the Little "Mermaids"
Read in Japanese on Steam for about 45 hours.
I really do not like Disney’s Little Mermaid. No, not the 2023 live-action one I would never watch and certainly not for the usual shitty reason on the internet. The 1989 one which seemingly kicked off the so-called Disney Renaissance is the one I would rage against. The fairy tale of the same title by Hans Christian Andersen was what introduced tragedies to me when I was still literally in kindergarten. So how dare the House of Mouse turned it into a light-hearted musical comedy. Without that early encounter with a tragic tale, I wouldn’t have been here recommending Muv-luv Alternative almost 3 decades later.
Even though Muv-luv Alternative is one of the most critically acclaimed visual novels, it feels like a forgotten gem. Maybe its reputation of being dark and serious plus the “50 to 70 hours long read time” scare off many potential readers. While the forty plus hours I spent reading it do feel jarring, I still recommend it wholeheartedly to someone who find merits in sad stories. For its success in creating tragedies of the classic and typical sense, even though there is a lack of interaction.
Edge of next year
Muv-luv Alternative goes straight for the visual novel tropes of time loop or at first glance crossing over to maintain the directness of it being a sequel. The original Muv-luv’s Unlimited segment can end with a “happy” ending where pov character Takeru Shirogane got the young woman his loves out of that hell on earth. So, what could possibly be next? Well, he witnessed and seemingly perished in a traumatizing FUBAR situation, then he woke up in late October, 2001 on said hell on earth yet again. No slapstick background music this time, he thought long and hard about how he can prevent the recent-to-him FUBAR and have many answers whether he wants it or not.
With this game released in 2006 and having time loop as a plot device, it’s hard not to draw comparison to All You Need Is Kill, a 2004 Japanese novel that got turned into this Hollywood “cult favorite”. AYNIK was inspired by its author’s “heated gamer moment” of wanting video game stories to acknowledge players’ retries, so he wrote an alien invasion story where the hero’s success depends on live, die, repeat and repeat. Takeru Shirogane only has to live, die and repeat for one long last time here though, since Alternative is more interested in telling readers about the dystopian world it built than showing some noob getting good.
As a naysayer of the Last of Us since 2015, yours truly still find the 2023 HBO series’ shortcomings more loathe worthy. How David thought him the type of monster as the “mushroom” is especially eye-roll indicting. Overall, with a faithful adaption prioritizing getting the story forward, I just find it cute that Drukmann thought that story is worth a damn with all interaction cut out. On the contrary, visual novel stories are “video game stories” that have to work without interaction.
Though one does need to enter with expectation for a different kind of editing. One tricky thing about adapting visual novels into linear non-interactive media, nothing can get away with “characters talk, talk some more and keep talking” like those can. Actually, not even other interactive things can get away with that. Nope, neither “Hideo Kojima Game” nor SEGA’s cinematic epics in my book anyway.
Muv-luv Alternative is an extremely wordy visual novel. A lot is delivered via dialogues or even monologue style lectures. Briefing is never brief here. Before all 5 set-pieces here, there are extended segments where readers have to listen to long monologue, and that’s about all this game has to offer. I said almost, because there are set-pieces depicting combat operations, where chapters are divided by the hours instead of days, and bit player pov characters were added to tell the whole story.
Worry not about the action, though. Type-moon style drag-out fights, where an all-knowing narrator would pause and explain every spell cast, are not here. Battle simply rages as sprites move on the screen with some combat chat thrown in. The different types of guns are mostly explained before the battle and one merely sees them switched in action.
Shin Sakura Taisen
The final set-piece of Alternative is about a grand battle under the code name Oka Sakusen, translated into English by yours truly as “Operation Cherry-blossom” or “Operation Sakura”. Oka and Sakura are just 2 different ways to pronounce cherry-blossom in Japanese after all. This got me thinking that Alternative did to SEGA’s Sakura Taisen or Sakura Wars series once what Tomino did to Yamato.
Yoshiyoki Tomino is known nowadays as the co-creator of Gundam but his deal is never about mega franchise building. Since the mid-1970s, his creations can be seen as a criticism to Space Battleship Yamato, a military science fiction anime of early-1970s. Yamato overall considers the military as something inherently good. Tomino looked at that statement and basically yelled how military is inherently bad with all the projects he co-created, supervised and directed, whether it is relatively more grounded like original Gundam or plain high fantasy like Dunbine.
SEGA’s Sakura Wars imagines an alternative early twentieth century where World War II never happened mainly because there was a global defense against an extra-dimensional threat. The series started, so I guess it can be forgiven for being an advocate for “End of History”.
