but you can largely think of them as 1, 2, and 3 from a series structure stand point. Extra and Unlimited are set a little apart from Alternative, too. In their current western release on Steam, those two entries are sold as one game (simply titled Muv Luv) while Alternative stands alone. Part of the reason for this is probably that Unlimited will look at your most recent Extra playthrough in order to change a few elements of its script, while Alternative has no such mechanic. It’s probably easier to pass information like that internally. The two have always been paired with that. In fact, while the Steam version lets you just play Unlimited if you want, originally Unlimited would be locked behind finishing a minimum of two specific endings of Extra (and one of the achievements on the current version reflects that, declaring you “ready for Unlimited” once you’ve earned the requisite Extra clears)
You can probably take from this that Extra and Unlimited are the kind of VNs that have multiple routes, and you’d be right. Like many such, the route is determined by what heroine Takeru (as played by you) is pursuing in this reality, determined by choices made over the course of the games. The route difference is much more pronounced in Extra which has one route for the two main heroines that forks at the end, two similar-to-each-other routes for another pair of characters that fork from the main route at about the midpoint in the main route’s run, and one last route for the last proper heroine that forks just a hair earlier. Unlimited instead branches near the end, and has all its major events take place in some form no matter who and what you pick.
Because of this, talking about Extra is going to involve a lot of talking about its leading ladies. We’re going to be spending a lot of time with this cast, so I might as well get it out of the way and introduce everyone who’s consistently important in the Muv Luv Trilogy.
First up is Sumika Kagami, Takeru’s sometimes violent, often ditzy, but always spunky childhood friend. Her romantic interest in Takeru is fairly obvious to everyone who isn’t Takeru, but to be fair she does punch him into the stratosphere now and again, so perhaps Takeru can be forgiven for not picking up on the otherwise blindingly obvious signals. This kind of typifies a lot of their relationship and interactions: Takeru and Sumika tease each other mercilessly throughout Extra with fairly constant roughhousing besides; you’d think they were the worst of enemies if not for the fact that they also clearly seem like a couple who can’t really live without each other. Honestly, it’s remarkable how well their chemistry works when by all rights it largely shouldn’t, but contrasted against some examples of genuine bitter enmity in these stories it’s pretty clear that the only reason Takeru and Sumika can be harsh with one another verbally and physically is that they both feel 100% safe and comfortable with the other person. This shows more in their calmer interactions, particularly some window-to-facing-window conversations that tend to come up in the evenings and see the pair acting more openly insightful and empathetic towards their other half. When these two are sweet, they’re incredibly sweet and really express a strong bond with deep roots.
Next we have Meiya Mitsurugi. Meiya is a newcomer to Takeru’s life, showing up quite out of nowhere to turn said life upside down. In a sense, she fills the plot role of the traditional “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”, in that she serves as a catalyst to force Takeru to confront his assumptions about his existence from new angles, but while Meiya may do what that stock character does, she fills neither the expectation (being a well-spoken and refined, even regal, young woman despite her disconnect with normalcy, when the typical MPDG would have a voice more like Sumika’s) nor the definition (The MPDG being defined as lacking an inner life or unique persona, when Meiya of course has plenty of desires and problems of her own to be confronted in her route and even out of it). She appears in Takeru’s bed one Monday morning, transfers into his class, and from there just sort of makes herself at home with the help of her absurd wealth and squad of retainers.
Meiya is heir to the Mitsurugi Zaibatsu (Mitsurugi Financial Group in the subtitles, which doesn’t quite carry the weight of the term “Zaibatsu”), which lets her do things like get rid of Takeru’s parents at the start of the story by sending them on a round-the-world vacation, buy out every house within a kilometer of Takeru and Sumika’s houses to build her own giant mansion (in the course of a couple days), summon top chefs from around the world to produce a school lunch, and other such displays of telling the rules to sit down and shut up because she’s got money. She also has an archaic warrior honor and no idea how ordinary people live their lives. Her requests are most usually filtered through her chief maid, Tsukiyomi, who is less disconnected than Meiya but warped enough that she often causes more mayhem than Meiya would directly. If Tsukiyomi needs extra hands, she calls in a trio of maids that quickly and rightly receive the nickname “the three idiots”, leading to even more mayhem than if Tsukiyomi just handled it. Lastly in Meiya’s circle there’s Takahashi, the driver, who aside from being able to make a 60-meter-long limousine do Fast & Furious tricks is probably the most normal of Team Mitsurugi.
Sumika and Meiya are the main heroines of Muv Luv Extra, having the largely shared longest route and being the two endings you need to see to be “ready” for Unlimited. They also probably get the most dedicated time on common routes, so they rather come off as the ones the game wants you to get attached to. That said, there are three other full-fledged heroines in Extra (classmates of Takeru at the start), and a few other characters worth introducing besides.
The first of those heroines is Chizuru Sakaki, aka “Class Rep” due to being, well, the class representative. The very surface read on her is that she’s, to put it bluntly, the Class Rep. She’s somewhat shrill, a great student, and a stickler for rules and order, which combine with her big glasses to create a very stereotypical picture… at first. Like fellow Class Rep with braids and huge glasses Tsubasa Hanekawa, there’s more to Sakaki than meets the eye… though you’re not guaranteed to see all that much of it in Extra depending on the choices you make. One side note for her is that she’s the outgoing captain of the Lacrosse team, which I’m sure won’t lead to a big arc that takes up the middle third of the game.
Class Rep’s archenemy is Kei Ayamine, a laconic, teasing, chronic absentee. Ayamine has a deep distaste for authority, rules, and structure, and a sharp enough tongue even speaking (as she does) largely in sentence fragments to get under Class Rep’s admittedly thin skin. Ayamine is probably the heroine that it’s the hardest to get a real handle on, in part because that’s also true in character. She has a distinctive voice (like all the characters in Muv Luv – one of the strengths of the franchise being that the characters are both instantly connectable and deep when explored) but because she’s furtive and mysterious there’s only so much that can be reliably said about her. She’s a slacker, hates Class Rep, likes Yakisoba sandwiches, and is notably strong and good at sports. If you’ve got that down, we’re good at least for the “main line” of Extra.
The relationship between Sakaki and Ayamine is what I was alluding to when I mentioned that Takeru and Sumika’s interactions are juxtaposed with a real enmity. These two fight pretty much whenever they’re in the same place at the same time and it does NOT come off as friendly teasing, or anything less than legitimate venom, really. I honestly think that may be part of the “reason” for these characters, since their mutual hatred does a lot to paint Takeru and Sumika in a better light.
Lastly, Miki “Tama” Tamase is the most bizarrely designed of the characters. She’s tiny compared to the rest of her classmates, looking more like a middle schooler rather than a high school senior, keeps her hair in a sharp-angled spiraling boomerang formation that’s as broad as her arm span, with the top styled in a cat-ear design supported by her wearing of a fake cat tail accessory and oversized bell collar, not to mention her sometimes cat-like mannerisms and expressions. Tama can seem like the team pet, but she’s actually utilized pretty well, the easily-flustered girl acting as something of a mediator, particularly between Sakaki and Ayamine. Even on the common lines we get that she’s a pretty good archer of all things, but also that she has some severe anxiety issues to get over when she’s not just running around being cute.
Those are the heroines (characters with routes to explore their personas, ultimately leading to romance endings with Takeru) of Muv Luv Extra, but there are a few more characters (aside from Meiya’s retainers) that bear mentioning in general. Marimo Jinguji is the home room teacher for Takeru and his not-exactly-harem. She’s kind and nice and is remarkably tolerant of the shenanigans that go on all the time in Muv Luv Extra. She also has a fun, friendly rivalry with Yuuko Kouzuki, the hot-rodding mad scientist physics teacher who enjoys livening up the already lively situation and setting up things that won’t pay off until Alternative. Finally, Takeru does have one other boy in his circle of friends: Mikoto Yoroi, a small or even girly guy who’s something of a wilderness survival expert (due to his father often “kidnapping” him into stranded-on-a-desert-island scenarios), is Takeru’s usual opponent in his favorite robot themed fighting game (Valger-On), and is otherwise a kind of chipper dude who’s calamitously bad at listening to people and following a conversation.
