Another year, another season of the troubled Muv Luv Alternative anime has come and gone. For those just joining us, I looked at the first two visual novels, the Alternative Visual Novel, and the first season of this show last year. I will try my best to keep this newbie-friendly, but we are talking about season two of an adaption of part 3 of a saga, so into this review some references must fall.
The takeaway from season 1 of the anime was that it was deeply flawed, especially as an adaptation, but that further seasons could bring things back a little if they cleaned up their act and spent at least a little time shoring up neglected foundations.
Once again, I’ll try to get through the plot with some degree of brevity, seeing as I’ve covered the material being adapted already.
Season 2 Episode 1 comes out swinging: We start in the Extraverse (where this whole thing should have started) and get some genuinely funny moments that show how the original comedy could have been adapted to screen. For better or worse, though, this is Takeru’s “pick up” visit where he retrieves one Yuuko’s work for the other one and not actually starting over with a proper adaptation of Extra. Still, the animation for human characters has clearly been bumped up a notch, at least over the shameful levels it hit at the end of the previous season.
During Takeru’s stint in the peaceful world, we get to see him interact with some of his classmates/squadmates in the different setting, but most especially we see him spend time with Sumika Kagami, the girl he’s in love with and who doesn’t seem to exist in the BETAverse, leaving Takeru torn between being sad to be missing her and happy that she doesn’t have to endure the horrors he’s seen.
When he returns with the material for Yuuko, we find she’s set up another little event for Takeru, with a large-scale trial of the XM-3 operating system that he helped design. Takeru and his squad do very well, and some of the veteran pilots that are part of the trial even pull Takeru aside to congratulate him on having made something that’s going to boost their life expectancy and humanity’s chance of victory. Everything seems to be going well, which is exactly when the BETA attack.
Yup, they’re finally here! A “small” herd of BETA attacks the trial grounds, which is a problem when everybody is loading blanks for mock combat. Takeru in particular reacts badly to the BETA and worse to the hypnotic trigger and stimulants meant to get him into fighting shape, resulting in him turning deaf to orders and going absolutely berserk in the face of a BETA back with nothing but paintballs in his armament. Not that he can tell then or after, but he actually does a damn impressive job of holding their attention and not getting killed while totally out of his mind, which means that when his TSF is finally taken down, it’s not long enough before help arrives for the BETA to finish him off.
Still, the experience is extremely traumatic for Takeru, who, after the battle appears to be done, ends up moping and looking over the site of his failure when Marimo Jinguji comes around to give him a pep talk.
Marimo got barely any attention in the first season in Alternative, but the first couple of episodes of Season 2 helped step her up. Which is good, because she’s actually a fairly important person to Takeru on any timeline – she’s his homeroom teacher in Extra and, as his squad’s commander in the BETAverse, she’s been a teacher there as well, making Takeru and the others more or less into the people they become. In the BETAverse in particular she’s as harsh and tough as a Sergeant should be, but also still warm, knowing when to get tough with someone and when to show them some genuine care. Here, she pulls out her softest for Takeru, because that’s what he needs.
Unfortunately, at the end of her big speech, Takeru turns around just in time to see a human-sized BETA that the initial sweep of the grounds missed seize her from behind and bite her head clean in half.
This is probably the most infamous moment in all of Muv Luv – the Chomp. The point where the alien menace, which hadn’t been actually seen until just a few moments ago, takes one of the characters that the player is likely to have a close bond with and who the player would not expect to do anything except make it all the way and shreds her plot armor like worn cardboard. This is your real introduction to the BETA, and the reality of where Alternative is going.
In the anime, it’s a little bit different. We saw the BETA in Season 1 Episode 1, so while that did end with a BETA victory and thus maintain their menace, they aren’t newly stepping into the limelight the same way. We also had radically less time to get to know Marimo, so I think in a lot of ways anime-viewers could write her off fairly easily, even with the nice bonding scenes in the episodes before her demise. In terms of presentation itself, the Chomp in the games goes fully for gore, showing us one of the most memorable images we wish wasn’t so memorable (maybe memorable isn’t so much the right word as much as “seared into our retinas”). In the anime, they go fast with it, making the surprise the bigger element of the horror. I actually think this was a good choice, both because I didn’t need to see that again outside my nightmares and because in an anime, where the pace is in the creator’s control rather than the viewer’s, utilizing the pacing to deliver the hit is actually a pretty good technique. I especially appreciate that while it is fast, it’s not comically fast like Canaria getting theoretically splatted in Qualidea Code – there’s a solid moment where we see the BETA appear and open its mouth wide before cutting to the wide shot of the Chomp itself. It’s not a lot of hang time, but it is enough, at least in abstract.
