Muv-Luv is a game that embodies the value of planning and foreshadowing, the power of contemporary consumption of media, and the degradation of both of those strengths under the flow of time and ensuing discussion.
Extra, the first half of the simply-named Muv-Luv, is a romcom following Shirogane Takeru, an altogether average male protagonist, who ends up in the midst of a love triangle with his childhood friend, Sumika, and a girl with whom he made a promise to marry at a young age, Meiya.
The primary heroines, though, are important. They’re opposites in almost every way, playing off the duality of a lot of romantic dilemmas in similar stories. Meiya, colored blue, is socially distant, has immense influence, and despite being apart from Takeru for their entire life, made a promise to marry him when they were older. Sumika, dyed red, can read Takeru like a book, is subject to the whims of everyone around them, and despite being around him his whole life, has left her feelings unspoken because she assumes he’s going to default to being with her, as his childhood friend. The two heroines’ routes are inextricably linked, only parting ways at the end when Takeru finally makes his decision, and they’re the only two routes you have to clear in order to get to the second half of Muv-Luv.
The thing about Extra is that it’s essentially all build-up to a twist, a punchline that completely upends the entire facade it puts up for the sole purpose of tearing down. It’s important, in the broadest sense of the term, but it’s a structural importance more than a substantial one. It gives the player time to appreciate the normalcy of Takeru’s life, even if its normalcy is upended by the presence of Meiya and all of the influence she brings to bear on her romantic pursuit.
Even through that disruption, immense as it is in the context of our modern world, life essentially carries on, peaceful enough to sustain the simple romcom that Extra presents, rife with parody and cliche, to act as a facade.
That changes when the second half of Muv-Luv begins.
After clearing the twin routes of Sumika and Meiya in Extra, the title screen changes, becoming the title screen for Unlimited. The heroines present in the title screen, which lacks Sumika, wear somber expressions, the white uniforms of the school in Extra replaced with black military uniforms.
Takeru wakes up in his own bed, memories of the end of the mandatory routes intact but dismissed as a dream. He leaves his house, only to discover that outside is a barren wasteland, with wreckage of bipedal mechs dotting the landscape, and explores where his town used to be under the assumption that he’s just dreaming. Once he finds his way to the hill where his school used to be, he finds a military installation in its place, and is promptly captured, since he’s suspicious as hell.
Takeru is imprisoned and interrogated, which presents the first scene in which he has an actual voice actor. Through all of Extra, he has no spoken lines, which is standard for the contemporary dating VN format; the protagonist is simply a cipher for the player, a blank slate by which the audience chooses a character’s story to play out. Exceptions to this decision include flashbacks to Takeru’s childhood, functionally an entirely distinct character from his presence as a young adult.
Despite that, though, Unlimited once again serves more structural importance than substantial, though not as severely as in the case of Extra. Most of Unlimited is spent with Takeru reconnecting with the team he’s assigned to be part of and learning about the setting, a world where an alien race called the BETA (Beings of Extra-Terrestrial Origin and Adversaries of the Human Race) began invading Earth in the 70s. The BETA have a presence on both Mars and the Moon, and followed humanity back to Earth as they retreated after the Lunar War.
The BETA have seemingly no evolutionary precedent, utilize materials beyond human knowledge, and strip the planet clean wherever they establish hives and expand their influence. The knowledge that humanity has gleaned about them has come at a great cost, and is all related to how to fight them, because the only meaningful interaction with the BETA is to kill or be killed. They are the epitome of the faceless horror of the universe that form the backbone of a humanity vs The Other war story. They are seemingly endless, they are unpredictable, and they are hostile.
Despite learning all of this, Takeru doesn’t encounter any BETA in Unlimited. He’s just a cadet, and an under-performing one at that. He knows his squad, because they’re the universe’s version of his group of friends from his own life, but he hasn’t had the time spent with them to have any sense of mutual understanding. He’s also hopelessly outclassed in terms of military training and struggles to catch up the entire game both in terms of physical training and judgment calls.