And, I suppose, I should spare a few words for Takeru himself. Takeru is the protagonist of a Visual Novel, and as such there’s a degree to which the implicit viewer contract has to keep his personality in check. After all, Takeru can fall in love with whoever you want him to and answer a lot of important questions different ways at your discretion besides. However, Takeru does at least have a personality of his own. It’s not always the most charming; there are times when he seems to have all the guts of Shinji Ikari with a whole hell of a lot more unjustified pride. He gets a few scenes where he’s allowed to be legitimately cool to compensate, but he does talk a lot bigger than he delivers on most things, though more especially trivial ones. He’s also an incurable goofball, which can be endearing or grating depending on the context. I think most critical to this, though, is that Takeru grows up both over the course of each game and across the trilogy as a whole. Even at the end of Alternative I kind of feel like he’s got some growing left in him, but he’s also come a long way. All this, I think, makes him at least a decent character in his own right. If I had to choose, as a viewer, between Takeru Shirogane and a totally generic milquetoast nice guy protagonist the likes of which tends to crop up even in anime that wants you to self-insert? Shirogane, by a mile. He screws up, loses his cool, lets his emotions interfere with his life, gets frightened, hurts people with thoughtless actions, regrets his choices… and is better for it. While Extra is mostly safe and harmless and doesn’t invoke this as much as the harsher world-lines of Unlimited and Alternative, it’s important that when he’s challenged as a person, he’s not always going to rise trivially to the occasion.
So, how does the story go? After a little prologue wherein Sumika and Takeru go shopping, we get the point where Takeru wakes up to find Meiya in his bed with him, having no idea who she is or why she’s here. Sumika finds them moments later, to predictable results. After punching Takeru into a Team Rocket Style Blast Off, Sumika catches up to him on the walk to school (Meiya having vanished in the scene transition). They arrive at class to be harangued by Sakaki for showing up almost late (not actually late, just cutting it close) and making a ruckus, and also encounter and introduce Tama. Then, as homeroom begins (introducing Marimo) the new transfer student, Meiya, is brought in and sat in the desk next to Takeru, his previous neighbor having been suspiciously scouted by another school’s baseball team. Meiya causes quite the fuss with how overwhelmingly familiar she acts towards Takeru (not to mention her general aura of awe), with Sumika, Class Rep, and to a lesser extent Tama seeming particularly bothered by this turn of events. They don’t blame Meiya, though, preferring to heap the dark looks onto Takeru.
The first arc of the VN, common to all routes, is what I’d call the “School Lunch” Arc. The basic pattern is that, after Meiya’s hectic first day, both she and Sumika prepare lunch for Takeru each day – Sumika bringing her sometimes weird (but also sometimes weirdly inspired) home cooking, while Meiya presents the creations of master chefs using the rarest and most expensive ingredients. You can choose one of those two lunches, of course, but you can also flee the scene and trigger a second choice of where to flee to, spending the lunch period with Ayamine (Who’s rustled up some deluxe yakisoba sandwiches and tries to use them to train Takeru to shake like a dog) , Class Rep (who’ll share what little lunch she has in a surprisingly soft and earnest moment) or Marimo and Yuuko (Which gets you and Marimo teased mercilessly by Yuuko). The potential interactions with Tama come at a different point in each day, structured to not interfere with the lunch battles… which she can actually be triggered to join in on the last day, for her own reasons.
Yeah, last day. After a few rounds of the lunches (during which time the other major characters, such as Yuuko, Mikoto, Tsukiyomi, and the Three Idiots all get introduced), Yuuko interrupts the pending choice to propose that the situation be settled once and for all with a grand cook-off. She’s quite a sly manipulator about it too, convincing not just primary belligerents Sumika and Meiya to agree to this insane scheme, but Sakaki, Ayamine, and Tama as well. The prize at stake (by Yuuko’s order) is that the winner will have Takeru all to herself for a day.
The cooking contest comes and, of course, playing sole judge Takeru you can declare whoever you want to be the winner. For the record, Sumika makes a horrid sounding (but apparently fine) dish that combines a whole slew of Takeru’s favorite foods into a single item, Meiya has her chefs create a modernized selection of dishes from the Manchu Han Imperial Feast (her idea, with some great analysis, but not her work), Sakaki presents a bento that would be astoundingly fancy if it weren’t normal adjacent to Mitsurugi-style fancy (into which she put far more heart than most would expect given that she claims to only be participating in order to stop the out-of-control nonsense), Tama offers a rice ball “ostrich egg” that frankly I’d like to try, and Ayamine produces what is apparently a normal Yakisoba sandwich (but with premium ingredients that push it up to par with the rest, as is revealed if you pick Ayamine to win).
Whatever girl wins has Takeru go on a date with her the next day, which gives you more of a chance to experience her character and tastes. Amusingly, each date also implies that at least one of the other girls is spying: Sumika is out of the character’s sight if you’re with Meiya, Meiya makes an offscreen loon of herself if you’re with Sumika, Tama, or Class Rep (with Sumika hinting that she was also there in the latter of the three cases, as of the evening talk with her), and Class Rep of all people gets into offscreen (comedic) trouble as a ‘spy’ on Ayamine.
The date, however, wraps up the dueling lunches pattern and launches us into the Lacrosse Arc. The basic setup for the arc is that the school sports festival is coming up, and Women’s Lacrosse has been added to the list of available events. This has Class Rep down in the dumps a bit as while ostensibly it’s there to drum up interest and revive the Lacrosse team that might otherwise disband, she suspects that it’s really because everyone should be equally bad at the unpopular, complicated sport for which the school already has equipment. Yuuko pours gasoline onto this fire, however, by challenging Marimo to a class-to-class showdown in Lacrosse, with Marimo sure to be forced into cosplaying for a convention if team Main Characters doesn’t manage to overcome Yuuko’s class. As though this wasn’t personal enough for Sakaki, Yuuko also promises that her team captain will be a girl named Akane Suzumiya, who is something of a long-term rival to Class Rep in academics and sports alike (though it’s revealed a little into the arc that the two are actually best friends, being more like Mikoto and Takeru or Yuuko and Marimo than Class Rep herself and Ayamine).
There’s just one problem, though. After the initial volunteers for Lacrosse (Sakaki, Sumika, Meiya, Tama, and an extra named Kashiwagi) step forward, the group is one player short of an exposition team. There’s a strong player left to grab, which is good, but the problem is that player is Ayamine, who’s not going to play nice with (or play at all with) Sakaki.
The basic tension of the Lacrosse Arc is first convincing Ayamine to sign on to the team (though you can shirk this when Sakaki asks you, if you don’t mind breaking her heart, and it still works out) and then training everyone’s Lacrosse skills up to the level where they can take on Yuuko’s team with ace Akane at the big sports festival game. Your choices (as the self-declared “manager” of the team) through this are mostly who to talk to at a couple of junctures in the middle of training, and who to follow up with on your way home. It doesn’t seem like all that much, but there are also a couple of ‘control’ choices in this arc that aren’t obvious but together determine (with the exception of not disambiguating Sumika and Meiya) what ending you’re going to get. Essentially, you have to make a couple of more or less obtuse picks if you want a minor heroine’s route, and if you make those picks and don’t have the affection to qualify for the girl’s ending, the game plays a short “neutral” end instead, one of two depending on where exactly you went wrong. In a sense, Lacrosse itself doesn’t matter, but serves as a cover for the route split going on ‘under the hood’.
Because of that, this is also where the review has to split in order to cover the endings of the “lesser” Heroines.
Tama is the first to branch off. About halfway through Lacrosse, you get the chance to visit her house and see her challenged to an archery contest for her father’s Dojo. If you haven’t gotten close to Tama, she has to drop from Lacrosse (with the blessing of her friends) to train for that challenge. A cross-dressing Mikoto replaces her, and the game cuts to and ends in the final huddle before the fateful Lacrosse match. If you have been following along with her, though… the same thing happens, except instead of the game skipping to a Lacrosse ending, Takeru agrees to help Tama overcome her anxiety so she can show off her real skills. After all, it’s not Tama’s ability with a bow that’s in question, it’s the fact that she completely freaks out when she’s being watched. The fight to conquer Tama’s fears leads, of course, to getting very close to her and ultimately a mutual confession after the Dojo match (which, in a final little twist, is revealed to have been a complete setup on the part of Tama’s dad and his friend/rival whose daughter was Tama’s opponent, in order to make Tama face her fears). It’s sweet enough, I guess, but we don’t really learn much new about Tama, we just do a deep explore of the Tama we already knew. If you like Tama and think she’s cute and want to get to know her better, I think you’ll be pretty satisfied with her arc. If you were hoping for something transformative, hers is not the arc for you.
