Muv Luv Alternative. Even before the anime adaptation appeared in Fall 2021, it would be somewhat strange for a fan of Japanese media to have never heard about this thing. Even if you know nothing else, the fact that it’s the highest-rated VN of all time according to VNDB (above such entries as Fate/Stay Night at #12 and Steins;Gate at #2) accords it some degree of fame. But, if you maybe aren’t terribly connected to that side of fandom, and have been a wee bit out of touch since it came into a more mainstream anime light in October, that’s alright. Though, before we go on, let me repeat my dire spoiler warning from last week’s review.
“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 brighter if you don’t have this review behind you.”
That said, let’s jump into Alternative. The game starts with a prologue scene from the UN forces that seized the former Yokohama Hive during Operation Lucifer, the effort to reclaim the Japanese mainland using the new G-Bomb weapon to clear out the BETA. There’s still some activity in the Hive, but the pilots who made it to the main hall are more concerned with a different discovery: some pillars with luminous, blue pods suspended in them and, on closer inspection, within the pods? Human brains – clearly the same sort as in that room Kasumi hung out in during Unlimited.
If you get the feeling from this that the brain in a jar is going to be important rather than set dressing this time around… yeah burning the opening on that is a little something called “Chekhov’s gun” (named for Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, not the Star Trek character), a dramatic principle that, in general, if an element is included it should be of some use, usually with the metaphor that if a gun is shown in the first act, it should be fired by the last; otherwise it should not have been included. This sort of conservation of detail holds more strongly in stage plays (where time and set dressing are both harshly limited), less in film and television, and less still in novels and the like… but it’s still important to understand. And while a VN has room for throwaway details (perhaps the most room for them of any media type), it doesn’t use such prime territory as the entire opening just to set one up.
The story proper starts with Takeru Shirogane waking up in his Extraverse-style room alone on the morning of October 22nd, 2001. You might recognize this scenario, as it is exactly how Unlimited starts. Takeru notices this as well; he’s been here before and while he forgets to grab his Game Guy this time, he does seem to confirm that he’s right back where he began his long, strange trip in the BETAverse. This isn’t fresh-out-of-Extra Takeru. His body seems to be something of an amalgam, having his Epilogue-of-Unlimited level of fitness but not any extra age over where he started Unlimited. Speaking of Unlimited’s epilogue, Takeru has some important memories this time around.
First of all, he remembers Alternative V, the Migrant Fleet, and the Fall of Earth. He feels like there was something extremely important that he was protecting in those final, nightmare moments, but he can’t remember what that might have been. He doesn’t quite remember how things went after the bombs fell either. But, while Takeru has forgotten some details that would be important for any ending of Unlimited, we relatively shortly find that he actually remembers the ending of Extra now – Sumika’s ending, to be specific, all the way to their big kiss on the hill at Christmas Eve.
Speaking of Chekhov’s gun, I suppose I might as well get one of the biggest yet also least damning spoilers of Alternative out of the way right here so I’m not dancing around the issue for the review: Sumika is in this one. In fact, she’s not just in it, she’s the only girl for Takeru this time around, and Alternative does a great job of convincing you that’s exactly as it should be. The game doesn’t even try to conceal this either, hence why despite her showing fairly late in this almost doesn’t even count as a spoiler. Even aside from the Chekhov’s gun element of bringing up her Extra ending and having Takeru think about her way more intensely than he did in Unlimited, Sumika is all over stuff you’ll see before you even start a new game of Muv Luv Alternative; she’s on the banner art on Steam, she’s the main menu poster girl for Alternative, and she’s aggressively in both OP videos the game has to offer. Many of these images also show her not in her school uniform but in a TSF Pilot’s Fortified Suit, a unique hot pink one at that. With so much focus and so many resources dedicated to Sumika I think just about anyone could tell you that it’s likely not just symbolic images of Takeru’s “Lost Lenore” and that we’re actually going to see her this time around.
How and why we run into Sumika in the BETAverse where, recall, Yuuko told Takeru that there is not and never was any such person as Sumika Kagami, I will leave for the proper moment, but it makes no sense to attempt to conceal that Sumika is in Alternative or that Alternative in some ways the “Sumika Route” of Unlimited.
In any case, burning with the determination to not let the horrors of Alternative V come to pass, Takeru comes right out and seizes the opportunity to attempt to change that fate. To that end, he returns to Yokohama Base, running into the same guards as last time. This time though he isn’t taken out by one little blow meant to subdue him, and knows what names and terms to invoke in order to get a better intro, meeting up with Yuuko on day 1 and, after some initial friction due probably to her not having complete control of the situation this time around, starting to work with her in order to push both Alternative IV and the main character squad forward.
Naturally, Takeru’s re-introduction to his friends is a little different this time around. Rather than being a naive weakling, like he was at the start of Unlimited, he’s a veteran soldier (a veteran of training, at least) and because of that comes onto the scene several steps ahead, seeming to be a super-elite prodigy (given that he’s still explained to them as being a green recruit) rather than a rank amateur. This leads to them looking up to him (possibly with envy) even as he tries to play off his skill, in part because he still sees the girls as his betters and the people who made him who he is.
Takeru’s interactions with Yuuko, however, are a little less smooth, at least until the incident where the BETA attack and slip the front defensive line happens. Yuuko refuses to do anything to reduce casualties from that incident (after all, in Takeru’s memory it’s cleaned up fairly well) and instead uses it as a test of his future knowledge. The BETA are, after all, fundamentally incomprehensible to humans and therefore unpredictable, so if things go down as he says that means his abilities are genuine, rather than smoke and mirrors produced by insider knowledge of her operation as a spy might have. Takeru, grudgingly, accepts this, and it pans out for him to be promoted from untrusted asset to useful pawn.
Yuuko also makes a case that, for the time being, deviation from the known past should be minimized, in order to avoid unintentional drift. Takeru might have had a similar idea himself, as throughout the first sections the player gets choices to repeat his mistakes from Unlimited, or to instead utilize preexisting knowledge to go for the Mr. Perfect route. This culminates in the CCSE; Takeru is resolved to make sure that it goes a little smoother than last time, at least, but as you may recall the last time through the CCSE was a hell of snakebites and humiliation, so while Takeru will correct some of the problems himself, there’s also elements of choice when it comes to others.
In any case, the CCSE was passed in Unlimited with Takeru as screw-up supreme, so it’s not as though they’re going to fail when he’s instead escorting them through most of the tough situations that can occur on the island. We can’t let him off without a little humiliation, though, so somewhere in all this he still forgets to bring a swimsuit for the afterparty.
That of course brings us to the TSF stage of the group’s training. Takeru had an advantage in this to start out with, and over two years of experience wasn’t going to make him any worse. He ends up talking to Yuuko about a couple things. In practical things, Takeru brings up the HSST incident that was defused in the previous timeline by Tama making an amazing shot with the OTH Cannon, but it would be both a major risk reduction and a test of the ability to alter established events if the HSST was somehow prevented from its most-likely-sabotage fall on Yokohama base. Yuuko takes that under advisement, intending to do something about it, and sure enough Undersecretary Tamase’s visit to Yokohama base goes off without incident (excepting incidents caused by Tama’s “squad leader for a day” act).
He also talks about his video game experience with Yuuko and what he hopes to accomplish with things like combo attacks or better action and recovery canceling, in terms of what TSFs are capable of as machines and where the control scheme might hold them back. She seems to shoot his ideas down as impractical, but soon finds the spare time to come up with a new TSF Operating System based on Takeru’s feedback that reinterprets the principles behind his desires in a way that could actually be useful in the field, and allows Takeru to go from merely skilled and avant garde to truly next level. He doesn’t give himself much credit, but his status as a wonderkid both in coming up with the idea for the OS (as Yuuko credits him as the real inventor) and as a pilot in using it to show off what he’d always envisioned. A trial of the new OS is used to skip the “Sakaki versus Ayamine” plotline from Unlimited as well, when Takeru has Yuuko load their TSFs and not Meiya, Tama, or Mikoto with the new OS (which comes to be dubbed XM3), resulting in a flawless victory without any of that pesky team-building.
This is also a proof of concept that pilots other than Takeru can benefit from XM3. In fact, in addition to making TSFs with the OS installed significantly more responsive and maneuverable (when evasion is the primary defense TSFs have against the BETA, armor being a last-ditch save), it seems to make them easier to control if anything. Over the course of Alternative, most everyone except for Takeru who encounters the XM3 comments that it represents a huge step forward for conventional forces, liable to save countless lives and help push back against the BETA once it’s adopted broadly. Yuuko is a little less noble, seeing the XM3, once its power has been displayed for all to see, as a potent and high-value bargaining chip with which to obtain political concessions for her Alternative IV program.
Speaking of that, Alternative IV seems to hit a bit of a snag. Yuuko had the time to work on XM3 because she was stalled in her research and Takeru doesn’t even know what Alternative IV is yet so his ability to help is somewhat limited. Speaking of that, we know what Alternative V is, so what else do we know about the Alternatives? Well, Yuuko briefs Takeru on Alternatives I through III. Alternative I was an attempt to crack the ‘language’ of the BETA in order to communicate with them, which was a total failure. Alternative II attempted to understand the BETA on a physical and biological level and after years of brutal effort including capturing and vivisecting BETA samples concluded only that the BETA are carbon-based life and that the different strains don’t appear to have any sensible biological relationship to each other.
Alternative III was a little more ambitious and is a little more relevant. It was an effort, primarily Russian-led, to first produce humans with ESP abilities. These Espers could read and project thoughts at some level, which is close to but not exactly telepathy, and would be used to attempt to (as in Alternative I) communicate with the BETA. This involved multiple generations of test tube baby psychics who, because of the short range of the ability, had to be delivered to the depths of BETA territory to even attempt communication. They had a horrible survival rate (predictably, even if the quoted number is still grim) and were unsuccessful in establishing meaningful communication, but did manage to extract one pearl of knowledge: the BETA do not recognize humans as being living things. After Alternative III reached that dead end, Japan (and Yuuko, presumably) won the bid for the program resources and started Alternative IV, inheriting the fruits of Alternative III.
