Muv-Luv Alternative

Muv-Luv Alternative is a disaster, and not even an entertaining one. It is a failure across the board; The animation is bad, the art is bland, the characters come across as flat and generic, and the pacing is atrocious. However, the biggest failure of this series is managing to make a story taking place in a world on the brink of annihilation so utterly tiresome. Muv-Luv Alternative is an adaptation of a spin-off of a standard school romance visual novel, where the protagonist from the main game finds himself in an alternate universe where BETA (giant monster aliens) are trying to exterminate the human race. The originalsource was far too long to be adapted into one series, so only part of it could be adapted. The choice of part is the main reason why this show is so incredibly boring. This series starts part way through the story. Takeru, the protagonist, has already experienced this timeline once, but failed to prevent calamity. This time he will strive to change things. The issue this brings is that this means that Takeru knows when and where the BETA will attack, which means that within this series, the BETA, the central antagonists and threat of calamity, are entirely trivialised and barely appear in the series at all. Instead, what this series should be about is politics and mystery. The issue with this is that starting half way through the story robs us of context. The show takes often far too long expositing simple things, but fails to cover the information anime only viewers will have missed. It seems that the pacing took a hit so they could stretch this section of the story to 12 episodes. The other reason the politics and mystery in this series fails is that the characters, the reasons we should care about what’s happening, are weak. The reason why we care about stopping Alternative V should be that we care about the characters being saved, but the way they are characterised is generic and bland. It doesn’t help that the voice acting is often mediocre. What should have been the climatic arc of this cour felt unnecessary. The questions I kept asking myself when watching it was “why does this matter?” and “why should I care?”. The situation itself was actually fairly well written, and the politics were grounded (if not seeming to promote nationalism). But you cannot just try and set up a situation like this without making the stakes seem meaningful. In the original medium this probably had a lot more weight, but in the anime it just feels like filler. The production values being as low as they are also hurt considerably, and likely explain their decisions in choosing what to adapt. The animation is bad, with minimal movement and characters often looking off model. The art direction is also bland. This seemed like a tick box exercise of getting scenes from the visual novel and putting it into anime form, there was no concern in making scenes more interesting and suitable for the anime medium. Overall, this series has repeated every mistake that was previously made in adapting the spin-off Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse, and is even worse than it overall. It fails to deliver a positive experience for both fans of the original source material and first-time viewers of the Muv-Luv franchise. My recommendation to anyone considering this is to watch the first two episodes of Muv-Luv: Total Eclipse and stop there. Those two episodes are the height of what this series should be achieving, and is never replicated again, either in its series or in this one.

There is no Muv Luv Alternative anime. Full disclosure: VN reader. STORY: Yes, dear reader, as you can see, things are not looking good for MLA. Alternative is the third installment of the Muv Luv Trilogy, you will need to read Extra and Unlimited to understand the character interactions and basic background of the plot. It’s like watching Star Wars 3 – Revenge of the Sith without watching The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, you’re going to skip Anakin’s whole character development and skip to where he turns to the dark side? The story speedruns on a bunch of arcs that really make no senseand skips a bunch of character build up especially on Takeru. Avex pictures is lying to everyone when they said that anime only’s can understand the lore from this adaptation. ANIMATION: Oh boy, these LAZY. ASS. Animators. First off, they nerfed all the characters, they just look like plain jane anime characters, can’t tell them apart other than hair color. The distinctive hairstyles kinda makes the character personality, plus it’s the trademark of the franchise. The worst part about the designs is when its zoomed out or a group of them shown at one time, it’s really lazily drawn, like F/SN DEEN bad. That last ep with Meiya crying, You Have Got To Be Kidding Me. SOUND: Eh, it sounds ok? Nothing to write home about, would be nice to use the OST’s from the VN, even better if they used the same VA’s. The VA’s selected are ok, but what really irked me is Takeru’s VA being a noob, lets just say he didn't really do a good job. CHARACTER: Referring to my Star Wars comparison, there was barely time to get the sense of character development. This mostly happens again in Extra and Unlimited. Because anime only’s are only introduced to Alternative without any prior info, Takeru is basically going this anime with a gameshark modded mindset because he knows what is happening. All these events happened in Unlimited. Also because this is only focusing on Takeru’s POV, you barely get to even know the other characters. I bet for the anime only’s, you can’t even name the heroines off the bat, because of the speedrunning of the storyline that there was very little time to flesh out character traits. ENJOYMENT: To quote TheReportOfTheWeek, “My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.” Historically, anime adaptations of VN’s are not really well received and are scored accordingly, mainly because in most VN’s, there are routes where you can read for a heroine and there are multiple heroines. Muv Luv Alternative doesn’t really have this issue because it’s a linear/kinetic continuation of a previous storyline but at the same time gives off a “spinoff what if?” vibe. The main issue is poor decision making on what is being adapted and how they’re adapting this, at this point they’re just pissing off the VN community with a butchered turd while leaving the anime only’s more confused on what are they even watching in the first place. OVERALL: Just play the VN trilogy, ignore this anime adaptation. You'll be glad you did.