Sakaki and Ayamine don’t share an arc the same way Meiya and Sumika do, but their stories do start the same way: at the big game, the two of them can’t overcome their friction, resulting in a sporting accident that puts Akane in the hospital with a concussion – mild, but given the nature of the injury the hospital insists on keeping her a few days for monitoring and testing, which is enough to cause everything to melt down back at school. On one side, Ayamine starts to make herself even scarcer and seems to have some bad blood with the Hospital. On the other, it turns out that Akane was insanely popular, and her rivalry with Sakaki was well known while their friendship wasn’t. This leads to Sakaki being bullied to the point where she stops coming to school.
No matter which of the two you’re on the route for, these facts are basically true. On Ayamine’s route, Meiya and Sumika handle Class Rep’s problems (and do so more effectively than Takeru does, given the scenes with her later in the arc) while Takeru sticks his nose into Ayamine’s business. On Sakaki’s route, Ayamine is largely left to her own devices because she’s more “okay” than Sakaki, and Takeru does his damnedest to take care of Sakaki in her dark hour. Both of these routes discover and explore more about their Heroine, bringing us into things that we didn’t really know about them. They also highlight the similarities between the two in a way that becomes rather interesting as of Unlimited.
So, starting with Ayamine, we actually get to delve into her past and, to a lesser extent, why she is the way she is. It takes a long while to come out, but it seems that her mother used to be a nurse who worked at the hospital where Akane has been taken. In those days, a young doctor named Sagiri was a very close friend of the family. Very, very close. As in, the plan was for him and Ayamine to get married when she was old enough. Ayamine also idolized her mother, and wanted to become a nurse herself. This all changed when Sagiri made a mistake in the operating room, and Ayamine’s mother (quite against Sagiri’s own intent) took the blame and the fall for malpractice. This resulted in Ayamine’s mother being fired and up-and-coming Sagiri getting arranged into a somewhat political marriage with the hospital director’s daughter. From this, Ayamine came away feeling horribly betrayed by both “The System” (hence her hatred for people like Class Rep), the mother she looked up to (who she doesn’t know was innocent), and the man she was in at least puppy love with. Now, Sagiri, deeply regretful for his part in all of this, wants to start over, at least getting a chance to tell Ayamine the truth and possibly being willing to go so far as to divorce his wife to be with her again.
Takeru gets tangled up in this as he tries to get Ayamine to visit Akane in the hospital without her suplexing him and fleeing at the first sign of Sagiri, and deeper when she convinces him to lie to Sagiri about being her boyfriend… though it’s unclear just how much of a lie Ayamine (or Takeru) would like that to be. Sagiri seems like a real class act – though he does want to make up for having, as he sees it, betrayed Ayamine, he’s happy for her to have a good man and deeply respects Takeru’s own increasing and increasingly romantic devotion. Ultimately, both men confess to Ayamine (Sagiri off screen, and Takeru struggling to walk off getting creamed by a car other than Yuuko’s magic slapstick Stratos), and she accepts Takeru’s feelings with Sagiri as the gracious loser.
Quite randomly, this is one of the most important arcs in Extra, for the sake of future plot, so it would be best to keep Sagiri in the back of your mind for later.
Sakaki’s arc also clues us in on the fact that she’s got mommy issues. Specifically, on visiting Sakaki’s house to check up on her, we learn that her father abandoned her in infancy, leading to her mother (a poor decision-maker unable to really stand on her own) to subject Class Rep’s life to a parade of sugar daddies. This has resulted in Sakaki having come to absolutely despise her mother (and develop some serious hangups about sexuality), and it seems that her intensity as Class Rep is at least in part an act of rebellion against her mom’s lifestyle and attitude as well as an earnest attempt to not be like her. However, in the wake of the Lacrosse incident and with the whole school except her immediate circle rather ruthlessly tearing her down, Sakaki is kind of at the end of her rope. The way she’s built herself up she can’t really bend, and because of that she’s just about ready to break.
Takeru steps in, of course, in particular saving a not-in-her-right-mind Sakaki from getting into serious trouble with a skirt-chasing salaryman. The interaction and following heart-to-heart between the two kids are seen, however, and since they were wearing their school uniforms while off campus in a bad neighborhood at off hours engaging in dubious activities this gets the authorities involved. Sakaki and Takeru each end up sticking up for the other in huge ways, ending with Takeru confessing that he does, in fact, have an ulterior motivation for the events of that day: a massive crush on dear Class Rep, not that he’d had the chance to tell her that yet. In the wake of that, Chizuru accepts Takeru’s feelings (having harbored her own, not that she really knew what to do with them) and the two of them go forward accepting that they need to and want to work on their faults. It’s not a perfect fairy tale ending or relationship, but it’s (like a lot of Class Rep’s scenes) surprisingly earnest and ‘real’.
Now, when considering a multi-route VN in whole, I think it’s somewhat obligatory for the reviewer (me) to admit who their subjective favorite is. There are no wrong answers in this, though we may pretend there are for the sake of humorous interaction. Of the Muv Luv Extra girls, my personal favorite has got to be… Sumika, actually. Like, it’s not even close, she just pushes way too many of my buttons. But below Sumika yet head and shoulders above everybody else is Sakaki, and a big part of that is how effective the character writing for her is over the course of the game.
To an extent, she can be considered a well-played Tsundere. She starts off prickly, even harsh, and is a flawed person who can go too far with her sharp tongue sometimes. But it’s also easy to see that she wants to be a good person, and does have a kind heart even if she doesn’t always let it show. But it’s not entirely fair to just brand her with the “tsundere” archetype either, because unlike the stock tsundere she’s not exactly “covering” for affection, she’s learning and growing as a person, grappling with her own internal issues and even against her best judgment letting those struggles show.
While the games will point out the ways in which she’s actually similar to Ayamine (both of them being intensely shaped by ill will towards a mother they’ve come to hate and not respect, and determined to follow their paths out of a need for control of their own situation), she’s actually kind of similar to Takeru in a writing sense. Just like Takeru has to (and does) grow up through his experiences both in any particular game and over the entire franchise, Sakaki has to (and does) learn and grow as a person in Extra (and Unlimited and Alternative as well). In a lot of ways, I do feel as though, while clearly not intended to be on par with Meiya or Sumika, she did get a little more thought, effort, and love put into her creation than did Tama or Ayamine, and a lot of that comes out in how intensely wrought yet humanly grounded her Extra arc is.
But enough of that, what are the other options? Well, if you take certain actions (I believe the ones that would normally authorize Sakaki or Ayamine’s end, without having the affection for them) the team will win the big Lacrosse match cleanly, only have Takeru wake up after the afterparty on an abandoned tuna trawler in the middle of the Pacific with only Mikoto for company, evidently shanghaied by Mikoto’s (unseen) dad for the other “neutral” ending.
On the other hand, if you navigate the Lacrosse arc correctly (or possibly if you do whatever and have enough affection from Sumika and/or Meiya; I’m less than 100% on the mechanics beyond what can be derived from playing through the game in a completionist manner.), Class Rep and Ayamine will temporarily overcome their differences to win the game cleanly (as in the neutral end), Mikoto’s dad won’t disappear anybody to a random derelict, and the game will continue onto what’s now the Sumika/Meiya Route.
You could be forgiven for not realizing that you’d missed out on Tama, Sakaki, and Ayamine though, as while the three of them do kind of fall out of focus once you’re in this section of the game there’s not an immediate and obvious ‘break’ from the game as it was in the dueling lunches or lacrosse periods. You attend class, having lots of talks with the girls (mostly meaning Meiya and Sumika) and getting some various and sundry zany antics on the side. While there are a ton of smaller movements and grace notes throughout this arc (and the whole game, in fact, most of which I am skipping or glossing over because this is a spoiler review rather than a Let’s Play), there are a few movements that really bear mentioning.