Frustrated with his own ignorance, Takeru attempts to derive from Unlimited-Yuuko’s drunken Christmas Eve rambling just what Alternative IV might entail. The topic gets onto those parallel processors that she mentioned back in that timeline, and current Yuuko (seeing as Takeru has proved himself enough in the know to be dangerous if left half-informed) explains the topic of research a little more clearly… which causes Takeru to flash back to that weird class Yuuko held in Extra where she declared, having had a vision while up all night playing video games, that traditional parallel processing was an outmoded concept and she could do it better and was sure to win a Nobel Prize. This gets current Yuuko extremely, even violently interested, but Takeru, unfortunately, neither understood and remembered the content of her other self’s classroom rambling as was far over his head nor saw and digested.
However, Yuuko hatches a scheme to correct this issue by sending Takeru temporarily back to his original world-line at a time and place such that he can recover the theory that her other self came up with and return it so that Alternative IV can move forward. At this point, I expect you to have to have questions.
Before I get to answering them forthright, I feel the need to explain something about Muv Luv Alternative. Alternative takes heavy advantage of having the player invested, interested, and (because this is a visual novel and not a show) able to move along at their own pace in order to provide exposition. Lots and lots of exposition. Yuuko, Marimo, and even characters we haven’t met yet love to give classroom-style lectures and military briefings in great detail… and I love listening to it.
This element was admittedly somewhat present in Extra, Unlimited, and the first bits of Alternative. For instance, Yuuko takes her time in the middle of the high-tension HSST arc of Unlimited to explain what the OTH cannon is, how it works, and even the history of why she has one just lying around and why they’re not mass-produced to stick it to the BETA. But as we get into more complex science fiction concepts than “aliens bad” on a regular basis, we’re going to see a whole lot more of these long and intricate lectures.
To an extent, it’s like being back in school – appropriate because Takeru is in at least a kind of school, but you are sitting still and learning about a topic being presented to you in an informative manner. The thing is, this school teaches things like military tactics, xenology, giant robot engineering, and the applications of quantum physics that let you do awesome magic-like things, so any difficulties you may once have had paying attention are liable to be diminished. Add into that the fact that you’re typically being let in on information because it is the topic at hand for an emotionally effective story, and you have a recipe for success.
In turn, these large and most importantly detailed information dumps help make the world of Muv Luv Alternative live and breathe. The incredible precision with which the topics are handled, and the ability to see the inner reasoning of why things are done they way they’re done helps sell all the action. When something happens related to these topics, we understand fully what that means without having to be brought out of the moment to be told there, because we were already briefed. And when something hasn’t been set up we feel shocked (like Takeru) rather than lost that this new element outside our understanding has arrived to throw a wrench into things.
What’s more, the extra details, the ones that never really have an impact on the plot, help to make it feel like there’s more world out there than just the story we’re being told. Which is important when Takeru’s quest is, in large part, to save a world that we do not directly see. There’s actually an impressive failure to apply Chekov’s gun in here: in one of Marimo’s lectures in the series we’re let in on the fact that TSFs can, in case of emergency, deploy a powered exoskeleton to help the pilot escape. We’re told many of this device’s capabilities, its history and how it grew out of some of the earliest infantry Anti-BETA weapons, how other successors to the prototype versions are still used in live combat, and how long a Pilot can expect to survive based on said machine’s life support capabilities, plus how many days their Fortified Suit alone will cover them for, together giving a variable predicted survival time after ejecting depending on if the mech has to be ditched before it’s been totally used up.
Nobody ever ejects. We never see the weird escape power armor, and no one has to be concerned with how long they can survive on its life support. Two whole games in the BETAverse world-line and this element that we spend solid time getting a class on never comes up. Chekov may be rolling in his grave but the fact is that the result is immersive. There are parts of this world that don’t just exist for the benefit of Takeru Shirogane.
Because of this, there are going to be some complex topics that come up over the course of Alternative. Some of these, particularly Yuuko’s quantum explanations for Takeru’s whole time-and-universe-travel thing, do not have explanations that are all of simple, concise, and clear. I will do my best to get through these situations with some manner of brevity; I don’t want to write out Yuuko’s big physics teacher speeches and as awesome as they may be to chew on in the game you probably don’t want to really read them in the context of a review.
With that established, I will do my best to summarize the Takeru Time Dilemma, part one.
Essentially, Yuuko’s working theory is as such: Different world-lines would act something like atoms, and currently Takeru is like an electron taken from one such atom and stuck to another. The multiverse will ultimately seek equilibrium, and thus while Takeru currently appears stable, he is in some ways a fundamentally unstable existence who could wink in or out of reality based on the meeting of certain conditions. The most basic conditions for Takeru to return to the Extraverse would be the BETAverse’s hold on him being shaken by rendering him unobserved (in a more properly quantum sense than the idea of observation is used – something needs to fundamentally isolate him, at least temporarily, from the rest of the universe), plus his own will being tuned to a desire to return since his own psychological awareness of his reality in the universe should be part of what’s keeping his cognition tethered to it.
But, since Takeru has traveled time as well as dimensions, this isn’t as “easy” as him dropping back into a universe where he’s been a missing person for three years. Instead, he’ll largely be responsible for temporal targeting, and will slide into his “original” universe at an insertion point they can at least partially determine. The goal, of course, is shortly after Yuuko has developed her theory, so that Takeru can acquire it.
The mechanism that Yuuko devises to turn Takeru into her dimension-roving agent is twofold: One part is a machine that will provide that isolation from reality that’s necessary for Takeru to leave. While it’s in operation, it will go so far that everyone forgets he exists until he returns. The second part is Takeru’s means of return, Kasumi. As a potent psychic – one of the last survivors of the final and most powerful generation of the Alternative III program – Kasumi will be able to maintain memory of Takeru for as long as she’s able to focus on him, acting as an anchor to draw Takeru back once the device is disengaged, rather than having him permanently return or be deleted or stranded in time and space. They manage some abortive attempts, and then transfer Takeru once, where he makes contact with other Yuuko and convinces her to prepare her theory for pickup.
This starts the upward journey of Kasumi’s relevance in Muv Luv Alternative. Not only has her involvement with the Alternative IV program been at least partially explained, but we’ve got an answer as to why she’s adopted Sumika’s behaviors (like waking Takeru up in the mornings) and why she displays knowledge of things she shouldn’t (like the Game Guy), because she’s read Takeru’s mind.
This all means that Kasumi is assigned to bond with Takeru, who is surprisingly good with the little kid for all that he’s normally kind of a git, which is good because we get to see a softer side of our main character, alongside his XM3-fueled training. We even get to skip out on the mountain expedition from Unlimited, though believe me when I say we haven’t heard the last of it.
The skipping of the mountain expedition and resulting less-pleasant forced relocation precipitates the first major change to the world at large in Alternative over Unlimited, and the center-chewing arc of Muv Luv Alternative.
Remember back in Muv Luv Extra how a big chunk of game was taken up by a Lacrosse game that, on the longer main character arc, didn’t actually amount to much of anything? I kind of let that slide in my review of Extra because I recognized that it was hiding the big route split taking place “under the hood”, but I know it’s something that tilts people when Extra is to be considered, largely because it can feel intrusive if you’re not following Sakaki or Ayamine. Well, that arc has something of a doppelganger in Alternative – a plotline that takes place around the middle of the game and that frankly didn’t exactly need to be there. Welcome to the coup d’etat.
The coup d’etat arc is about, what else, a coup. It’s led by Sagiri (who you will remember only if you actually did Ayamine’s arc in Extra, hence why I took extra time to highlight it), in this universe a ranking Surface Pilot who once served under Ayamine’s father and still has a checkered history with her including possible romance. Her father, you will recall, was imprisoned for failing to uphold his duty as a soldier and commander, but apparently many of those who served with him find this unfair and unjust, rationalizing that he was looking out for his people above all. They’re rising up now, though, because they see the current regime as hopelessly corrupt in its globalism, essentially a CIA catspaw, with the last straw being the treatment of Japanese civilians in the Mt. Tengen forced evacuation that Takeru and team didn’t participate in this time. The rebels are deep in the military, particularly the garrison forces, and quickly establish control of much of the capital at Tokyo, including summarily executing Sakaki’s father, the Prime Minister. The Imperial Guard, though, keeps the Shogun out of rebel hands, which is a problem for them as they want her to legitimize their forces as the new government while the survivors of the Pro-UN side establish a provisional government elsewhere, also without Imperial sanction.
Let me remind you that the BETA are literally at Japan’s doorstep, because Takeru doesn’t hesitate to point out the stupidity of infighting in front of an alien menace, even as we’re about to do a whole lot of it.
I’m going to cut the description of the Coup arc relatively short. As the situation develops, we learn that every member of the team has some connection to a significant player: Sakaki just lost her father, of course, while the perpetrator is Ayamine’s old flame. For Tama, it’s strongly implied that her father is either complicit with the CIA chicanery or over a barrel given his position in the UN. Mikoto doesn’t know what her father does for a living, but the truth is he’s an intelligence chief working for the Shogun, who goes missing after the incident. And lastly, there’s Meiya, the distant relative of the Shogun when the Shogun is the piece everyone involved in this mess wants to capture.
It also becomes apparent as the situation evolves that there are way, way too many factions. There’s Sagiri and his rebels, the Provisional Government, the Imperial Guard loyal personally to the Shogun, the Japanese-UN team represented by squad main characters and effectively guided by Yuuko, the US-UN team that seem to be decent people, and the unseen CIA string-pullers looking to use the chaos to turn Japan into more of a handy vassal state.