At the very least, while there were upwards of twelve episodes and two un-adapted games leading into this that would have had to be done differently for maximum effect, I don’t think the scene itself in isolation really could have been executed better in an anime.
Naturally, while the monster is dispatched almost immediately, this takes Takeru’s little hope spot and turns it into an even worse day than he’d already been having. He’s drugged to the gills for interrogation as command tries to figure out what went wrong and left delirious from chemicals and grief alike. In this state, he has some bad encounters, including one with Meiya where he pretty much threatens to rape her in an effort to make her just go away and she instead offers herself up if that’s what it’s going to take to get her friend and squadmate, Takeru, back. This leaves him feeling even worse about himself, which is when his addled brain hits on the fact that there is, in fact, a way he can go home to the wonderful world where there are no BETA.
Seeing a broken Takeru as not particularly valuable, Yuuko agrees to go ahead and drop him off in the Extraverse he’d meddled with before. Kasumi is hurt by this desertion, but fulfills her part as well, leading to Takeru waking up merged with his other self. The sight of all his friends happy and alive, particularly Marimo, brings Takeru to tears – enough that Marimo takes note and decides to play part-time counselor after school. We don’t get to see their conversation, but suffice to say that Takeru is on the mend after it. He offers to walk her home, but she declines, and it seems like this world will be fine
The next day, the news reports that local schoolteacher Marimo Jinguji has been murdered, fed head-first into an industrial meatgrinder by an obsessed stalker who saw her with another man (Takeru, by the time and place).
What follows is a whirlwind of sorrow and mayhem. Takeru confers with this world’s Yuuko, who insists he brought Marimo’s death with him. That might be the end of it, since he didn’t see anyone else he knows die, but that doesn’t end up being the case as Meiya loses her memories of Takeru to the same phenomenon.
The overall explanation is that the two universes are bound via Takeru, who acts as a “causality conductor”, and that they seek equilibrium. “Heavy” information, like physical status (most especially death) passes over from the BETAverse to the Extraverse, while “light” information (like memories, particularly those of the Conductor) pass the other way. In all cases, the closer one is to Takeru, both literally and emotionally, the stronger the effect. It might balance out over time, but who knows what the damage could be before that happens? Considering there were five billion fewer humans alive in the BETAverse and much of the world was in ruins, quite a lot is possible.
Takeru makes ready to travel the world as a person no one can remember, hoping to outpace the potential of causality catching up for as long as it takes for the merge to be complete. Before he can depart, though, Sumika ends up catching him. He tries to push her away (quite brutally, in fact) but she finds him again anyway, knows him well enough to know when he doesn’t mean the nasty things he says, and begs to hear him out. Takeru, too low to do otherwise, tells her the whole story of world hopping and aliens and… she believes him, trusts him, accepts him, and swears that no matter what happens she’ll never forget (which even seems possible if she truly has no counterpart for the information to be conducted to). They confess their feelings for each other, kiss, and Takeru is satisfied that, after one more day to say goodbye, he can walk the earth and be comfortable if at least Sumika, the girl he loves, remembers him.
The next day, Sumika is weirdly distant when they meet at school, like she’s forgetting despite it all. Before Takeru can confirm what’s happening, an accident at PE causes a basketball hoop to squish her.
Takeru is caught by Yuuko before he can commit suicide, and offers to erase him in a way where he won’t take the innocent Extraverse Takeru with him. Before they go they visit the hospital where Sumika is, finding out that she’s alive but in some awful condition. They also visit Sumika’s house, and find that she was able to remember Takeru as long as she did by reading over her old diaries, which essentially chronicle the life the two kids shared.