For the first, we get another culinary sequence, because Muv Luv knows that the best way to someone’s heart is through the stomach (well, or right through the ribs if you want to reach it literally, but that’s not for Extra). Specifically, after a failed attempt by Tsukiyomi to get Sumika out of the way (sending her parents on an all-expenses-paid Australian safari thinking they’d take their daughter with them), Sumika starts cooking dinner for herself, Takeru, and Meiya on the regular. This is an important thing for her even though it eats into her study time because she’s feeling inadequate about what she’s able to do for Takeru, next to Meiya. However, the feeling between the girls (like their budding friendship, all things considered) is mutual, as Meiya herself feels a little inadequate when it comes to her bond with Takeru relative to Sumika’s.
This results in house-shaking explosions that aren’t explained for a bit, but ultimately prove to be Meiya’s attempts to teach herself to cook, realizing that the personal effort, rather than solving things with money, is important to communicate her feelings. Yes, somehow Meiya’s fundamental disconnect from reality means that attempting to create rice balls results in massive house-shaking explosions and after days of training and an entire night slaving over the effort, some eggshell-ridden food objects that might be called rice balls if one is exceptionally generous. Said effort also results in a despairing, crying Meiya, which Takeru does a good job of dealing with, cheering her up that while she might not be able to cook like Sumika, it’s fine – Sumika is Sumika and Meiya is Meiya and neither of them should try to be the other. Meiya ultimately shows her gratitude to both Takeru and Sumika by giving the two of them a classy dinner date, where Takeru gets to have the other side of the heart-to-heart with Sumika, assuring her that it’s alright if they do things their way and Meiya does things hers.
From there, we get a birthday bash, as it turns out that Takeru and Meiya share their birthday. The gang prepares a surprise party for Takeru while he works on getting a gift for Meiya (on a budget of 500 Yen). The surprise party is extra surprising, though, as everybody but Meiya worked to make it a party for her as well when she wasn’t planning on celebrating for herself. The resulting exchanges are very sweet; Sumika gets Takeru a “Game Guy” (Based on the images and descriptions, a lawyer-friendly GBA. That would have come out around the 2001 date of Muv Luv.) while everyone else chips in games, and the two childhood friends spend a little quality time playing. Takeru and Meiya also get a chance to exchange gifts in private, with Takeru’s cheap little gift (the exact form of which will lead to a different minor scene later) putting Meiya over the moon wit joy while she gives him a secret signet ring that will, once Meiya ascends the ‘throne’ of the Mitsurugi Zaibatsu, mark him as someone deep enough in her favor that retainers like Tsukiyomi would be obliged to obey.
After the birthday party, the next main event is a Hot Springs vacation. Schemed up by Yuuko, everyone is going to be there (except Kashiwagi, who is too much of an extra to merit inclusion at this juncture) to have a nice time and take a load off. In addition to some general partying, this gets us three absolutely critical scenes. (You can also, with setup, get a “Marimo Ending” here but the game doesn’t acknowledge it as an ending and play continues like nothing happened).
The first of these scenes takes place as Takeru is bathing late at night. He hears Meiya and Sumika talking on the other side of the wall that divides the mens and womens baths, and Mikoto makes himself scarce suggesting that Takeru should eavesdrop in peace. He does, and hears Meiya and Sumika affirm their friendship and rivalry alike, the two declaring in unison that they’re in love with Takeru (which he somehow didn’t really get up to this point despite Sumika and especially Meiya being about as subtle as a pair of bricks to the face).
In a sense, you could stop here. This scene, with Takeru overhearing that conversation between Meiya and Sumika, ending on the love declaration, is played again at the start of Unlimited and is strongly implied to be the last thing Takeru remembers before winding up on the Unlimited world-line. The game wants you to clear both Meiya and Sumika’s endings before you’re “ready for Unlimited”, but getting to this moment in the Onsen trip with either one will, to an extent, give you the grounding you strictly need for most of Unlimited. I’d recommend doing the ending for whichever girl you’re going to go for in Unlimited (if you’re psychic) or going with the old ‘unlock’ if you don’t mind a little rereading, but it’s interesting to note that, to an extent, this is the one end to Muv Luv.
But, presuming you don’t go Blind Takeru and charge into unlimited after hearing Sumika and Meiya admit they’re in love with the same guy, there’s more at the Onsen. A nearby cave is found, and Takeru visits with Meiya, ending up having an emotionally charged conversation with her and also having to carry her back to the hot springs in when she slips and hurts her ankle. On the whole, the scene shows us more of Meiya’s vulnerable side (similar to the “Meiya learns to cook” movement) and that dark thoughts are really starting to eat her up inside. After that, there’s a scene where Sumika manages to get Takeru into a private mixed bath, and tries to seduce him there. Takeru dodges her efforts because, interested in Sumika or not, he can tell that she’s nervous as hell and not clearly thinking through the consequences of her actions. She takes this rather hard and abandons the plot with haste, left thinking that she doesn’t really have any hope of getting out of the Childhood Friend Zone.
Thus, Christmas approaches with both girls of the route thinking they’re on the brink of total defeat. On the night of the 22nd, Takeru overhears a strange conversation between Meiya and Tsukiyomi. He gets nothing from it, but both seem very disturbed to be overheard. Over the night, Takeru has a dream memory that finally comes together, revealing that the strange and out of place memory of promising to marry Sumika as she was carried off by some adults was, in fact, a memory of Meiya. The next day, Takeru wakes up to find that Meiya is gone. Sumika manages to explain, feeling a bitter irony when she hears that Takeru remembered that incident on his own.
The truth was, basically, that Meiya was a disfavored child who, due to a superstition about twins, lived with some distant relatives when she met Takeru. Then, however, her biological parents and favored twin sister died in an accident, and little Meiya was recalled by her grandfather as the sole heir of the Mitsurugi. Now that she’s eighteen, she’s set to have the reins passed to her, and at the same time set to be placed into a loveless arranged marriage with some notable. Wanting to have a life of her own choosing, she clung to the distant memory of her childhood and the boy who promised to marry her, and made a deal with Grandpa Mitsurugi that basically set up the plot: She would be able to interact with Takeru, and would be allowed to wed him and live more her own life under three conditions. First, he had to remember his promise all on his own, without any help or prompting from Meiya. Second, Takeru had to love and accept Meiya earnestly as herself, or there wouldn’t be a point. The third condition was a time limit – if by the end of the year (a little north of two months after the start of Muv Luv) Meiya hadn’t gotten anywhere, the game was over. Now, Meiya has returned home early, feeling that the second condition was lost to her and that the first condition may have been screwed by Takeru overhearing that conversation he couldn’t make heads or tails of the previous night. She left Sumika to deliver her goodbye, but Sumika (also in utter despair thinking that Takeru loves Meiya and not her) tells him to chase after Meiya and win her back, and to cap it off runs out into the cold December morning saying her own heartbroken (and heartbreaking) goodbye to Takeru.
Takeru chases after Sumika, and ends up finding Tsukiyomi. She gives him a good talking to about how things have gone and may yet go and then brings out Sumika. A last choice is set: Takeru can meet up with Tsukiyomi to go after Meiya after saying some goodbyes to a much calmer Sumika, or remain with Sumika and never see Meiya again.
If you’ve gone all in on one of the two heroines, the game makes the choice for you, but if you’ve gotten this far being indecisive, you get presented a choice of which ending to see. Either way, this is the final fork in the plot, where Meiya and Sumika diverge for a last couple scenes.
The Sumika ending is sweet and fun. Takeru stays with his childhood friend (of course on the hill behind the school where love confessions are blessed, because we need more tropes in here), they affirm their love for each other, and ultimately head back home, leaving Meiya to her devices. They arrive to find that Meiya has already had every bit of evidence of her presence essentially erased (the neighborhood is a normal neighborhood again), agree that they won’t forget her even if she tries to erase herself, enjoy the obligatory time in bed, and the next day go in a Christmas Eve date where we see that as much as they’re lovey-dovey they’re still Takeru and Sumika, ending with a big damn kiss that’s a hugely heartwarming moment.