Before getting into exactly how these collide, I wanted to address a common complaint I heard about Muv Luv before I played it; the idea that the story is deeply anti-American (usually calling it jingoistic or nationalistic, which I don’t consider to be really exceptionally in evidence either, at least not in the implications usually given). This arc is what is really suggestive of that material, and with all respect… not really? A big part of this is that Muv Luv clearly wants to evoke the Cold War with the BETAverse and frankly it would be weirder if the CIA wasn’t doing dubious cloak and dagger nonsense. Other than that, the American and American-sympathetic characters we’re shown all tend to be fairly reasonable people. One of the elements of tragedy in Muv Luv is that there are often times when the characters who are at odds don’t have a clear moral high ground drawn between them. Everyone has the goal of assuring human survival, especially their own, but there are irreconcilable differences in the means they see as best to achieve that end. Yuuko has given everything she has to Alternative IV and it makes sense for Takeru to be with her both because he trusts her personally and because he has some imprinted trauma from Alternative V. On the other hand, the Alternative V and Anti-Alternative factions are given decent reasons for their stands. Alternative V, of course, seems like the “best” course if you take as a postulate that the BETA can’t be defeated, while for the Anti-Alternative side, devastating superweapons have provided humanity’s only recorded success.
This goes at a more personal level as well. Takeru meets two people in the Coup d’etat arc whose words and deeds he will keep flashing back to as sources of strength and resolve. One of those people is the Shogun. The other is the commander of the American forces in the immediate operation, who is portrayed as a very reasonable if possibly harsh authority figure. We talk with the other troopers as well and when we do they seem mostly like decent sorts, including refugees fighting for America to earn a place in a country that would have them after the ruin of their homeland. Naturally, the CIA is making a mess of things, but we actually never see any characters who are willingly and knowingly aligned with said political backstabbing – they work through post-hypnotic triggers and brainwashing in a way that kind of recalls the most insane attempts of the CIA to get an edge in the Cold War.
In any case, the events. Takeru and team are deployed on a relatively minor mission to guard one of the supposedly unoccupied fallback forts belonging to the imperial core, only to discover that the Shogun has used the secret passages from her palace to there in order to escape rebel encirclement. The Shogun, by the way, is a young lady named Yuuhi Koubin, who bears an extremely strong familial resemblance to Meiya – as it turns out she should, because the two are actually twins and not distant relations at all.
Yeah, remember in the end of the main arc of Extra how it was revealed that Meiya had a twin sister and was, because of a superstition about twins, only elevated to a recognized member of the high family when her favored twin died in an accident? Turns out the same birth order and superstition is in place here, but Yuuhi didn’t die, meaning that Meiya remained with her foster family as a “distant relative”, bearing the knowledge that she exists only as Yuuhi’s shadow, a doppelganger who could play body double while being entirely expendable. Yuuhi, for her part, has tried to reach out in as much as she’s allowed, including being the one who sent Meiya the purple Takemikazuchi, which is technically the Shogun’s own personal ace custom TSF.
Yuuhi is a character who is almost too perfect, but that ‘almost’ is a very key distinction. Part of what keeps her from being really grating is that she is only in the story during the coup d’etat that, all things considered, isn’t that much of Alternative. Make no mistake, it’s a big arc that takes its time, but in the grander scheme it’s not even close to the percent of run time that Lacrosse takes up in Extra. And also make no mistake that while Yuuhi won’t appear when we’re done with the arc, Takeru will think of her and the things she said a lot, putting her face and her words back into focus, but she largely has her impact on the story and characters and then exits, so you can get the feeling that you might start seeing more human sides of her if she was actually a fully included character. On the other side, even with what we see of her, where she has the uncanny ability to tell everyone what they need most to hear, she’s not immune to mistakes, expresses heavy regrets, and is both physically and emotionally unready to stand entirely on her own. So for her run time, the portrayal is balanced enough.
After Takeru finds her (and Mikoto’s dad, who hands her off and then vanishes from Muv Luv Alternative), the race is on to bring her to the safety of Yokohama Base before the rebel forces hunting her (with uncanny accuracy at that) can close in around them. The biggest complications are the aforementioned rebel advance and the fact that, despite being trained as a surface pilot and expecting TSF pickup thanks to Mikoto’s dad presumably having worked this out with Yuuko, the Shogun decided to come out in her pretty winter coat ensemble rather than a Fortified Suit, which means she’s ill-prepared to endure the g-forces and turbulence of riding along in Takeru’s cockpit. At first the team makes a somewhat careful advance, but they have to pick up the pace as enemies close in, ultimately rendezvousing with an American team that takes charge along the way. The Americans are outfitted with powerful next-gen TSFs, but the group is still bitterly outnumbered and outgunned, and has to get from critical point A to point B fast enough to not get cut off.
Eventually, the deteriorating condition of the Shogun becomes the limiting factor on the advance. She’s administered the maximum safe dose of tranquilizers to prevent acute motion sickness from overwhelming her (potentially fatally) but it’s not enough to keep her from slipping into a bad state. At that point Takeru calls for a stop, the American commander insists on upping Yuuhi’s dosage beyond recommended levels rather than daring a rest in enemy territory, and it becomes something of an argument with Marimo and Tsukiyomi chiming in as well when Takeru doesn’t want to OD a head of state. Yuuhi regains enough consciousness to ask for the dose, but by the time she does it’s moot: the position is encircled. Sagiri is here in person, though, and while phenomenally misguided as to what to do about the problems he sees, still has that bizarre situational honor he displayed in Extra, agreeing to an hour of ceasefire for the UN forces to get their house in order, even though he wants to acquire and/or protect the Shogun.
During that time, Takeru gets to visit with everybody, Yuuhi recovers significantly and tells people important things (particularly Takeru to that he mustn’t be shy about getting blood on his hands if he wants to reach his goal), and a plan is hatched in which the Shogun will agree to meet Sagiri and attempt to talk him down, with the modification to Yuuhi’s original idea that it will be Meiya delivering her words rather than the Shogun herself. Sagiri, over long-range communication, agrees to terms of an audience with the Shogun rather than just having her handed over, and Yuuhi and Meiya perform the clothing swap necessary to have Meiya ride out with Takeru to meet what they both fear could very well be her sudden and violent end. In the encounter with Sagiri, Meiya steps up, finding enough inner strength to convincingly be Yuuhi, and basically succeeds in shaming Sagiri into surrender. Before he can actually call off the revolt and fall on his sword, though, the CIA kicks in brainwashing on some of their troops to force a firefight to start, against the orders of our American commander on the ground, commencing a massive brawl with Takeru and Meiya (who most people think is Yuuhi) caught right in the middle.
In the ensuing fight, all the American forces are killed despite their awesome next-gen TSFs, Sagiri is shaken to be however briefly confronted with Ayamine’s presence and loses a duel with Tsukiyomi, and the Yokohama team with their XM3-outfitted TSFs get away with the Shogun. With Sagiri’s death and the Shogun’s arrival at safe ground from which to get her house in order, the coup falls apart, and Yuuhi is able to establish a new stable government, taking a firmer hand in the future to prevent the apathy and corruption that drove Sagiri mad from rising again, essentially meaning that while his insane and wrong violent revolt has been bloodily suppressed, his ideals will be achieved to the degree that they were worthwhile.
Before she goes, Yuuhi has a few more ultra-precise words for everyone, helping both Ayamine and Sakaki towards overcoming their daddy issues, reassuring a wavering Tama and Mikoto… you know, all the things you’d expect the wise mentor figure she basically is to get done at that time.
There are a few loose ends – Mikoto’s dad seems basically AWOL, the not-officially-proven but present CIA meddling weighs on everyone’s mind, and Takeru is also left questioning given just how much of this fairly awful sequence seemed to play right into Yuuko’s hands.
Distraction over, we can get back to the plot that it procrastinated by having Takeru revisit the Extra timeline with Yuuko’s crazy machine. On the trip back to pick up the prepared documents (and deliver a sealed message from Yuuko to her other self), Takeru ends up merged with his Extra self, making Yuuko’s time forcing him to write his name on his hand in permanent marker (remember that from Extra?) moot. Between this trip and the one before we get the ‘payoff’ to a number of weird scenes from Extra, including carrying the massive pile of papers for Yuuko and the “shoe from the bushes” moment (Alternative Takeru was in the bushes trying to be Solid Snake on pass 1).
While Takeru does return the reports essentially without incident, he’s not perfectly able to hide his influence from the world of Extra, as he ends up caught by Sumika – an encounter that’s extremely difficult for the Takeru who has clear memories of falling in love with her. To the game’s credit, Sumika is still the Sumika we remember, violent and annoying tendencies intact, not a romanticized version of herself. This is fine, because despite all her flaws she was still likable to begin with, and Takeru’s affection for her does soften the general impression even as he remembers the foibles of his past.
With those transfers, though, Yuuko has everything she needs to complete the technical side of Alternative IV. What she wants more of, though, is political capital, and her and Takeru’s XM3 Operating System is the way she sees to get it. The performance of those outfitted with it in the coup d’etat is a field test, but Yuuko quickly draws up a scheme for a more formal trial, intended to display to the UN and Imperial forces just how valuable XM3 could be once fully implemented. She assures Takeru that broad implementation will save countless pilot lives, but before that using it as a bargaining chip will help them secure a strong position over the Alternative V and Anti-Alternative factions. As such, a massive joint exercise is prepared, and Takeru and friends do extremely well, showing off what they and the XM3 are capable of while veterans handling it for the first time come to appreciate the power and control. Everything is looking up.
So, up until this point, Muv Luv Alternative has been something of a war story, but while the coup d’etat brought actual combat and death onto the table, it has been more about people away from the front lines; less grim combat and more mad science and training montages. This is pretty similar to Unlimited, which makes sense as many of the events so far were things that happened in Unlimited. Here at the XM3 trials you’ll have already spent a good amount of time with Alternative – how much is hard to say because it’s not chunked up in an orderly fashion and it depends on how fast you read and what your policy on the voice acting is, but it’s a while. You’ve gotten used to Alternative Takeru’s struggle to bring about a better future, how he tries to correct his past mistakes only to realize that he’s still got a lot of growing left to do as a person in order to reach the level he thought he was on. You have a handle on the tone, which probably comes off as dark but noble, a world in a bad way but one where good people can make a big difference.