As for that erasure, the means to do it is by sending Takeru the Soldier back to the BETAverse, a contingency prepared for in some of the notes that BETA-Yuuko passed to Extra-Yuuko. Takeru is prepared to accept it, both because it will stop the Extraverse he’s touched getting worse and because, as Yuuko points out, Sumika’s vulnerability to causality conduction means she’s out there somewhere. Sadder but now filled with greater determination, Takeru is banished back to the BETAverse, where Yuuko also prepared for that eventuality by saying he was on a top secret special mission.
Seeing how Takeru is now sane, sober, and deeper in knowledge of messed up world-lines, Yuuko has a new mission for him: “tuning” (making battle-ready) the 00 Unit, the core of the Alternative IV program that Yuuko completed while he was away.
This turns out to be Sumika. Specifically, Sumika’s mind, pulled from that weird brain in a jar Yuuko had and inserted into a robotic replica (a perfect replica, mind you) of her human body, now with vast psychic powers. She’s a little crazy though, ranging between near-catatonia and berserk flip-outs, and it’s Takeru’s responsibility to attend and care for her and help her remember her human self.
Honestly, it’s very sweet and surprisingly not horribly done. Since we got a fair amount out of Sumika in Season 1 and the Extraverse wild ride her in Season 2, this bit does land, at least a little better than killing off Marimo. The rest of the team is also glad to see Takeru back from his “secret mission”, including Meiya (and her apparent budding feelings for him all set to be dashed by Sumika’s arrival) and his new squad leader Michiru Isumi (who also gets hims some hypnotherapy to help deal with his BETA-related PTSD).
The new squad, consisting of Michiru’s long-time partners and all our new graduates is A-01, the Valkyries, the first component of which was seen briefly in Season 1. They spend some time training together while Takeru also tunes Sumika, leading up to a Christmas day assault on Sadogashima Hive, in which the combined UN and Japanese forces will take on the BETA, with Sumika riding a powerful superweapon in order to hopefully both get close enough to start reading BETA minds and ultimately to destroy the Hive. In the mission, A-01, as a top-secret element, is set to be the superweapon’s vanguard and support.
As hostile and potent as the BETA are, everything seems to be going well for a bit, with Sumika arriving and, in two massive shots, blowing away the above-ground portion of the Hive and massacring the BETA on the surface.
At this point, Takeru has an intrusive thought of Meiya being very forward with him in a darkened TSF cockpit, and Sumika goes unresponsive, grounding the superweapon and denying a third shot to finish the obliteration. Underground BETA begin to surface everywhere, and the entire operation goes to hell real fast.
You know, with the background of having played Unlimited, that weird intrusive thought makes sense. It’s both an actual memory (as Meiya and Takeru have a romantic scene in a TSF… and another in Meiya’s ending) and triggered by a potent association: the smoldering ruin of the hive reminds Takeru of the erupting volcano that was a key bit of backdrop for the all-routes romantic scene with Meiya. Without any of that, it just seems kind of random, he just gets this intrusive sexy fantasy about the admittedly gorgeous squadmate he’s not even interested in that way on this route. I mention this because, while not dwelt on in this season, it is established by the end to be a working theory for why Sumika (who, recall, is psychic) kind of crashed here.
In any case, the mission changes: Takeru is set to retrieve the 00 Unit from her superweapon while Michiru has her instructions to try as long as she can to reboot it, and if that fails trigger the self-destruct. The BETA do their damndest, and it takes everything that not only A-01 but the entire military force has in them to secure an escape route for Takeru, Sumika, and the others. Along the way, the TSF of one of the other Valkyries, Kashiwagi, is damaged and ends up leaking fuel, so she turns back to link up with Michiru, ultimately taking Michiru’s good-condition TSF to help fight off incoming while Michiru works on the superweapon.
Ultimately, before Michiru is ready to go, Kashiwagi is overwhelmed and killed, meaning that Michiru, while successful, has no escape – she’s forced to wait inside the superweapon, ensuring it detonates and takes all of Sadogashima island with it.