The Meiya ending is a little different in tone and tenor. Takeru says goodbye to Sumika and then turns into a determined juggernaut of willpower and effort as he steps up to make Meiya his girl, impressing Tsukiyomi and even winning over Takahashi, who was at first against this crazy enterprise. He drives them to the Mitsurugi Estate, with the sixty meter Limo breaking every traffic law known to man on the way and ultimately enduring a hail of gunfire from security in order to deliver Takeru and the maids to the front door. The three idiots jump into battle against the house guards and Tsukiyomi delivers Takeru to the inner sanctum. There, he pulls out that ring Meiya gave him to discover that she’s already been made head of the Mitsurugi but hasn’t yet been married. This gives him the opportunity to chase after Meiya who… isn’t happy to see him at first, oddly enough. Yeah, as sharp-tongued as Class Rep may be, it’s Meiya who ardently tries to refuse Takeru’s declaration of love time after time, finishing off the action-packed wedding-crashing ending of Muv Luv with a roof top chase of Takeru following Meiya in a wedding dress, only for the two of them to conveniently crash through onto a waiting bed once she more or less gives in at long last. After the obligatory sealing of the deal, we get a small epilogue where Takeru is training hard to live up to his new position in the Mitsurugi. Presumably, he never sees his other friends again, though that element isn’t addressed.
To be honest, there’s a degree to which both the Meiya and Sumika endings are a little disappointing. The lesser Heroines get long, involved, dedicated arcs. Meiya and Sumika have to share; once their routes diverge from one another, there’s just enough time left for one or two scenes. The Meiya ending is also particularly baffling in how it abruptly cuts genre and character. To an extent, Takeru is more badass in the Meiya ending than he is in Unlimited (where he’s a soldier) or Alternative (Where he’s a soldier who’s actually kind of used to soldiering and is good at that stuff) and it comes right the hell out of nowhere along with gunfire, period style palace guards, and a bizarre action-romance climax.
If I had to describe the endings of Muv Luv Extra in one word each, Sumika’s route would be “Sweet”. It’s adorable and full of well-done intense feelings. Is it (along with the common Meiya-Sumika material) cliched as hell? You bet. But it’s also well enough written to start the waterworks or (especially in the true ending) warm the heart. Tama’s ending would be “Cute”, the story of an adorable girl overcoming her anxiety with the help of the boy she likes and who would come to like her. Ayamine’s would be “Melodramatic”, since it’s basically a soap opera plot full of twist reveals and overblown feelings. Chizuru’s would be “Earnest”, being a smaller-feeling story about a girl having to grapple with being brought down to the depths of (mundane, believable) despair and lifted back up by the love and support of her would-be boyfriend. Meiya’s, finally, would be “Excessive”. Like Meiya herself, the ending is completely over the top in every conceivable way and I still can’t for the life of me decide whether or not that’s a good thing.
To an extent, the differences between these endings kind of highlight the core elements of Muv Luv Extra. It is cliched as hell and sometimes melodramatic, and it has a certain comic excess that gives it an unreal quality. However, the writing is good enough, and the characters ultimately human and lovable enough, that you can broadly forgive the game’s excesses and appeal to time-worn tropes. It’s a pastiche of every Late 90’s to Early 2000’s school rom-com note, but it’s executed so well that you can’t help but smile. And to an extent, I think it’s supposed to be a bit hokey and cliched, even unreal enough to be considered “dream-like” in its appeal to these basic archetypal patterns, because ultimately Extra doesn’t stand alone. Extra is the first entry in the Muv Luv trilogy; it’s the peaceful, fun, and bright world that Takeru dreams of when Unlimited and Alternative throw him into a hellscape where alien monsters have invaded, most of humanity is dead, and he has to learn to fight and then fight just to see another day. It’s alright if Extra is a little much when it comes to the Rom Com genre tropes, because that serves to accentuate what’s lost in the other world-lines.
So, before I let Extra go more or less entirely, there’s one last element that I’d like to talk about: the material that hints at or ties in with the other core Muv Luv games. The most obvious is Valger-On. One of Takeru’s main interests outside the plot is a mecha-flavored fighting game, while in Unlimited and Alternative he’ll be piloting real mechas. The mechas and controls are different, but there’s enough transferable skill that it matters.
More interesting are a few enigmatic scenes, mostly around Yuuko. We get quite a few moments that have nothing to do with anything else in Extra where Yuuko devises a “Sure to win a Nobel prize” theory about parallel processing and artificial intelligence mid-class before running off to refine it (not that you can really follow the theory). We get another scene where she picks up a stray cat Takeru found with the explanation that said cat is a quantum many-worlds alternate of one of her students (not that this makes sense), and another set where she has Takeru write his name on his hand in permanent marker to not be washed off on penalty of class failure and has him haul thousands of pages she’s printed out for some reason, saying that he only has himself to blame in an odd way. There are a couple bizarre circumstances around Sumika as well: in one scene she throws her shoe at a fleeing Takeru (she’s not always the brightest bulb) and when he goes to retrieve it for her the shoe appears rather abruptly before him as though tossed back out of the bushes. Later, there’s a point where she and Takeru seem to be on a somewhat different page, and days after that she asks him if he’s been “in robot world” in a way that might be able to be read as referring to his Valger-On gaming addiction, but is more suggestive of something else.
While you’re playing Muv Luv Extra, it’s pretty safe to assume you know the pitch, that Extra is not all there is and the story will continue in at least one VN scenario set in a post-apocalyptic mecha world-line. As much as it’s nice to imagine somebody being utterly blindsided to discover Unlimited, I don’t think that level of “unspoiled” actually exists. Extra mostly wants to create this perception of the happy dreamy normal school romance world, but these scenes, particularly the ones where Yuuko goes on about weird theoretical physics and the like, serve to remind you of (or hint at) the fact that there’s more to Muv Luv than what you’re allowed to see in Extra. We won’t properly explain and use these space-time anomalies until Alternative, but it’s important for then to establish that they’re there.
So, on to Unlimited. This one will probably go a little faster because it’s all common route and cut into “Episodes” as the game calls important plot movements that are actually fairly bite-sized. We start with Takeru Shirogane hearing the confession at the Onsen, only to wake up in his bed at home. He regards this as a little weird, but picks up to head to school (including grabbing his Game Guy because I guess he’s a pretty poor student). Of course, when Takeru goes outside, the lack of a wake-up from Sumika (or even Meiya) becomes the least weird thing about his situation. The neighborhood is an ashen wasteland (more so than the area Meiya cleared for her mansion), and what would have been Sumika’s house is squashed under the partial wreck of what appears to be a giant humanoid robot. This makes Takeru think he’s having an awesome dream, and set off in search of what else his brain has cooked up, particularly any intact robots, because robots are awesome.
Eventually, Takeru decides to check out the location of his school, only to see that while, unlike the rest of the city, there’s life there, it now appears to be a kind of military base. He’s a bit slow on the uptake while talking to a couple guards at the gate though, and they become suspicious when they realize his school uniform is not a proper cadet uniform despite some pretty heavy visual similarity. Takeru ends up arrested and thrown in the detention barracks, where he languishes for multiple days (interrogations aside) before a familiar face shows up: Yuuko. She’s got a lot to say but the most important at the start is that she can and will get him out of prison on the condition that he agrees to obey her utterly. Takeru agrees, and gets hauled to her office for his tutorial.
Yuuko explains that Takeru is in a different world. He may regard it as a dream, but it’s very real to her and he doesn’t seem to be waking up out of it, so it’s time to play along. The basic facts of this world are as such: aliens known as the BETA invaded Earth in 1973 and have since done quite a number on mankind. Eurasia is overrun, Japan is a core war front, and the human population as of 2001 (when Muv Luv takes place) hangs at 1 billion. Part of Japan was overrun by the BETA but recently retaken, including this city (hence the ashen wasteland), with the former school site now being home to the United Nations Yokohama Base. There, Yuuko is still a mad scientist, but she’s not a teacher. Instead, she’s the Executive Officer of the base, effectively its second in command.
Yuuko is interested in Takeru, since his appearance has some relation to her theories, so she agrees to cover for him, including making him an off-the-books ID that will let him visit restricted areas (such as her office) conditional on his continued agreement to be pressed for information about alternate worlds and all that. As cover, and to make maximum use of him, Takeru will also be placed in a squad of cadets training to be Surface Pilots, a prospect that rather excites him because, hey, he’d get to pilot a big robot.