That sense of relative security, the idea that things are under control, that you know what’s going on, is the cue for the BETA to actually arrive. A small force appears rather suddenly towards the end of the XM3 trials, and while it’s not much of an attack by BETA standards, it’s still a crisis given that most of the assembled TSFs have nothing but paint bullets and boffer melee weapons.
It’s also a crisis because we’re talking about the BETA here.
Before getting into the details of this attack, I think it’s wise to take a moment to talk about the BETA, what they are, and how the Muv Luv trilogy makes use of them from a narrative perspective.
We’re now deep in Alternative. By reading time, this is likely around the halfway mark. By “chapters”, it’s deeper. And before Alternative there was Unlimited that introduced them but never showed us more than a shadow or a radar blip. This is the first time the BETA have actually appeared ‘in the flesh’, and while there’s some degree to which you could cite the Jaws effect, it’s not like they’ve been terribly heavily built up either, because they always seemed like a relatively distant threat. This is because Muv Luv has been lulling us into a false sense of security.
One of the complaints I’ve heard directed at Muv Luv is that the BETA are pretty lame enemies, and that was something that I found I wanted to address in terms of storytelling techniques. Because, from one perspective, when stacked up against the benchmark examples of “their type” of horrifying unappeasable swarm of alien bugs – StarCraft’s Zerg or Warhammer 40k’s Tyranids – the assessment is absolutely correct. I, however, find that there are good reasons why that doesn’t matter.
For one, it’s not a competition. Sure, fine, compared to the Zerg or the Tyranids the BETA are slow, stupid, vulnerable, and with the possible exception of the Laser Class’s air denial capabilities not really offensively capable. They don’t need to be. From a narrative perspective, the Zerg need to threaten an advanced spacefaring society and a precursor race, and the Tyranids need to be a credible threat to galactic-scale societies with even more ultra-tech and silly quantities of weaponry. The BETA need to present a credible threat to a version of Earth that’s basically the Cold War plus a tech boom in response to the BETA. And they do that.
Related to that, it’s about context. There’s a degree to which, using the three alien swarms (BETA, Zerg, and Tyranids) as benchmarks, we actually see the emotional connection to their threat is the inverse of their “objective” power level. The Tyranids exist in a universe that’s full of many terrors that are at least as bad as they are. They’re faction-tier, but with Chaos and everything else roaming about, they aren’t uniquely threatening. The Zerg are a step up. In their own setting they’re absolutely heavy hitters that generally serve as the primary motive concern. However, they can still be beaten and pushed back with something resembling regularity. It may always take a lot to win a battle against Zerg, but it can be done (after all, the game wouldn’t be balanced otherwise). The BETA, however, have pushed everything that’s not BETA in their setting to the absolute brink. They have never been taken in a fair fight (as Muv Luv is keen to remind the player) and might not even be able to be beaten even with absolute dedication and spending everything: the Anti-Alternative faction in setting hopes to pull it off, but both Yuuko’s Alternative IV and the dreaded Alternative V are, explicitly, alternatives to traditional armed combat. Not that they won’t include efforts to secure military victories for mankind, but they both acknowledge that just fighting with everything humanity has isn’t working.
Objective strength isn’t really correlated with the degree to which an enemy force is threatening in a narrative, nor with how much it does (or should) horrify.
And that’s just in the background, which brings me to what’s then done with their proper introduction at the end of the XM3 trials and physical appearances in the story in general.
When the BETA first manifest, Takeru is paralyzed with fear. The combat hypnosis he’s hit with doesn’t take well either, sending him into a berserk fit, dodging and shooting even though he has no weapons, rather than properly calming him down. Even by the time Takeru responds, the vanguard of the defense is largely dead, and everyone is scrambling to make sure they’re not soon to follow. The real kicker to the presence of the BETA, though, comes after the fight. Takeru is seated on the quiet battlefield, among the corpses and wrecks, seriously moping about his performance. Granted, he’s told (though more later when reflecting on the incident) that the technical prowess he displayed while freaking out was damn impressive, and an effective diversion that probably saved lives besides, but right now he’s more concerned about the fact that he was overcome by fear and unable to follow even the simplest of battle plans once the BETA were actually in his presence, recalling the time in Unlimited when he fainted dead away at the very idea of them, rendered only as blips on a map, and afraid that he hasn’t come as far since then as he though.
It’s some legitimate angst, which means when Marimo comes out to see him, she goes into her softer mode. They have a good talk, though the blocking of the scene would suggest Marimo is largely directing her words towards the back of Takeru’s head. She relates some of her own past and helps pick him up when he’s at his lowest. Takeru thinks about what she’s said with a lengthy inner monologue (nothing unusual for Muv Luv, there have been dozens of them so far in Alternative alone) and turns to thank her for everything she’s done.
This is when Takeru comes face to face with real horror. While he was moping, one of the humanoid-sized BETA, the little annoyances that don’t even rate when you’re in a TSF, that wasn’t caught by initial sweeps of the field, came up behind the two of them. It’s already gnawed most of Marimo’s face off, leaving the skinless open wreck with staring eyes staring back at Takeru, and as he watches with numb horror, chomps down on the top, sending blood, brain, and eyeballs this way and that. You watch too – no long lines here, no contemplation, just visceral death and destruction.
And yes, the game does show you that image in extreme, gory detail. Either one is one of the most ghastly pictures you’re likely to see this side of the most brutal Horror films, equal parts incredibly brutal and damnably creative. It’s drastically more intense than anything else that has been shown or will be shown in Muv Luv, and is the essence of well-done gore. It’s only on screen for a couple of seconds (unless you’re too numb to press the space bar), but in those couple of seconds you, or at least the unspoiled viewer, is liable to experience the whole range of negative emotion, feeling the blow as one of the kindest, most supportive and likable characters in the franchise has her head obliterated not just in abstract but with a very precise misalignment and mangling of vital bits that sears itself into your retinas. I’m very fortunate I’m not the nightmare-prone type, because it was fairly late night when I hit that scene, and if I was it would have messed me up for sure.
One moment, the only thing that could really be called truly gory at all in probably a hundred hours of gameplay across the franchise (again, less if you’re a fast reader), but because of the effort put into the visuals and the precise timing and emotional impact of how it’s deployed, it’s better and more effective gore than the content of entire shows that thrive on blood and torment. Elfen Lied and Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka wish they were as hardcore as that couple of seconds. That couple of seconds is all you need to completely transform what you thought Muv Luv Alternative was into something much darker.
And, at the risk of getting ahead of myself, this ties into what really maintains the menace of the BETA, how they step up as powerful alien antagonists despite being, even in setting, fairly stupid, and relative to the panoply of Science Fiction and other examples of their archetypes “weak” or “lame”: The BETA have now shown up, and they didn’t just take statistics and faceless red-shirts, they killed Marimo Jinguji, someone who matters to Takeru and who the player is liable to care about a whole lot. Since this is a spoiler review anyway, I’m going to come out and say that this is only the beginning. Every time the BETA are close enough that the player is actually allowed to see them “live” in the present, someone you care about and are invested in will die. Muv Luv Alternative doesn’t let its heroes even attempt to fight they BETA, much less score anything that could really be counted as a win, without paying a price in lives in a way that has an immediate meaning to the reader and Takeru Shirogane.
“The average surface pilot lasts eight minutes” is a statistic. “Humanity has never captured a hive” is a statistic. The nameless, faceless, non-specific soldiers who fall holding the line against minor herds early in the story are statistics. These things are the viewer being told how dangerous the BETA are. Statistics can help, and some telling is often needed, but they never really horrify on their own. The writers know this. Marimo Jinguji is not a statistic. Her death horrifies. This is showing, forcing the viewer to experience and understand how deadly the BETA are. And more are coming, to enforce that you are dealing with top-tier horror monsters. Enjoy your PTSD, because Muv Luv Alternative is not done serving it up.
So, while the offending Soldier-class BETA is quickly dispatched by… someone in the general area, it’s a bit late for Takeru Shirogane to not be having, to put it lightly, a very bad day. Rather, you could say he’s having a complete mental breakdown in the wake of Marimo’s death. In his very bad state, he hits on an idea, one hope of salvation from the hell he’s found himself in: Yuuko and her world hopping machine. He goes and rather gracelessly begs Yuuko and Kasumi to send him back to the wonderful world where there are no BETA and Marimo still has her head intact.
Yuuko, oddly enough, agrees – he’s done what she absolutely needed him to do, and while she’s somewhat disappointed she acknowledges that he’s not really of any use to her as he is right now. Kasumi is harsher, calling Takeru a coward right at the end… though whether she developed her own opinion on the matter or is simply relating Takeru’s own self-image back to him as he takes what seems to be the easy way out is left a mystery.
There are a couple ground rules Yuuko sets – Takeru will be going to the world-line they meddled with before. He’s fine with that. He’ll merge with his other self. He’s fine with that. He won’t be able to come back. Takeru is fine with that too. In fact, you might say it’s the entire point. Thus, Takeru is banished back to the Extraverse (or at least a world-line a lot like Extra, because the next bit unlike the previous meddles sure didn’t happen then).
Takeru arrives back in his old life, the one where Sumika who he loves exists and where Meiya who he deeply respects was a weirdo who just sort of decided to move in. He goes to school, overcome with emotion as he meets versions of everybody when they were happy normal(ish) kids who didn’t have to be hardened for a world of warfare against an implacable alien foe, and utterly breaks down in tears when he first sees Marimo as his homeroom teacher.
His displays don’t go unnoticed. Physics Teacher Yuuko seems to know what’s up, but Marimo is more concerned that one of her students seems to be having a very legitimate psychological episode. Being the kind, nurturing person that she is, she decides to act as something of a counselor to Takeru, having a talk with him at a restaurant after school and, while she doesn’t know the specifics of what he’s suffered, setting him on the path to mental and emotional healing.
The next day, the news reports the brutal murder of Marimo Jinguji, beloved schoolteacher, who was killed by a stalker who saw her eating with another man and fed head-first into an industrial meat-grinder in an attempt to dispose of the body, until the grinder jammed having only taken her face and most of her skull.