Among the dedicated Muv-Luv fans, I, as an anime only and first time viewer into this franchise, felt as if I was standing in the middle of a warzone as they broke down with meltdowns every week over how horrifying this adaptation was. Low effort 2D showed hilariously drawn faces, and animation that felt weak and hollow. People were disintegrating before the beams hit, and some soldier's eyes were drawn so bad it was just sad. Episode 1 prepared you for what's not going to happen in season 1 because the BETA weren't even the focus. It felt like bait but at least it hadthe BETA introduced. The pacing is so rushed, it felt as if the story was watered down and irreversibly neutered. As bad as this started, at least it got better and became decent towards the end. The music was memorable only for the wrong reason because all I remember is how badly it sounded in the first episode. It felt like a struggle to get through all the boring and overuse of exposition in the beginning. It was as if the staff crammed the visual novel's story so much they managed to pound it into a low quality jewel. Some weeks I just couldn't watch the new episodes. There is a huge cast of characters and a lack of development for most of them, thus it was a challenge to try and follow along without doing a re-watch. Don't make the mistake I made and read what was released before to understand the characters better. Fortunately, towards the end, despite there was still comedic 2D animation, the final arc began turning the quality around a bit. Most fall season protagonists are terrible, but Takeru's growth throughout really made me respect him more as the series went. The politics and dialogue was saved by Yuuhi with her passionate leadership. The CGI shown here was actually decent. It ended with a small decimal of dignity but at least they tried towards the end. Season 2 was announced as well, and I will be watching it regardless of how rough this season was. Maybe this series was trying to be friendly for the new fans to get them to read the visual novel, but it's opposite for me because I have a bit of interest to read it because of how bad it seemed and what could have been. Despite the stronger second half, Muv-Luv Alternative overall did not do what I want, and did not do what I need.

Just to clarify here guys, I read the VN, but I read it all the way back in 2014. But oh man, where to start. I saw the announcement for this anime before the season started and was looking forward to this more than anything else this season. However I shouldn't have expected anything as soon as I realised it was going to be a one-cour series. MLA is probably one of the darkest and gloomiest stories I've ever read. But to truly be able to appreciate it, you would need to read through both the Muv-Luv Extra and Muv-Luv Unlimited stories, BOTH of which are skippedhere for some reason. So what we essentially get is the second half of a story that in an ideal world has already had around about 60 hours of playtime from the reader to build the characters and the world up taken away. So it is exceptionally hard to piece together exactly what is going on, even for the initiated. The overall idea of the plot is that an extra-terrestrial race known as the BETA have invaded Earth from space and consumed alot of the main land (Europe/Asia) and are on the cusp of invading Japan. It's something we have seen before in a lot of different anime, just done a bit more PG (Strike Witches etc). The first episode is an original story which is sort of a prequel to the main plot where the BETA take over an island just off the coast of Japan. Through this we get to see just how futile humanity's efforts are to stop the threat and how little regard the BETA have for human life whether it is soldiers or civilians. It's honestly the highlight of the series as it gets the point across pretty well that humanity is pretty much boned unless a miracle happens. Then we get to Episode 2 onwards which introduces us to our protagonist Shirogane Takeru who has already experienced both the worlds of Muv-Luv Extra / Unlimited so he has the knowledge from those worlds but the watchers here do not. So he just knows things for "reasons" from an anime only watchers perspective which is just really shoddy writing. Most of the heroines of his unit are just kind of there as the series expects you to know their quirks but they get so little screen time that I bet most people won't even remember their names over "the pink-haired one" or "the one with glasses" etc. It's really such a let down as these characters make the visual novel what it is just as much, if not more so than Takeru himself. The story is trying to compress about 50+ hours of playtime into a 12 episode season, or 11 if you remove the original first episode. Any remotely experienced anime watcher will tell you that that would shoot the pacing to hell and it shows so much here. I found myself scratching my head at what was going on more often than not. I even binged episodes 9 - 12 just so I would be able to try and keep a handle on the action as it was unfolding. But I can promise you, I still only had half an idea of what was going on. Some of the soundtrack that was playing in the background during battles was pretty nice though, I will give it that. Not memorable but definitely serviceable. The art was generally very dull, most characters looking pretty similar with hairstyles being the only real differential between some characters. The story ending where it has for this season is a bit bland too. We get the BETA as this all encompassing threat but we spend the majority of the plot with humans fighting humans for the sake of national pride or political influence which felt really stupid to me. I think the BETA are in like two episodes outside of the first one, so they are just a threat for plot convenience and not the harbingers of the apocalypse like they are supposed to be. There is talk about "Alternative IV" being the saviour of humanity, but it's only spoken about in the first half and then not mentioned again. It would have been a bit better if that particular reveal had come up as a season finale instead of what we got. (VN readers will know exactly which reveal I mean) If Season 2 does come, I hope the studio understand the concept of pacing and actually reads the source material instead of cherry picking some pretty irrelevant moments from the visual novel and making near full episodes out of them instead. This series has had some of the highest potential to be a true classic but it has sadly tripped over itself and landed face first in a bear trap. I know there is a stigma that visual novels are generally badly adapted but there are anime such as Kanon 2006, ef and Clannad that would beg to differ. It can be done but it seemed that the studio had this as a cash grab for the many fans of the source material. So to summarise, there is only one word that wraps up how I feel about this anime as a whole and that is "disappointing". Anyone looking to delve into this universe, for the love of god, read the visual novels and leave this to the side.

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