Muv-luv Alternative is a more realistic and cynical piece of work in the mid-aughts, it imagines an alternative early aughts when a war against extra-terrestrial threat had been going on for 3 decades. But national boarders still mean conflicting interests. In this world where nation states are all high militarized, it’s hard to assume that those conflicting interests can be settled with merely words. Alternative’s first set-piece about a coup just told me “Yeah, no shit, reader.” Powers with their armed forces always go war war, rather than jaw jaw”
Speak of criticizing media in the 1990s, people sharing the shower regardless of gender is something discussed in Muv-luv Alternative. It’s identified as a way armed service taking away its personnels’ privacy. The pov character’s potential love interests in the first game all have parents in high places so they were subjected to another way of losing privacy: the almost naked looking cadet polit suit. One up that “bleed heart liberal” Paul Verhoeven’s. How dare he suggested the mix gender shower scenes in Robocop and Starship Troopers as something wonderfully progressive when it’s anything but.
There is maybe something regarding gender and race for the sensitive type who must come across this game. Even though gender no longer stop people from participate in the war, “man using lance to attack while woman using shield to defend” in a er, Mobile Armor for my fellow Gundam viewers, is still some weird gender role stuff in the final battle. Regarding race, there is a stereotypical Chinese looking (Narrow oval eyes and pencil sharp mustache in contrary to the two doe eyed and clear shaved young Japanese men here.) infantry corporal and a stereotypical Black (Thick though not cartoonish so lips.) looking private. As a story quite criticizing towards US foreign policies being hegemony no matter what, it sure embraces some not so considering Hollywood trope.
The first four installments in the Sakura Wars series had the same pov character and an ever-growing ensemble of potential love interests for him. Alternative could not escape the trap of sequels having more cast members but it did escape the gravity of one man’s assumed charisma. Just check out the audio option menu and you would find a whole another dating sim worth of new anime or manga babes than the original Muv-luv. But they are not there for a reader’s choosing pleasure, several of them are locked in their own love triangles or other likewise situations.
For one thing, Alternative is not a typical dating sim. The marketed 50 to 70 hours run time is not about multiple routes and rather one single whooper of a storyline. Yours truly got through under 50 because the auto text speed was tuned to max and I clicked through almost all the flashback scenes. There are branches for choosing a girl to hang out with, but they just add some extra scenes. The only love story here is more about the pov character reuniting with a predetermined star-crossed lover, one yours truly has yet to know in the original Muv-luv by the way.
A fair warning, though, do not get too attached. Since a whole bloody lot of them will join something like Yoshiyoki Tomino’s Ghost Parade and the suicide mission afterwards. It is no “maxed out, pay a little attention and you should be fine” type offered in Mass Effect 2 in this epic. Yours truly still feel devastated by the first one of those a whole week after as the time of writing, partially because it kicked off a chain of events that manages to make the game’s forever war dystopia not look like the worst thing in the world. How graphic it got does not help either. It contains a piece of horror imagery that the game’s ESRB summary would not warn you about. Strange how they focus on the relatively brief tentacle porn angle there while even hearing people die screaming is more disturbing than seeing that horse shit in this one.
History never ends but all good stories do
Nowadays many know Muv-luv Alternative as one major inspiration for Hajime Isayama and his abomination titled Attack on Titan. He namedropped that game in 2014 where one could still except Eren Yaeger to go through the “trying to be a decent person in an indecent world” arc that Denji went through in the first 11 volumes of Chainsaw Man. Alas, whatever Isayama thought he learned from Alternative, it had been filtered through that nationalist yet niellist twisted mind of his and ended up on the page as something nigh unrecognizable
Yours truly would put this one next to a better book: the late Kentaro Miura’s Berserk. The book started off edgy but managed to feel surprisingly heart-warming at points, especially in the recent volumes. Before his untimely death, Miura at least dedicated Berserk’s latest high adventure arc to the recovery of a highly traumatized [REDACTED]. Alternative is mostly about the weaponization of such recovery process, but then again everything can be weaponized in that awful world forged by a forever war.
Alternative has a line about even though they manage to “kill the ‘emperor’ and destroy the ‘death star’”, the war would not end immediately that day. Of course, Muv-luv as a multimedia franchise indeed did not end in 2006. Alternative alone got both a graphic novelization (Strangely the English version of which is sold as DLC for original Muv-luv on Steam) and a new as the time of writing animated adaption. So new in fact that the usual suspect packed cast in the anime is very different from those put their back into the game.
The global forever war setting sure can keep the spin off train going. And even though original Muv-luv’s Extra segment already feels like a fan disc to yours truly, Alternative does have an actual fan disc about hanging out with the main game’s large ensemble against a high school set-com background rather than fearing for their lives in a forever war. But I’m more than satisfied with Alternative’s end. So, I’m going to leave it at that. Good stories remain good stories because they end and no continuation is allowed to foul that up.