Marimo’s second death hits Takeru like a sledgehammer. We don’t have to see it this time, but the fact that it’s a very similar set of damages is not lost on Takeru, nor is some degree of his own culpability (once again). We take longer going through the stages this time, denial and desperation before the destructive grief sets in. We are now well and truly in Takeru’s Wild Ride, as the Extraverse is set to be no safe haven against horror and loss.
Now, I’m not going to slow roll the reveals we get through here with proper dramatic timing. That’s not my job. So before I get the entire week of Extraverse emotions and revelations out in a couple of paragraphs, I have to say that the sequence here is brilliant. The roller coaster of everything getting worse and worse for Takeru is really well done. Every dark cloud is quickly given a silver lining, but then the silver lining is pulled back to reveal another even darker cloud hiding behind it. It gets constantly worse and worse, but the efficacy of these turns is maintained because we’re granted the illusion of solace and false peace of some sort in between them. Those moments of hope are well-executed and necessary to make sure the reader doesn’t tune out due to fatigue with the darkness, which is often a problem in grim media or grim sequences in media – too grim for too long without something to suggest an upward trend and the novelty soon wears off. Muv Luv Alternative clearly knows that, and knows how to avoid it.
So, long story mostly told by Yuuko short, Alternative Yuuko predicted these events to an extent – that Takeru might run from their world, and what his travel between universes might entail – and sent Yuuko a manual on what to do about it. Not all of her theories or pictures were complete, but enough were to piece together what’s happening as it happens and no sooner.
The basic reason why the Extraverse is starting to circle the drain is that Takeru is a “Causality conductor” – his touching of multiple worlds in the way he was doing it allows information to pass between the worlds on a quantum level, and where the worlds touch they attempt to reach equilibrium. This results in things like Marimo’s suspiciously similar death (which Extra Yuuko, deeply hurt by the demise of her only true friend, lets Takeru know he ‘carried with him’) as the potential difference in the states of two linked entities drifts to match. These events, of course, will happen more around Takeru, and it seems that “heavier” information (like death) conducts more, so presuming he didn’t see anyone else die he might not cause any more death… or he might precipitate a series of disasters to depopulate Earth down to the one billion persons alive in Alternative. Given time the effect should fade as Takeru integrates with himself, but there’s another problem. As “heavy” information conducts to Extra, “light” information conducts across if not to Alternative than at least to the void. That light information is memory, specifically the memories of Takeru held by his friends, who start to forget him, and forget him more and faster the more they interact with him, as the very act of struggling to remember “Takeru Shirogane” provokes the conductor effect to snatch those recollections away. A friend (Sakaki in my playthrough, but I suspect that’s one of the small things you can change in the otherwise linear Alternative story) first sees Takeru as a dear friend in need, then an acquaintance and classmate, and then even as they talk that fades away to a total and frightening stranger position.
Sumika of all people seems to be immune, with Yuuko speculating that this should be the case since the doesn’t exist in the Alternative universe. All the same, Takeru tries to cut ties and book it away from the people he cares about and could hurt the most. Sumika intercepts him, and despite his struggle to push her away for her own safety, ultimately gets the full story – all the unbelievable time travel, aliens, mayhem, and death as well as the current crisis. While he’s busy confessing things to Sumika, Takeru goes ahead and confesses his feelings as well, and she accepts his love and helps pick him up out of the absolute gutter, giving Takeru the fortitude to continue on. He plans to say goodbye to everyone he can the next day and then begin walking the earth, hoping to outrun causality as the man who can’t be remembered.
Naturally, this all goes horribly wrong as Sumika proves the next morning to have not been so immune, addressing Takeru as just a classmate. And, when he tries to see her to reach out for some spark of hope, she gets squashed by a collapsing basketball hoop in the gym.
This drives Takeru to Yuuko, still seeming to hold on to her memories, and the only one who might know something. She’s able to let him know that Sumika is alive (though he tunes out the bit where she’s not going to be okay with the injuries she sustained, suggesting that her accident has left her “alive” in technicality but in some extremely reduced state), and they investigate and find that she didn’t keep her memories naturally, but rather fortified herself as best she could with the diaries she’d kept for years and years about her and her beloved. It’s a process similar to the one Yuuko herself is following, using thousands of pages of notes she prepared on her Alternative self’s recommendation in order to produce academic knowledge rather than emotional memory of who and what Takeru Shirogane is.
In this dark time, Takeru is driven to seek suicide, but Yuuko intercepts his wish, and lets him know that while that would possibly solve the Conductor issue for this world, she can’t permit it since he’d be taking the innocent Extra Takeru with him. She does, however, have an alternative: the ability to erase this Takeru, which turns out to be by sending him back to the Alternative universe, again utilizing plans sent along by her other self on a previous visit.
As horrible as the Alternative timeline was, Extra has become worse, so Takeru goes ahead with the idea, and is ultimately returned to Yokohama Base after a week of absence and with the new goal to end whatever made him a Causality Conductor. In the long list of things Alternative Yuuko was crazy enough to prepare for, Takeru’s return doesn’t even rate – she welcomes him back as a now wiser and more reliable pawn (and one that she believes will be quite useful going forward, including with some extra info sent from Extra Yuuko via a note in Takeru’s pocket) and gets him set up with his new squad of full-fledged TSF pilots via the pre-set cover of saying he was away on a top secret mission to the front. Kasumi forgives him, and he has to squirm a little as most of his other friends believe he was doing something dangerous and noble while he not wrongly feels like a deserter.
The new squad absorbed the whole main cast training squad, but also contains a few seniors to them, such as Kashiwagi (remember her from Extra?) and Akane (Again, who you might remember from Extra) as well as several newcomers to Muv Luv, some of whom are carryover characters from the studio’s earlier VN, Rumbling Hearts. Now, as of the current date I have not played Rumbling Hearts, so I’m just going to have to judge these characters as they are when contained to Alternative.
In general, the Surface Pilots of A-01 Squad – aka the Isumi Valkyries after their leader, Michiru Isumi – are given a lot of love and focus for their comparatively short screen time, being introduced as they are after the halfway point of Alternative. Perhaps because the writers knew at least some of them from having written a whole game with them before, they’re very fleshed out and fun to interact with, making it easy to get attached to Takeru’s new team. I dare say the longer-running characters, with the possible exception of Meiya, kind of fade into the background in this arc in order to let Isumi and her compatriots have a little extra spotlight. Which is okay – we’ve had two and a half VNs with those girls, and it’s not like they totally just drop out, so we can let the newcomers get some real development.
In this arc, Takeru has to do a lot of one of his last (or close to last) “growing up” steps. He’s returned to the BETAverse of his own mostly free will, but is still struggling to face down some of his demons, particularly the fear of the BETA themselves and his guilt over the end of the XM3 Trials and his subsequent flight from the battlefield. It’s heavy stuff, and to an extent we’re allowed to get back in the familiar loop of briefings, training, and exposition in order to really have time to properly process it all.
We learn some important things through here, too. For instance, we finally get the rundown on the BETA “classes” that are so iconic to the Muv Luv Franchise – including the small but deadly anti-air Laser class, their ultra-destructive Heavy Laser cousins, the overwhelmingly massive Fort class with their acid stings, the iconic but unremarkable Grappler class, the fast armored Destroyer class, the swarming red Tank class, and the human-scale Warrior and Soldier classes, the latter of which has, despite being the weakest sort of BETA, become a source of particular trauma to Takeru.
Also critical is what Yuuko still could use Takeru for. She’s gone and created the core of the still mysterious Alternative IV program, an entity called the 00 Unit. The 00 Unit is meant to crack the problem where the BETA don’t see humans as life-forms, possessing the telepathic capabilities of a psychic like Kasumi on the chassis of a humanoid robot. However, Yuuko is not so naive as to believe that she’s going to reach for peace. Instead, the goal is to deliver the 00 Unit to the core of a Hive (or as close as is necessary) and have it read the BETA’s internal information in order to find their weaknesses.
Takeru comes into the picture because the 00 Unit is Sumika. It turns out that when Yuuko said Sumika had never existed in the Alternative timeline, she was lying. Rather, Sumika had lived her normal life in Yokohama until the fall of the region to the BETA, and was discovered when the Yokohama Hive was retaken, albeit in a very altered state as one of the brains in weird chrysalis things that were found to lurk deep in the hive as of the opening cutscene to Alternative. Of the brains the BETA had claimed, Sumika’s was the only one to make it through the reclamation, becoming the brain-in-a-jar that Kasumi spent her time hanging out with. Her unique condition also made Sumika an ideal candidate to become the 00 Unit – Yuuko lifted Sumika’s thought patterns from the brain (causing its biological processes to cease in the process, since that was a transfer and not a copy) and installed them in the 00 Unit’s quantum-conductive computer brain (the version that replace the impossible parallel processing attempt) while, for Sumika’s comfort and sanity, making the 00 unit essentially a perfect replica of Sumika’s human body, just out of inorganic material.
The problem is that spending literal years as a brain in a jar with no sensory input except for, eventually, Kasumi’s telepathic presence attempting to reach her, has left Sumika in a patently unacceptable psychological state that varies between catatonic episodes, berserk rages, and extreme panic attacks with very little human sociability in between. However, this is still Sumika, and Takeru is Takeru – Yuuko believes that if anyone can “Tune the 00 Unit” (that is, bring Sumika back to herself at least enough to act like a real person), that would be Takeru.
It’s a long, uphill battle that doesn’t resolve with a magic epiphany to make Sumika be herself. The incremental progress is promising at each stage, but the gulf between the Sumika we know and love and the one we’re seeing is still agonizing. In a sense, we do get from this how far Takeru has come, since he’s resolute and dedicated and willing to work through these problems for the woman he loves rather than flinching away from what looks to be a hard and painful path. Eventually, his efforts pay off, and Sumika is all set to be at least fit enough to carry out her mission, even if she’s not quite all there.