It just so turns out that said squad of cadets consists of some very familiar faces: Squad Leader Chizuru Sakaki is in charge of Meiya Mitsurugi, Kei Ayamine, and Miki Tamase (as well as the initially-absent Mikoto Yoroi), and their instructor is Sergeant Marimo Jinguji. In other words, Takeru’s Home Room Teacher is once again his teacher and his closest classmate friends are now his squad-mates, though Yuuko insists he should keep his status as a person from another reality absolutely top secret. Even outward from there it seems there are a lot of similarities: Akane was apparently a cadet until recently, when her class managed to graduate ahead of Chizuru’s, for instance. There are some new faces, like the base’s lunch lady Ms. Kyouzuka (who acts as a friendly sort of mentor to Takeru) not being someone Takeru knew, but that’s to be expected with Yokohama Base pulling from the whole of the UN. There are, however, three particularly glaring differences in Takeru’s circle: a change, a presence, and an absence.
The change is that Mikoto is a girl in this universe. Takeru makes an absolute mess of himself on first encountering Mikoto, who is certainly a girl but otherwise looks pretty much identical to Extra Mikoto, and who writes her name differently but is otherwise pretty much the same person as Extra Mikoto, with all the mannerisms and quirks down save where being a girl alters something. Werid.
The presence is Kasumi Yashiro, a little white-haired girl with some connection to Yuuko. She hangs out in a room next to Yuuko’s office most of the time, where there’s a brain and spinal cord in a glowing blue cylinder of unknown function and provenance. Kasumi is a little weird (I mean, she’s a girl in a formal uniform with bunny ear and tail accessories who hangs out in a creepy brain jar room) and extremely soft-spoken and laconic. I think through most of Unlimited she utters an easily countable number of unique words, mostly “bye-bye” as Takeru teaches her to say when she’s leaving the room, otherwise communicating largely through gestures. Kasumi’s main interaction in Unlimited is to wake Takeru up each morning, eerily like Sumika did in Extra. Which brings us to that last detail…
The absence is the marked lack of Sumika in Takeru’s new world. Out of everyone Takeru knew, Sumika was the one who undoubtedly had the largest presence in his life, and she’s not here when everyone else is, a fact that starts to make Takeru feel quite weird. He asks after her, if any of his other friends know who she is or if Marimo could find her, before the matter is finally brought to Yuuko’s attention. Yuuko tells Takeru that “Sumika Kagami” doesn’t exist in this world and never did, which Takeru finds to be something of a relief (not wanting Sumika to be subjected to the horrors of war even if her presence would make him feel better), though it would likely be more of a relief if Yuuko had told him that before he gave everyone the idea that he was probably looking for some mysterious old flame. Whoops.
In this world, Takeru also starts out brutally behind in… just about every way. While he wasn’t unhealthy in Extra, he wasn’t exactly in shape either, and now he’s being expected to compete on a military level. He’s also not had the rigorous basic training that everyone else in this world has had, so he can’t really do things like shoot straight or field strip a rifle. And, not being native to the culture, he can’t even really engage on the level of his friends in what they do for fun, since it’s different from his experience. This goes so far as to have Class Rep (who he still calls that, by the way) compare Takeru to a childrens TV icon “Chop-kun”, who at least sounds like he’s a lot of fun being terrible at everything and prideful about it as a puppet.
We get a couple of other arcs in here. In one, there’s a near miss regarding the squad being deployed in the face of a BETA attack, which causes Takeru to faint dead away, forcing him to confront (to an extent) the fact that he’s not psychologically hardened. On the reverse, there’s an arc where one of the girls (depending on who you’re spending time with, it could be any of the squad) finds Takeru’s Game Guy – a device that shouldn’t exist in this world – and after grilling Takeru to the point where he passes off an insane lie about being a 00 agent “Super-elite soldier” from Area 51 with the Game Guy as Yuuko’s “portable training terminal”, is allowed to borrow it. The girl in question becomes addicted to the video game, withdrawn, and asocial, causing friction in the squad even as it causes her to conspire more closely with Takeru… at least until the batteries die. There’s also just in general a lot of character building, relationship building, and military training that the squad is eager to hurry through and eager to get Takeru up to speed on. He is, at least a fast learner, but he needs to be faster still.
There is cause for haste in Takeru’s training, in that their squad is scheduled to soon take a test known as the CCSE (Comprehensive Combat Skill Evaluation) which will determine if they promote to piloting training or not. The squad failed the CCSE once before, seemingly at least in part because of the continuing friction between Sakaki and Ayamine that might be even more vitriolic in this universe. Soon enough, still as the weak link even if not dead weight, Takeru is thrown into the CCSE, where the group is semi-stranded on a tropical island to complete objectives and ultimately escape within a time limit. It’s a pretty dangerous “exam” and Takeru gets assailed by rubber bullet traps, bitten by a snake, cared for by Mikoto much to his horror, driven delirious with sickness, shot at by a live ammo gun turret, and ultimately humiliated even when the group manages to pass as he’s the only one without a swimsuit for the celebration at the end.
That may suck to experience, but Takeru’s persistence at least pays off when it’s time to train for actual piloting rather than the basic stuff. It turns out all that time playing VR robot fighting videogames as well as the modern world’s tolerance for things like roller coasters has given him an iron stomach and high affinity for actually controlling real giant robots, together leading to him not just placing at the top of his class, but having the highest starting aptitude on record. As he gets more freedom, his attempts to pull off video game moves like jump-cancels lead to a bizarre but highly effective piloting style, hampered only by the limitations not of the TSFs themselves but the control system. Now the tables have turned (to an extent) and it’s Takeru who has to take the lead and help everyone else reach his level.
Side note that has to go here – remember how in Extra, Meiya was the heir to an insanely wealthy megacorp? In Unlimited, we’ve been let in on the idea that all the girls in the squad have some kind of “Special Circimstances”, but what they are has been pretty much kept in the dark. After the CCSE, we learn something of Meiya’s position when a special badass mech called a Takemikazuchi shows up, delivered by Tsukiyomi and the Three Idiots for Meiya’s use (though she refuses it). Apparently, such mechs are restricted to the Imperial Guard, and the presence of the particular model is a marker of Meiya’s status as a distant relative of the Shogun (because Japan still has a Shogun in this world-line). Tsukiyomi and the Three Idiots stick around to protect Meiya (technically, they’ve been here the whole time but haven’t shown themselves) and are particularly suspicious of Takeru, calling him a “dead man”. Odd.
To an extent, instead of having routes for each girl, Unlimited has each girl take a starring role in one of the plot chapters in, more or less, the second half of the game (the first half being all the bonding and incidents up to the CCSE, of which there’s quite a lot). The CCSE was Mikoto’s arc – Takeru was paired with her (because she’s the survival expert and he was the weak link) and they spent some time having to get quite comfortable with each others’ presence, especially Takeru getting ‘used’ to the fact that the BETAverse double of his best bro is a girl. We spend a little time letting Takeru have his day in the sun as the prodigy pilot, and then launch into Tama’s arc.
The arc starts off funny enough, with Tama being made “Squad Leader for a Day” because her father, who is UN undersecretary in this universe, is coming to visit and she thinks he’s gotten the wrong idea from her letters and already thinks she is Squad Leader. Everybody plays along, some (like Sakaki and Marimo) more grudgingly than others, but the visit is interrupted by a major crisis when a UN Space Shuttle (called an HSST) is found to be out of control and accelerating through a decaying orbit with Yokohama Base as its predicted point of impact. If the ship hits ground, it’s all over – the carrier is packed with high explosives and moving fast enough to penetrate many floors underground, which would wipe out or cripple much of the base from the kinetic damage alone. Yuuko, however, has a daring plan to avert catastrophe by using a prototype ultra-range TSF weapon known as the Over-the-Horizon Cannon in order to shoot the rogue ship out of the sky. And for that, she needs the best sniper in the eastern theater: Tama, who was already shown to be a crack shot here the way she was a skilled archer in Extra.
While Tama might not be quite as anxious as her Extra self, she still suffers very badly from some performance anxiety, and Takeru has to carefully talk her into stepping up and taking the shot with a clear mind. After all, she only gets three attempts even with the OTH Cannon’s range, given the target’s speed. Of course, the day is saved and Tama truly manages to conquer her fears by, with her friends beside her and watching, making the shot to save all their lives.