However, the one aspect of military life he’s actually somewhat suited for is also the one he’s most excited for. In Extra, a parody of Virtual-On makes a few appearances, and Takeru’s love for bipedal mechs is what drives him to join the military instead of just being the XO’s assistant. When they finally qualify to begin training, they discover he’s got an aptitude for the mechs, called Tactical Surface Fighters or TSFs, for the simple reason that he’s not prone to motion sickness like the rest of the squad.
He spends the remainder of his on-screen time training to be a TSF pilot before Christmas Eve comes around, alongside the ending of the Alternative IV program that the squad was part of. Takeru, unable to help bring IV to fruition, has to watch as the final resort of sending a fleet of refugee ships and nuking the planet from orbit comes to pass, though it does take another three years. In that time, nothing significant happens, aside from token promotions and the blooming of a relationship with the heroine that Takeru ends up with; he sends them off to join the colonists, and the final scene of each route is the heroine telling their daughter about the bravery of their father.
Whereas Extra and Unlimited are, all told, waiting for the other shoe to drop, Alternative is where the shoe drops harshly, repeatedly, and directly onto Takeru’s face. Even through Unlimited, Takeru was being sheltered, kept in a bubble out of the kindness of circumstances beyond his control and the emotional immaturity he wore on his sleeve. Alternative has no time for such niceties, and the changes wrought by his foreknowledge quickly snowball into escalation of political tensions, DEFCON levels, and death tolls.
Even in the face of utter annihilation at the face of an uncaring, unending horde, jingoistic pride and the idea of valuing national identity still have their hooks buried in humanity. It’s not enough to survive, the UN member nations (particularly America) think, we need to wring all the influence we can out of everyone else so when we stand atop the smoldering, barren earth, we can be the most important people here.
The frustration that Takeru feels when dealing with Americans playing politics, exacerbated as it is by his certainty that humanity is truly on the brink of extinction, is palpable. And yet, there is a fascination with the shogunate, honor, and imperial duty that also colors the political skirmishes and the coup d’etat that makes up a major turning point in the diverging timeline. It’s certainly softer on the national pride of its country of origin, but I don’t have the energy to research JP political history to delve into just how soft it gets.
The surprising part is that I agreed with, or at least respected, most of the politics, because of the context they came from. For what it’s worth, however, it has only driven my real politics further to the left. Many of us are privileged to live in a bubble away from violence that is ongoing in our world; Yuuko even points out that while Japan is peaceful, that’s definitely not true of everywhere in Takeru’s original world. I, however, am unfortunately idealistic, and I see this as a reason to care even more about making the world that we do have influence over a better place for everyone.
This insulation from violence is also true of Takeru’s time in Unlimited, but that insulation is yanked away from him, and the audience, very quickly. Whereas Takeru never encounters a BETA in Unlimited, only the silhouette of one in a training program, a training exercise goes awry in this altered timeline and BETA stage an attack on the unprepared base.
Things go poorly, and Takeru is left traumatized by the experience, as is the audience thanks to a particularly grisly CG as part of the scene. Attempting to flee back to his home world, he does so, only to bring the violence that surrounds his current self back with him in a heart-wrenching sequence that works aptly as a metaphor for PTSD and assorted related psychological issues. He eventually cannot bring himself to stay in such a peaceful world at the expense of his friends’ happiness, and returns to Alternative’s world, where everything takes a surreal twist as Alternative IV comes to fruition. And then everything gets worse, and worse, until it ends, in a slow spiral of death and causality finding the one way to a supposedly brighter future.
I won’t spoil Alternative entirely, but suffice it to say, it’s one of a few VNs that will stick in my brain for a long, long time. There are seeds, genuinely planted in Extra, that aren’t paid off until Alternative, three years later, and the first time through the back half of Alternative was a series of escalating exclamations of disbelief for me. I will give a content warning for extremely grisly death scenes and sexual assault by tentacles in a mandatory and plot-relevant capacity, but if you believe you can handle that, and are otherwise interested in the trilogy, I believe it’s well worth your time. It’s also pretty fucking depressing through a decent chunk of Alternative, so mind that as you save in the name of true love.