Along the way, Takeru also has to juggle his other issues of integrating into the Valkyries and overcoming his fears. His seniors, particularly Isumi herself (Who convinces Takeru to go in for hypnotic conditioning of his own free will, among other things), do a lot to help him out, so that when the time comes for a mission, he’s ready.
And it’s a hell of a mission, an all-out assault against the BETA hive at Sadogashima. Yuuko’s secret weapon for defeating the hive come hell or high water is an ultratech super-weapon known as the Susanoo-o, a floating battle platform armed with a truly obscene number of guns, a massive particle cannon that can carve through terrain, and best of all a defensive field produced by its drive that will obliterate anything that tries to touch it while in operation. The sole problem with the prototype was that humans couldn’t safely pilot the temperamental machine, causing it to be mothballed, but Sumika is not human in critical enough ways that she can make it go and without risking the same backlash that spattered the last test pilots all over the cockpit. A-01 (other than Takeru) isn’t told more than the cover story that it’s an automated weapon, but they are given the critical mission of protecting it’s approach to the Hive, since getting pounded with too many lasers would at least stress the engine, and it’s not as invincible as one might like while its main weapon is recharging.
Thus, on Christmas Eve when Unlimited’s timeline would have seen the end of Alternative IV (and, essentially, of the game), begins Operation 21st (the effort to eliminate the 21st BETA hive) and the drag-out alien-fighting part of Muv Luv you’d basically been promised since the first days of Unlimited. There is still going to be plenty of character and plenty of briefings, especially since Takeru and Sumika have a lot to work out yet, but the action side of the plot is on an entirely new level compared to what was seen before in the Coup d’etat and such.
The eve of battle is a pretty good series of scenes, especially Takeru bonding with Isumi, when the two of them get talking about what’s worth fighting for and their respective crushes on their childhood friends. The scene provides not just a little levity with the planning of “Operation Hot Springs” for Isumi, but also helps to push Takeru forward, convincing him that it’s alright, even preferable, to have a very personal reason to fight as well as the broader-picture goal of saving humanity.
As for the battle itself, while Muv Luv Alternative spends a lot of time doing the tactics in high detail, which is good, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to relate that push-and-pull in a review. Rather, it should be noted that no plan survives first contact with the BETA, and despite that fact humanity’s assembled forces manage a quite effective push, within what amounts to margin of error of the desired objectives. On the close-up level, Takeru does some really fancy fighting (and his squad in general helps to further prove the awe-inspiring utility of XM3), and the way is more or less secured for the arrival of Sumika and the Susanoo-o.
That goes well… for the first shot. The Susanoo-o levels the above-ground structure of the BETA hive with a single blast, leaving a smoldering crater and filling the embattled forces with hope. Takeru looks over the devastation, and is reminded of Unlimited and the erupting Mt. Tengen. He then has an intrusive thought about the other time he was in a TSF cockpit together with Meiya, in her ending of Unlimited. Takeru is momentarily off-guard that such a ‘weird image that never happened’ would pop into his head… and then the recharging Susanoo-o loses control and crashes to the ground, the 00 Unit inside unresponsive, the Hive’s underground structure intact. Takeru recalls that Sumika is telepathic and also reliant right now on his love and support to keep her psyche in a shape that resembles something stable and thus inwardly blames himself for this turn of events, believing that she must have seen the ‘weird fantasy’, taken it to be a true memory, and flipped out. (We find out much later that she actually crashed due to heavy use of her powers draining her faster than anticipated and not because she saw Takeru remembering intimate relations with someone else, but that’s neither here nor there).
At once, the operation goes into panic mode. Without a working Susanoo-o, the margin for error that had already been eaten into by little losses and incomplete objectives along the way vanishes and then some, putting the idea of properly capturing Sadogashima Hive out of reach. Ultimately, the decision is made to have Takeru and Isumi enter the downed Susanoo-o, extract “Its core processor” (which only the two of them can know the nature of) for recovery, evacuate the remaining assault forces from the island, and then blow the Susanoo-o’s reactor core, which thanks to the exotic physics drive it’s got will take out the entire island, including the Hive.
Even that doesn’t go smoothly. It takes massive sacrifices to clear an extraction path for Takeru and most of A-01 (including several Japanese Navy battleships taking it to the Laser Class at great cost to screen the retreating troop transports and, incidentally, Takeru’s needed airspace. The Susanoo-o doesn’t properly respond to attempts to remote it even with Sumika removed, forcing Isumi to stay behind and sacrifice herself to detonate the reactor, and before all hope of her getting out of there somehow after keying things in vanishes, Kashiwagi (whose fuel tank was damaged, meaning she couldn’t make it to the target distance for the retreat anyway) dies trying to protect her position. The two most developed and likable of the Valkyries don’t make it through this outing, because the BETA turn plot armor into wet cardboard.
Isumi, at least, gets to go out on her own terms, being allowed one last video call to her surviving squad-mates from inside the indestructible but inoperable Susanoo-o. She gives a hell of a motivational speech that’s up there with Yuuhi’s (in my mind if not in plot weight, it’s even better) and Yuuko is at least able to tell her that her little sister (a Japanese-affiliated Surface Pilot) survived the battle before she goes ahead and takes her death, and the main objective of Operation 21st out with her.
In the wake of Operation 21st we spend time with those left behind, seeing how the people Isumi addressed, including our familiar characters and the surviving valkyries, are changed and affected by her words. Importantly, though, it’s also time for Sumika and Takeru to face their problems. Yuuko blocks out the ability of Sumika to passively read Takeru’s mind and he patches over the misunderstanding (even as Yuuko deduces that, in fact, Takeru has been through EVERY ending of Extra and Unlimited as part of his world-hopping, time-resetting, causality-conducting nature), but she proves quite difficult in that traditional Sumika way and pushes Takeru away even as he tries to get closer to her as the girl he loves, and who he remembers loving him. Kasumi (who has apparently based much of her borderline personality on Sumika, whose mind she’s spent a lot of time reading) tries to help, but things of course, ultimately turn out to hit an extreme emotional struggle even as the final countdown to Yuuko’s next operation, an assault on the original BETA hive at Kashgar (based on info Sumika was able to recover by reading the Sadogashima hive’s network before she crashed), is quickly reaching its final stages.
Sumika first pushes Takeru away, saying she hates him and wants him off the mission as well as out of her life, but Takeru gets the help he needs to realize she’s acting against her own wishes because she wants him to be safe and is grappling with her own issues. This leads to Takeru approaching Sumika again, and getting probably the second most infamous sequence in Muv Luv Alternative after the death of Marimo – Sumika relates what happened between when the BETA overran Yokohama and when she ended up a brain in a jar.
So, it’s worth mentioning at this point that Muv Luv Alternative (like the rest of the series) was originally an adult VN, in the sense that it would feature explicit sexual activity. The most available version in the West right now, and the one I played, is the “All Ages” version available on Steam. Take the idea of All Ages with a salt mine worth of salt, since it does still include the lovely image of Marimo minus her face that is nothing approaching family friendly, but suffice to say that the outright sexual content has been censored in some degree. In Extra and Unlimited, this was fairly obviously a cut of detail in the sex scenes at the endings, which mostly didn’t hurt because it still went through the emotions. I understand the people who feel like something critical was lost, but I personally disagree.
In Alternative, it’s also clear where the cut was, and similar to Extra and Unlimited, the cutting is essentially a matter of the CGs not showing any objectionable anatomy and sex acts largely not being described in mechanical detail.
Why do I bring that up now? Well as Sumika lets Takeru know, both she and the Alternative timeline’s Takeru were (along with many other humans) taken and held by the BETA. The others were steadily hauled off to never come back, until it was just the two lovers, and the BETA came for Sumika. Takeru tried to fist-fight the monsters for her sake, and that ended with him about as dismembered and devoured as you’d think, which shattered poor Sumika’s psyche, leaving her unresisting putty in her captors’ grasp.
From there, she got the full Tentacle Rape experience. The image that’s left in the All Ages version isn’t quite on par with Marimo’s death, but it’s fairly brutal – Sumika, bound and clearly naked, covered in slime, eyes wide with fear and full of tears as a mass of tentacles is forced into her mouth. But, you know, because it’s cropped to above the level of her chest, that counts as all ages, right? Sumika’s narration of what happened, driven by the self-loathing the incident planted in her, spares no detail. Okay, perhaps she doesn’t actually describe penetration in detail, but she still takes pains to walk us through the process of how the BETA broke her down in every sense of the phrase, using pleasure stimulation to break her mind, leaving her unresisting and addicted to the experience, step by step as she was taken from terrified girl to just a brain, her body slowly altered to be more and more receptive to the treatment until the BETA started just stimulating her brain directly and junked everything that wasn’t needed for the skinner box setup before encasing her brain in that cylinder for storage.
For the life of me, I can’t determine whether this crosses the line, or crosses the line so far that it loops back around.
On one hand, Sumika’s character is actually handled pretty well. We’ve seen how much like her other self she can be, but frankly because she wasn’t in Unlimited (well, that we knew) we never saw how she would be transformed by the kind of suffering that the BETAverse timelines force onto everyone. Combine that with the fact that she had to share her Extra route with #1 rival Meiya, and we haven’t until now seen her grapple with dark and intense feelings the way we got to see pretty much everyone else go through some serious business twice each, in their Extra route and in their Unlimited plot arc.
And it’s kind of a doozie. Sumika had some limited self-worth issues in Extra. When competing with Meiya, she often worried that she wasn’t good enough, and when Takeru teased her (or just plain chickened out) it dealt small, normal blows to her body image and confidence as a woman. Here, the same species of issues is bitterly magnified by leaving Sumika see herself as a defiled thing unworthy of receiving love. We know that she came out of her jar state hating the BETA, considering that pre-rehab she could pretty much sputter about killing them all and wasn’t concerned with much else, but it’s clear here that she hates herself about as much, for having succumbed during her captivity and especially (when it comes to that being undeserving of love hangup) for forgetting Takeru while she was busy being literally raped out of her mind.