This is followed with a shared arc for Sakaki and Ayamine. Marimo splits the squad into a pair of 3-mech elements for mock battles, and Takeru is stuck with Class Rep and Ayamine as his partners. It would be bad enough that the other team is more balanced (with cqc expert Meiya, sniper Tama, and scout Mikoto as opposed to everyone in Takeru’s group being more or less better close up), but the violent disagreements between the rivals are only getting worse, and it’s suggested that if the three of them keep losing to their own infighting, it could see them be held back. This means it’s up to Takeru to bridge the gap and convince the pair to work together. At Yuuko’s suggestion this becomes operation sleepover (She’s still something of a troll, and Takeru doesn’t get much rest with all the guns that end up pointed at him in the night.), but sadly physical proximity doesn’t seem to breed understanding, and the fighting hits a boiling point with a legit fight between the girls.
This leads to Takeru tracking them down (order, and therefore several details of the conversations, up to the player) and learning about their special circumstances in this universe. While Sakaki and Ayamine both had mommy issues in Extra, they have daddy issues in Unlimited – Sakaki is the daughter of the current Prime Minister, and is driven to seek her own path somewhat in an act of rebellion against his controlling nature, having given up a draft exemption to be here. She wants to rise to the top in order to be able to stand up for herself with confidence, and can’t stand Ayamine’s disregard for authority. Ayamine, meanwhile, is the daughter of a military leader who was imprisoned for desertion. She doesn’t know the truth of what happened to him, but blames her father for daring to retreat (something she’s sworn to herself to never do) and incompetent leadership for potentially forcing the choice to be retreat or death. Thus, she despises Sakaki’s hard-line orders as she feels such would force her into the no-win situation of either retreating or being wiped out.
Takeru explains each of the girls to the other in order to get them to understand one another rather than seething based on their assumptions, and further baits them in to working together for at least one mock battle with the promise of fulfilling any one request that may be made of him if they win. This allows Sakaki and Ayamine to (briefly) work together, before getting mad at each other again as they both want a personal lunch with Takeru as their reward. It does not help that he doesn’t get the picture and invites them both straight to the cafeteria.
Finally, with that resolved, we move into Meiya’s arc. The squad is called upon to help evacuate civilians that are in the way of a volcanic eruption, with orders to get them out by force if necessary. Meiya and Takeru are paired up for the operation, and quickly come across an old lady who doesn’t want to leave her home under any circumstances, despite falling overherself to bow and scrape when she gets a good look at Meiya. Technically, their orders should run to abduction, but Meiya is unwilling to remove the woman forcefully, and fights for another solution (initially excluding Takeru as she does, because Meiya is as proud as she is stubborn.)
Meiya hurts her leg and even ends up getting both her mech and Takeru’s damaged when she tries to go out and divert a lava flow with her shield, forcing Takeru to come and pick her up. Eventually, connecting to both Meiya’s feelings and the old woman’s (and seeing as their radios are part of what got wrecked by Meiya’s little stunt, meaning no calling home), Takeru agrees to help Meiya find a plan to save the woman’s home, ending up with an impressive stunt that puts Meiya and Takeru in the same cockpit with jump-jets cannibalized from Meiya’s worse-condition mech, in order to bring down a chunk of mountain with a sword and block off the flow. Meiya and Takeru end up buried under rocks and, perhaps because she’s seeing what may be her own death, trapped in the dark, incoming, Meiya gets a little forward… right before the rescue team (headed by a flustered and horrified Tama) opens up the cockpit to pull our two little delinquents out.
Takeru spends some time in a detention cell after that one, including his birthday on which Kasumi shows to gift him (a drawing of) a Game Guy. That’s nice of her. By the time he’s done his time the base is in an odd sort of quiet, nervous holding pattern. To break the tension and liven things up, Takeru proposes and organizes a Christmas party, which does its job and also serves as the split point for the various endings of the girls. As the player, you can have anywhere between one of the girls and all five, depending on how well you’ve chosen your actions up to this point, that Takeru could ‘think of’ as he wraps his present, and whichever you choose will both get Takeru’s present in the semi secret Santa gift exchange, get hers to him, and be the girl that Takeru has an ending with.
The route split in Unlimited is just a wee bit disappointing, actually: Three of the routes (Mikoto, Tama, and Ayamine) have extremely similar scenes. Class Rep’s covers mostly the same material, but it’s structured differently and has a couple of notes that make it feel more heartfelt, at least in as much as she’s got a stronger voice and an ever so slightly different blocking. She’s still mostly the same. Meiya, of course, gets the deluxe treatment, though all things considered it’s not that far off, and much like in Extra she turns out even harsher than Sakaki, protesting the whole way.
Honestly, there’s a degree to which Meiya almost comes off as some weird inverted Tsundere. She ranges from friendly to lovey-dovey most of the time, but in an actual romantic situation she turns very shrill. I can’t say it feels unnatural, especially since her endings in Extra and Unlimited both have the kind of high emotional tension that could do as much to anyone, but I digress.
There is one interruption to the Christmas Party before Takeru’s Unlimited Love Life is set in stone, though. Marimo visits the party, seeming horribly distracted, and this ultimately prompts Takery to go check on Yuuko, hoping that she can cheer Marimo up given how close they were in Extra.
Takeru finds Yuuko drunk as a skunk, dressed in a Santa suit, and crying in despair. Yuuko is not the type who would or should ever cry, but she’s been brought to it. Takeru gets a lot of enigmatic answers out of Yuuko as to why she’s full of booze and sorrow, things about “fifteen billion parallel processing circuits in the palm of my hand”, there not being any tomorrow for Yuuko or humanity, or Yuuko not being “cut out to be a Holy Mother”. Pretty much all of this is setup for Alternative (to an extent all of Unlimited is, but this material is limited in its own merit in isolation). By default, Takeru returns to the party somewhat disturbed by what he’s seen, but on second and later playthroughs the player can decide to have him not leave Yuuko to her grief. This results in her ending (unlike Marimo’s scene in Extra, this is a real ending counted by the game, if a nonstandard one), complete with romantic or at least bedroom partnering and mostly some more obscure hints at stuff that will become relevant in Alternative. Along this route, the game does end here, no more scenes.
Should Takeru return to the party, we do the gift exchange (done via a hot potato sort of mechanism where everyone passes their gift around and gets whatever they have when the music stops) and get the girl-by-girl endings.
No matter who you picked or even who you could pick, it turns out all the girls got their gifts expressly for Takeru, resulting in the various recipients of the ones he didn’t get himself all paying visits and dropping off the gifts: Fresh combat boots from Mikoto, potted flowers Tama grew herself and we saw as being precious to her in the HSST Arc, a hand-made stuffed Chop-kun doll from Sakaki, a handwritten “meal with me” ticket from Ayamine, and from Meiya the handguard of her katana packed in an elegant box, because Meiya is over the top in every dimension.
And, especially seeing how much thought and feeling everyone (well, everyone other than Ayamine at least) put into their gifts makes Takeru feel kind of bad about his. He’d meant to sent a fancy handkerchief around, and that would have been bad enough, but he ended up giving that to Kasumi and improvising a “Rent-a-Takeru” voucher to control him for a day, which he regards as something of a gag gift opposite what all the girls (again, except possibly Ayamine) did.
Takeru figures out who got his gift by process of elimination and goes to visit her, thank her for her thoughtful offering, and apologize for his lame little ticket. The conversation ends up beating through his thick skull that all the girls had hoped to be in that position, and that they harbor romantic feelings for him. Of course, Takeru only has eyes for the girl right in front of him, and they initiate and consummate their relationship. During this sequence, Takeru has some flashbacks to the ending of Extra. No, not the Hot Springs moment that started Unlimited, the Ending of whatever girl he’s romancing here in Unlimited. He even comments that he doesn’t think these things happened in the previous world, but for players who have seen the scenes in question when they did go for that girl and are now seeing them flash while approaching her again, it’s clear there’s something else going on with time and dimensions.
Before the evening’s through, though, the squad is called to assemble and receive an announcement from the CO of the the base.