In Michiru’s last moments, she’s able to be patched through to first Takeru and then the rest of her squad, giving them all a final round of inspiring words, and in the case of her conversation with Takeru even receiving some, since they did bond a bit before the battle over both being in love with their childhood friends. Michiru isn’t going to make it back to hers, but Takeru assures her there’s nothing wrong thinking of the people she cares about in her last moments, and she insists that he needs to take good care of Sumika. What’s more, she reveals the hypnotherapy was nothing but basic calming exercises, and he’s now able to face the BETA with his own courage. To the rest of the Valkyries, her final comments give them something to strive for.
Then, with as much clear as is getting clear, Michiru Isumi goes boom, Sadogashima goes the way of Atlantis, and we’re treated to a brief heavenly vision as she dies.
There is then one final episode which shows us some of the aftermath (including borrowing from one of the sidestories about Michiru’s sisters). This mostly just sort of breaks down what happened, dwells some more on Michiru’s last speech, establishes why Sumika might have crashed, and plays us out with some extra time getting to know the other Valkyries.
As of the time I’m writing this, Season 3 of Muv Luv Alternative has not been announced, so we don’t know when or if they’re going to finish this thing, a prospect that I have mixed feelings about. On one side, with the vast improvement from season 1 to season 2, where we actually got good character scenes and a less insane pace, I do kind of want to see this to its conclusion. Season 2 cut exactly where, after Season 1, I thought it would for a 3-season model, so I think twelve more episodes could likely wrap things up right with the same quality we saw this season.
On the other hand, while Season 2 is better than Season 1 by far, it’s still just a B product. Not bad on its own, in fact better than a bog-standard baseline… but still kind of an insult to the Muv Luv Trilogy that spawned it. As someone who really loves the VN, do I actually want it to have a mediocre anime with a bad start that’s finished and can trick people into thinking they’ve experienced the whole thing?
I think I do more than I don’t. Will it be harder to convince people who haven’t read the VN that they’re missing out on something really great if they don’t? Yeah, probably, but to an extent that was already true when Season 1 came out and gave us its quality point – the ending being adapted won’t make the problem much worse. And there are the twin facts that VNs are a kind of niche market anyway and we’re unlikely to get another better Muv Luv adaptation if this one ends with a whimper and a “Mission Accomplished” banner over the turbulent waters where Sadogashima used to be, so I think being a sucker for completeness wins out in this case.
At the end of it all, I think the Muv Luv Alternative adaptation took a mortal blow when they decided that they didn’t need to adapt Muv Luv Extra (or Unlimited I guess). The first episode of this season, combined with the lack of enjoyment I’ve suffered at the hands of certain romantic comedies (consider this foreshadowing) have left me outright baffled as to why we apparently couldn’t get an adaptation not of Muv Luv Alternative but of Muv Luv, starting with Extra.
Because while, in a sense, Extra is almost a parody of your typical dating sim rom com, it plays enough elements straight and has characters with more than enough charm that I’m fairly convinced it could hold up in anime form, and part of what the Alternative adaptation has done is show how Alternative really is the capstone of a larger story, and not its own independent tale. Unlimited, similarly, serves to ground your expectations in the BETAverse, as well as establish one of the prime timelines of a “change the timeline” time-travel story. I don’t think Steins;Gate would hold up if the show just opened with Okarin’s first time leap and the “save Mayuri” arc without us ever having a chance to meet Mayuri (or anyone else for that matter). As long as Extra and Unlimited are missing, something is going to be lacking for Alternative, and from its very inception this adaptation was doomed to fall prey to that: you’ve got to read the VNs or accept that even the best presentation isn’t going to match up to what the people who did feel. It’s sort of like the Rankin-Bass Lord of the Rings having to cover only Return of the King for crazy industry and rights reasons, even if you think it turned out well you can’t in good faith call it the real thing.
As what’s on screen, a humanity-on-the-brink mecha war story with a little dimension hopping scifi and some degree of romance worked in, Alternative Season 2 earns a B as I mentioned, I think bringing the overall aggregate of the anime to something like a B-. Even if a Season 3 does happen, it would take a miracle for the show to rise any higher than that. I guess a B- usually means something that I can fairly recommend, that will scratch the right itch if you’re in the mood, that may have problems but overall puts out a solid performance… but if you’re interested in Muv Luv do yourself a favor and read from the start.