That’s heavy stuff, and it ties in to the fact that she’s also not exactly Sumika Kagami or even human – the map of Sumika’s consciousness was transferred over to the 00 Unit made in her image, and then her brain died. She has a continuity of experience from when she was a living human, but no part of her is actually alive nor did any of it belong to the woman who was Sumika Kagami. So is she Sumika, because of that continuity, or is she just a robotic impostor tricked into thinking of itself as a person, a digital ghost at best? And even if she is Sumika, is she the same Sumika that the Takeru before her loves, or worthy to stand in that place? Even without the whole “Tentacle rape until you like it” aspect she has a lot of reasons to doubt herself, her nature, and her bond with Takeru.
Also in the sequence’s favor, the way Sumika was acting was fairly extreme, and thus it ironically helps her not seem crazy that she was carrying the burden of a pretty huge secret and extreme trauma. If she’d just been garden-variety upset or stressed or overprotective, she would have come off pretty badly.
But I have to bring up the other side as well. First of all, the emotions in this sequence don’t flow. First we have Takeru, trying to address the girl he loves and break through to her when she’s pushing him away. Then she spends a lot of time telling the story of her fall. The focus and detail make it stand out, and it does take a good deal of time just relating events. Sumika also tries to push it out there in a somewhat disturbing, dispassionate fashion. Which makes sense, because she’s trying to disturb and dissuade Takeru, but means we jump tracks entirely from emotional drama to sci-fi horror without a resolution to the former. This isn’t something they talk about, we don’t hear people really cry or get worked up, it just gets narrated.
And then, in the flashback scene itself, there’s a weird tension that I don’t think works in the media’s favor. On one hand, this is clearly meant to be disturbing and revolting. Sumika hates everything involved with it, including herself, and Takeru is being introduced to the fact that no, eating somebody’s face is not the worst the BETA can do. It’s vile, on every level… except it’s also clearly supposed to be kind of hot. There can be no mistaking the fact that this was originally an H-scene, and H-scenes are going to exist, essentially, to reward and titillate the viewer. Now, again, all-ages version so I can’t comment on “the goods” in full, but it’s pretty clear what’s being reached for even without the explicit imagery to reinforce it. It’s not exactly uncommon fetish material, after all. But I’m not sure going for that was wise here.
In Gleipnir there is some pretty freaky fanservice, but in Gleipnir the mix of horror and eroticism is perfectly in tune with what the show and the sequences that use it are going for. Much of the show is about both threat and temptation. Claire is supposed to be both repugnant and incredibly attractive, so when the show has her involved in this scenario that’s suggestive to the point of being racy but also disgusting in other ways, it lines up. Here, it doesn’t line up. I think we’re supposed to feel sorry for Sumika, to pity her and hate the situation she was forced into. And we do, but that doesn’t track with making the same detestable scenario titillating. And you might think, perhaps, that this is a perfect time for some viewer navel-gazing, like we’re supposed to frown at ourselves for finding any degree of eroticism in the scenario like Sumika hates herself for falling prey to the Skinner Box rape. I’m going to say no, that’s not the case, because the resolution of the scene as championed by Takeru is to absolve Sumika of wrongdoing when she was the victim, so we’re supposed to empathize with her plight and not her point of view.
And I mentioned that the extreme nature of the sequence is, to an extent, justified because of the extreme nature of Sumika’s behavior leading up to it, meaning that those elements had to match. That doesn’t mean it had to be sexually extreme. We know Sumika was divorced from her body, rendered an isolated brain, left in darkness for years, and then turned into a robot. That’s a lot of extreme things to go through. What if the horror of her past experience had been one not of moral and mental corruption, but purely of pain, violence, and destruction – essentially what if, instead of going the tentacle rape route, Sumika’s past had gone all in for gore? I think it would have worked just as well, having her have the trauma of being literally torn apart rather than having that trauma washed out with having been put in a blissful haze for the process. Have her linger more on her humanity or lack thereof, that maybe she thinks it’s not okay for her to be happy because she’s not human or not alive. There’s a ton of pathos there, and it’s barely tapped as a side dish to the rape. We could still even get the notes of the BETA as intelligent experimenters (an interesting and not out of place note, despite the fact that we usually see them as senselessly aggressive monsters), depending on just how methodically Sumika was disassembled before the last part that was ‘her’ was filed away. The sequence would have an extremely similar impact, but no dissonance.
But, then again, maybe the dissonance isn’t the worst thing. Sumika’s flashback sequence is grotesque in every way, and there is something more vomit-inducing freaky about BETA that are capable of carefully pushing the buttons of a captive human while still not recognizing her as a living thing than there is about BETA that just vivisect what they get their appendages on. It is, at least, a fairly unforgettable scene, and not one that competes with the game’s other unforgettable horror scene because of how different it is. In a sense, both this scene and Marimo’s death are stronger because the game doesn’t repeat itself by showing Sumika’s insides being turned into her outsides. Each bit is permitted to be not just awful, but uniquely awful.
In any case, Takeru’s ability to accept and love her as Sumika Kagami, the only girl for him, manages to win her over. They even consummate their feelings in a more conventional censored scene (yes, the 00 unit is capable – recall it had to be as close to Sumika’s body as possible so her mind wouldn’t reject it, and Yuuko is of the opinion that a young lady would kind of notice if her naughty bits weren’t present and at least functional enough for recreation). The ‘next morning’ she’s shutting down, but Yuuko suspects that getting worked up burned through her metaphorical gas tank, and all will be well once she’s gone through her refresh cycle, which will be in time for the assault on the Kashgar Original Hive.
There might not be enough time for Sumika to complete that cycle, though, as the BETA are shortly detected marching against Yokohama. The herd is technically not a huge offensive, but after the losses taken on Sadogashima and the disorder on the main island from the Susanoo-o’s detonation collateral damage, the Japanese forces have basically nothing to slow it down or thin the ranks and no other UN Base is within range to cover Yokohama, what with the preparations for a global battle surrounding the Kashgar operation and the losses again from Sadogashima.
This means Yokohama base has to use everything it’s got to hold out against the BETA onslaught. On humanity’s side, the BETA attacking now are survivors of Sadogashima. Without a hive, they should be running out of energy, and will thus only have a limited window in which they can attack. The Laser classes, in particular, normally the most strategically dangerous BETA, should either be dead already, running on fumes and unable to fire, or nearly expended. On the downside, there are a lot of BETA, maybe not by BETA standards but in an objective sense, Yokohama doesn’t have a lot of fighting-fit forces, and there are quite a few loss conditions. If the BETA seize the hive reactor at the depths of Yokohama Base, they can recharge and re-infest Yokohama. Game over. If the BETA render the remaining backup Susanoo-o inoperable or manage to kill Sumika, the ace-in-the-hole for Kashgar is gone. Similarly, if anything happens to Yuuko, Alternative IV dies with her, essentially dooming humanity to Alternative V in the long run even if the operation already set up goes smoothly. The base defenders can’t evacuate and humanity can’t afford to have them lose, so a lot is riding on the outcome of the battle.
Again, going through the exact push and pull would be too granular. It’s nicely different from Sadogashima in that, while still a mass-scale battle, the main characters are here on the defense instead of the offense. At Sadogashima, they could ultimately afford to pull out. Here, it’s fight on and hope the cost doesn’t get too high. Which, naturally, it really starts to do. If nothing else, the BETA are fighting weirdly smart – since Sadogashima the previously directly aggressive hordes seem to have read up on their Sun Tzu, keeping forces in reserve where needed, utilizing deception and diversionary tactics, hitting the humans where they appear to be weak and working to neutralize their strengths. True, the BETA still seem to care nothing for their own lives, happily using the corpses of their vanguard units as cover to screen their advance, but it’s is damnably effective. Layer after layer of defense is breached and overrun, with every big fancy science or engineering play Yuuko and the Base Commander try to make ultimately failing to stop the BETA.
At last, the decision is made to shut down the Hive reactor, removing the objective that the BETA can actually usefully capture, even though it will be a huge long-term loss if the Reactor can’t be brought back online once the crisis has passed. Once again, everything goes wrong – remote controls? Cut. The first team sent to the local control station to input the stop code? Slaughtered, including the sweet team mom of the Valkyries desperately fighting an unresponsive computer to the last second as the Beta close in and ultimately tear her to shreds. Even the first attempt to plant charges on the reactor and blow it is foiled, with the BETA cutting the detonator cords, forcing another of the Valkyries to stay behind and suicide bomb the reactor instead. The defense of the Susanoo-o prototype is also deeply troubled, nearly losing it in at least a couple ways before the attack manages to be diverted.
Once the reactor is out for good, the horror ends – the BETA have enough self-preservation and little enough spite to not press an attack for no gain, and thus withdraw and attempt to reach the next-nearest Hive instead. In the process, though, Akane has been gravely injured and the rest of the non-main-character Valkyries have been killed, along with basically all the foot troops, armored divisions, and support staff (not Miss Kyouzuka on that last score. Even this game isn’t mean enough to kill the lunch lady. Instead, she provides some sobering yet heartfelt remembrances in the wake of the disaster.) Yokohama base is essentially a ruin, with the only good fortune being that the Susanoo-o (second edition) has a clear path from its hangar to the outside.
From this, the main characters have little time to turn around. They manage to get themselves the only TSFs in good working order (the XM3-installed Takemikazuchis belonging to Tsukiyomi and the Three Idiots, plus Yuuhi’s gift to Meiya of the fancy purple one. Takeru is riding in the stripped-down Susanoo-o with Sumika – and Kasumi – this time.) in time to ship out for the orbital drop against Kashgar.
Thus, on New Year’s Day, begins Operation Cherry Blossom. All over the world (or at least the borders of Eurasia) humanity prepares for a simultaneous offensive against the BETA hives just to act as a diversion for the main event: Main Character Squad, including the second, lighter Susanoo-o, deorbiting at Kashgar with the goal of reaching the core of the original hive and destroying what Sumika’s read of the BETA hive suggests to be the nerve center of all BETA operations on Earth.