He reveals that Alternative IV – Yuuko’s Project, which the base in large part existed to support – has been canned in favor of Alternative V, a scheme to construct an interstellar colony fleet and get humanity off of Earth and to a planet in the Barnard’s Star system, to be coupled with saturation bombing of the BETA hives in Eurasia to have those left behind start the final offensive. The squad can expect their situation to not change too much, as Alternative V will inherit a lot of Alternative IV’s resources, but it seems like the war with the BETA is not going to be fought – the best and the brightest (about a hundred thousand of them; a paltry number next to the billion surviving humans but actually quite generous for a colony project) are running away, and leaving everyone else to die.
Cut to two years later. Nothing really happened at Yokohama base in the intervening time, meaning Takeru’s life has been all prep and no practice. At least his romance has gone well, meaning he’s still with the partner selected before. Now, it’s the eve of the end: the last shuttle to the Migrant Fleet is leaving from Yokohama, and the day after that the bombardment and general offensive to retake Asia will begin. However, there’s just one rub: Takeru has a boarding pass for the shuttle, but has worked with Marimo to get it stripped of identifying information, meaning anyone could use it to get away. His plan, naturally, is to give his seat on the shuttle to the woman he loves, who otherwise wouldn’t be saved.
No matter who the woman in question is, she will initially object, very passionately, that she shouldn’t take the pass and instead wants Takeru to live, leading to a final choice to either accept her refusal (in which case Takeru goes ahead and breaks the boarding pass so that they can be together, which is not what she had in mind) or insist that he needs her to live (which results in her caving, and a last night of passion before the end). Either way, the next day sees a little denoument talk, more characterful if you went the route of having the girl escape since in and only in that case Takeru and his love will talk about what their life has been like for the last two years, and then a last second crisis.
Said crisis is that Kasumi, while very much on the passenger manifest, hasn’t boarded the shuttle, forcing Takeru (the only one left on base with the security clearance to reach the brain room) to go get her. As he does, she acts frighteningly like Sumika for a moment (calling Takeru “Takeru-chan” like she and no one else ever did, and making a very Sumika-like and not Kasumi-like crying protest to not go) before being hauled off to salvation. This causes Takeru to miss a last goodbye if he was sending his beloved onward, but at least the others report she was smiling at the end, so in Takeru’s mind everything is going to be okay. The shuttle launches, the Migrant Fleet gets going, Takeru says his last words about standing to defend Earth to the end as he gets his offscreen Bolivian Army Ending, and the credits roll. If Takeru’s dear was on the ship, you also get one last scene where she, apparently having been knocked up by that last goodbye pairing (as was the intent, admittedly), stands on a peaceful, foreign world to point out Sol and tell their daughter about Earth, where daddy is still fighting for everyone. Thus ends Muv Luv Unlimited.
I imagine you might have a few questions about that rather abrupt ending, so let me do a bit of a rapid-fire answer section
Why does Takeru have a boarding pass? Well, if you follow Meiya’s route you find out that she was accorded one (as a relative of the Shogun and thus an important person) but had Tsukiyomi secretly transfer it to Takeru. This is implied to be true regardless of who Takeru is actually with, which makes sense seeing as Meiya does come off as the kind of person to carry a torch for somebody basically forever, not to mention (if Mt. Tengen wasn’t enough of an indication) to sacrifice herself for another’s happiness.
Why doesn’t Takeru’s partner have a boarding pass of her own? Well, it’s explained on their own routes that Tama and Chizuru both lost their meal tickets (Tama’s dad having been assassinated by anti-Alternative terrorists and Chizuru’s father having been disgraced and cast out of power) in the intervening two years, while Meiya’s situation is covered in the above answer. Ayamine, presumably, never had a chance seeing as she was related to a disgraced figure rather than an illustrious one, and we never do learn what Mikoto’s ‘special circumstances’ were so you can kind of assume in Unlimited that she might be basically ordinary.
What happened to Yuuko? Never answered; though Kasumi’s situation implies that most Alternative IV personnel were still seen as important and valuable by Alternative V, it also implies Yuuko hasn’t been around.
What’s the deal with Kasumi and these weird echoes of Sumika? See Muv Luv Alternative for your answer.
What was Alternative IV anyway, and what was Yuuko talking about on Christmas Eve? See Muv Luv Alternative for your answer.
I could bring up more lingering questions, but honestly the answer to most of them is “See Muv Luv Alternative for your answer” so I’m going to try to keep this review to comments on Extra and Unlimited.
So, what can I say about Unlimited, with it all laid out before us?
Well, while the choice aspect is weaker than Extra, to the point of seeming a little perfunctory, the character building is not. Especially the arcs Tama and Meiya go through do a lot to show who they are as people and delve deeper into Takeru and how he rises to the occasion or fails to in this world of brutal warfare.
Though, on the topic of brutal warfare, there’s actually not really any of that here in Unlimited; that’s more Alternative’s thing. Takeru Shirogane never sees live combat until, possibly, after the epilogue. Hell, the BETA never even show up on screen through the entirety of the VN, despite being the main threat in the world and one of the most iconic elements of the series as a whole. When a herd attacks Japan and Takeru and the gang are almost called into battle we only see glyphs on a map representing the BETA advance. There’s a silhouette of one displayed in the simulators, but it’s just a shadow with the outline of a BETA; we never actually get to see the design of the monsters in Muv Luv Unlimited.
I guess it’s intended to be something of the “Jaws” effect, where not seeing the monster is supposed to build up its menace more than actually having a clear image… but there never is the payoff reveal in Unlimited, it’s saved for Alternative… and kind of deep into Alternative too.
But, because of that, there is actually a kind of softness to Unlimited. Unlike you might think when first given the setup, it’s not really ‘about’ humanity fighting against extinction at the hand of an endless swarm of aliens; instead, it’s about Takeru getting along and forming bonds while coming from a different context. More weight is given to the fact that play is primarily a social endeavor in this universe, with more-or-less grown women playing Marbles and Cat’s Cradle, and what that means for how they interact with one another and interface with life, than is given to the movement of troops or the abilities of otherworldly monsters.
This makes it all the more jarring when the final “twist” comes down and Alternative V is revealed. Because we never engage in combat with the BETA in this timeline, it doesn’t feel like mankind has its back up against the wall until we see what’s been prepared behind the scenes. And while I say it’s jarring, I do think the reveal of Alternative V is intentionally jarring. Throughout the last act of Unlimited you do get the sense that something is brewing, but if you’re going in unspoiled I don’t think you would conceive of Alternative V or even anything on that scale as the source of the oppressive atmosphere. This is the experience the player has… but it’s also the experience the characters have. Takeru can’t place the malaise that’s come over his new world after his stint in the prison and would never have been able to guess anything on the level of Earth being abandoned. Bad news? Sure. Apocalyptic news? Not even on the radar. Follow that up with a painful emotional scene and a Bolivian Army ending and you have a recipe for some deep, dark feelings… which is where the second act of a three-part story kind of wants to leave off.
In a sense, Muv Luv is structured a little like the original Star Wars trilogy: The first outing is bright and fun, but sets up some good characters. The second act builds them up, but leaves them at their lowest point with a devastating reveal; Unlimited isn’t bound by cinematic convention to have the action beats Empire Strikes Back does, but in terms of what Takeru goes through emotionally it’s a similar movement of starting out suffering, gaining through bitter work, and then ultimately being crushed. As for the third part… well, they both strive to be both big and final, whatever you may feel about certain elements.
But to an extent, the bit about the action beats means that the focus is entirely different. Rather than all three entries having the same weight as with the movies, Extra and Unlimited combined have approximately the weight of Alternative, and that’s in raw reading time before considering how big Alternative likes to go. Because of that, I’d personally say that Unlimited comes off as the smallest and weakest chapter in the Muv Luv Trilogy. It’s Takeru’s training arc, taking the guy we got to know through exploring the personal stories and endings of Extra and making him the man he needs to be for Alternative to even start. And, as I alluded to at the start of this review, he’s not even done training and growing. Oh, sure, he’ll never struggle to run 10k again, but that’s not all there is to growing and ‘training’ as a person.
In the end, while it sells Unlimited and especially Extra short to call them just setup for Alternative, seeing as I believe there’s a good deal of value to these stories in their own rights, there is a degree to which it’s true. Even if you, as I do, find these stories individually fulfilling, they’re clearly created to build upward and be built upon, and they are stronger as parts of a whole than they are attempting to be their own thing.
So, while you’re liable to love these characters after getting to know them in Extra and Unlimited, it’s worth it to see their story through in the next entry.