Just like at Yokohama, Murphy’s Law is in full effect. The orbital strike loses both the redshirt teams that were supposed to be helping and the carrier spacecraft, which throw themselves in the way of Laser-class blasts to shield the Susanoo-o and team, leaving only the six robots of our heroes to make their way into the depths of the BETA hive. They have very clear maps, the Susanoo-o (with Sumika sealed in as its core processor and Takeru driving as Yashiro engineers), and a precise plan that should get them all to the central chamber and out alive… but no plan survives first contact with the BETA, especially when the damn things have suddenly leveled up their strategy and tactics.
This leads to an extremely long sequence fighting through an airlock-style arrangement outside the Hive central chamber. Essentially, what the team has to do is inject a living door with “open” and “close” chemical signals to let everybody into the next hall and block out the BETA behind, while doing so again at the other end of the hall to get into the core chamber to face whatever’s there, the one thing on which Sumika had no intel.
It’s got a lot of steps, but it’s ultimately a simple plan. Open door, get through, close door, repeat. Executing that simple plan in the face of all the setbacks suffered along the way will cost the lives of Sakaki, Ayamine, Tama, and Mikoto.
I wasn’t kidding when I talked about the BETA eating plot armor for breakfast. I did not exaggerate when I said that whenever we fight the BETA in this story, somebody we care about dies. At the XM3 trials it was Marimo, at Sadogashima it was Isumi and Haruka, at the defense of Yokohama it was the rest of the Valkyries (who I feel sorry for not mentioning by name or more of their personality, but this review is already about an eternity long so trust me when I say they are developed, likable characters the likes of which other media would probably spare), and in Operation Cherry Blossom… it’s basically everybody.
And they struggle enough that even with what Muv Luv Alternative has put you through, you hold out hope until the last moment that each of them is actually going to make it, that they’ll pull off that stunt and scrape by on their way to evac. And when the truth sinks in, that you know that character you spent three long games getting to know, who you maybe romanced on another timeline or two, has just suffered a brutal demise to preserve a tiny sliver of hope for everybody else at the cost of their own lives, you hope that will be it, that the next one who’s in a tight spot will make it. And sometimes they make it through tight spots… but that doesn’t mean they make it all the way.
There’s a great bit of dramatic irony, in the proper sense of the term, in here as well: The audience is fully aware of the moments and causes for which Takeru’s friends sacrifice themselves… but he doesn’t even know they’re dead. In order to keep Takeru from losing heart, Meiya bluffs him with fake transponder readings so that the others still appear on his radar, and he feels deep relief that the people he cared about pulled through when we (and Meiya) know that they actually didn’t.
Thus, they enter the central chamber and face down the Hive Reactor of the Kashgar Original Hive… which unlike other Hive Reactors is crowned with a BETA monstrosity known as the Superordinate.
After a brief skirmish of sorts, the Superordinate recognizes communication from Sumika and Kasumi as being worthwhile to engage with, and decides it wants to talk. Kasumi renders its thoughts into words, and translates Takeru’s responses back. We get some very interesting science fiction insights and answers from this, like the fact that the BETA are essentially autonomous mining drones acting for a distant civilization of silicon life by harvesting and refining resources before launching them away, that there are a positively obscene number of them throughout the cosmos (enough to make their silicon masters a Kardashev Type 3 civilization, unless my estimations are grossly off), that they don’t recognize life on earth as life because their masters believe carbon chemistry fundamentally too volatile to endure the time scales necessary for life and natural evolution as they know it (With Superordinate pulling half of Tama out of its pocket to make the point, demanding to know in what way such a thing resembles ‘life’), and many other answers about how BETA think, what they do, and other things that I find immensely interesting but less so at the climax of a brutal action sequence where four out of eight characters who matter and are present have already died horribly.
Soon enough, the discussion reaches an impasse. Meiya tries to help fight off the Superordinate’s defense limbs, but gets her Takemikazuchi impaled to the front of the Susanoo-o for her trouble. The charged particle cannon is charged up, though, which means Takeru can pull the trigger and vaporize the Superordinate at will. Unfortunately, he’s got no way of doing that without also blowing Meiya to hell, since she’s currently welded to the muzzle and can’t bail from her TSF in its present condition.
It’s a very emotional moment, but after pacing so many of these big hard decisions and important death scenes so well, this is kind of the one that overdoes it. Takeru has done at least one entire game of growing almost exactly for this scenario, arguably two given Unlimited. I get that even though Meiya isn’t his love interest this time around she’s extremely special to him, but everything he’s been through, everything he flashes back to as important all the time, is telling him that he needs to be tougher about sacrifice, getting lectures on the nobility and necessity of what Isumi and the other Valkyries were doing when they laid down their lives, all the way back to the often-repeated line from Yuuhi that if Takeru wants to change the world he needs to not shy away from getting blood on his hands
It should be a hard, bitter, emotional moment, but it should also have been a brief moment, and it’s not. Takeru spends a long time dithering and weeping over Meiya. She even reveals that the Superordinate’s tentacles have invaded the cockpit and burrowed into her body, threatening to sieze control of her limbs from the inside and force her to act against Takeru, begging for death as she gets the drastically less sexual but no less horrific tentacle treatment, and he still can’t pull the trigger for, frankly, far too many lines. If the exchange was short and sweet, showing Takeru’s pain but also his ultimate resolve to live up to the ideals that Meiya and her sister lived by, it would have been perfect. As it is, it strained my patience.
In any case, Takeru does eventually do the thing, Meiya dies, and the BETA Superordinate dies with her. The Susanoo-o ejects its escape pod (working as intended) and Takeru, Kasumi, and Sumika are launched back to Yokohama base.
Except in one small but critical set of final reveals, Sumika isn’t going to make it either. Her card was marked when (and she very much had a hand in this) the Yokohama Base hive reactor was destroyed, since her quantum-conductive fluids couldn’t be refreshed without it, meaning the next time she went offline due to that, her brain would die and all the kings horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t be able to put her back together again. She decided to force the issue because she realized after the hot night with Takeru that her being linked to the Hive Reactor was feeding data back into the BETA network, letting them learn about humanity’s weapons, tactics, and defenses.
And, among her other lovey-dovey last words for Takeru, we also learn there’s another reason she needed to go: It was Sumika who had the power to make Takeru a Causality Conductor. It was her deep wish to be with him (amplified through psychic powers, being a brain, and quantim-gravity stuff from the superweapon that cleared the Yokohama Hive) that brought him back time and time again, whenever he fell for somebody else and her dreams didn’t work out. But Sumika’s empathy for her friends only compounded her grief whenever she stole away their happy endings. To set Takeru free, and to stop herself from turning into Yuno Gasai, she had to go.
That also means no more loops back to start, and no more hanging out in the Alternative timeline that could now have a future against the disorganized and better-understood BETA – without Sumika, Takeru will soon vanish, returning (as Kasumi clarifies) to a new world built on Sumika’s hopes and dreams. Takeru has just enough time to say some goodbyes, to the on-base impromptu monument that stands for all his fallen friends and to Yuuko and Kasumi, before he fades away into the epilogue.
And in that epilogue, we once again find ourselves at the start of Muv Luv Extra. Sumika comes to wake Takeru up, Meiya has appeared mysteriously in his bed, and while he doesn’t know he’s been through this before, he feels a surge of emotion as he greets his friends. This continues into meeting Yuuko and Marimo on the way to school, his classmates Sakaki, Ayamine, Tama, and… Mikoto as a girl. Odd call, Alternative-Sumika. And, of course chaos once again erupts when the mysterious Takeru-loving transfer students are revealed. Yeah, plural – Meiya, and her twin sister Yuuhi, both here to win the boy’s attention. And there’s another transfer as well – Kasumi! As Yuuko barges in to initiate a zany scheme, and before I can squeeze the game for an answer as to what the hell Alternative-Sumika did to create a functioning Extraverse with Yuuhi alive when it was critical to Meiya’s story that Yuuhi be dead (and recall that Meiya’s story is the inciting incident for the whole thing) and Kasumi existent in a world that shouldn’t have had mass psychic cloning, the end credits roll.
And that’s the end of Muv Luv Alternative, and with it the “Core line” of the Muv Luv Trilogy. Oh, there are plenty more Muv Luv games, including a huge number of little side stories for both Extra and Unlimited/Alternative and even an alternate version of Extra, known either as Final Extra or Altered Fable, that follows directly from the epilogue to Alternative, as well as the multi-chapter “The Day After” (and upcoming capstone Muv Luv Resonative) that takes place in the wake of Unlimited’s ending, showing what became of Earth when the Migrants were away and the bombs fell. But as far as the essential Takeru Shirogane story goes, it ends here in Alternative, and as such that’s also all I’m going to be addressing for the purposes of these reviews.
I do feel, though, that I need to sum up what I think and feel about the Muv Luv trilogy. The answer? Alternative stands, by many estimations, as the best Visual Novel of all time, and I can see why. It’s a powerhouse and an emotional roller coaster, that really shows what visual novels are capable of in that it gets the audio-visual immersion of watching a show along with the intellectual interest of reading a good book and the personal investment of “I did this” that comes with the game format.
For my part, I consider it to essentially be one entry with Extra and Unlimited. There’s just Muv Luv, the story of Takeru Shirogane across time and dimensions (and according to Alternative, every route is canon anyway, so there’s that) and it’s a damn good story. As could be said of anything so massive, there can be moments that don’t necessarily work, and I’ve tried to call them out when they appear… but all of them, even the ones that drew the most of my ire, are more or less totally eclipsed by the great mass of quality content that surrounds them. It’s not always pretty and it’s not always pleasant, especially in Alternative, but it is always engrossing, from the warm and comforting trope-heavy sillyness of Extra to the worst of Alternative’s war, horror, and gore. It’s well-written, well-plotted, shows a clear understanding of good storytelling techniques and how to use them, and is absolutely worth the respect it gets, the time to get involved with it, and so on. I lead off the review saying as much with my spoiler warning, but it’s worth saying again here at the end.
That said, my deep respect applies here only to the Visual Novels themselves. If the anime outings want even a hint of that, they’ve got to earn it themselves, rather than just riding Alternative’s coat tails.