Spend the entire first part of the game getting players used to the characters and their relationships, and then push it to new, powerful heights in the second part. ![]() Takeru, however, is still Takeru, transported mysteriously into this parallel world and suddenly forced to fend for himself. The twist, of course, and the point at which Muv-Luv could have made something really special, is that the entire cast is carried over Sakaki is no longer the Class Rep but the Squad Leader, Tamase is a crack sniper, and screwball physics teacher Yuuko runs the base with an iron fist. In this world, Hakuryo isn’t a high school, it’s a vast military base used to train “surface pilots”: highly specialised units capable of piloting gigantic “TSF” mechs. Where EXTRA was a high school romance, UNLIMITED tells the story of a parallel universe in which Earth has been almost entirely destroyed by alien attackers. I’ve been putting it off, because to begin to talk about it requires me to engage again with what could have been Muv-Luv’s standout moment. I said Muv-Luv was two games and it’s probably time to talk about the second one ( spoilers for the concept, though not the plot specific, follow). Without exception, each of Muv-Luv’s punchlines fall flat, each falling flatter than the last, until by the end, all of the bizarreness and high-flying antics have been reduced to nothing at all. When the game decides to answer a few, of course, it does so perfunctorily events resolve themselves predictably and without any of the flair of their initial setup. At the same time, however, the game positions Meiya’s nature and appearance as a mystery to be solved, and, set in the midst of an otherwise ordinary school term, I found it impossible not to ask questions. Nobody stands up midway through a Monty Python sketch and asks “but why did they hit that man with a fish”, just as nobody is tremendously interested in the exact physics of James Bond’s jetpack. As far as Muv-Luv is concerned, helicopters filled with chefs are simply meant to be received and not questioned.Īnd to an extent, that’s fine! The game has a rich streak of absurdity, and so often absurdity works best unquestioned. For a long time, I hoped that the game would give me a compelling reason for Meiya’s near-magical abilities other than her vast wealth, but as it progressed it became clear that I wouldn’t be receiving one. These things are merely day-to-day for her, and it’s the far more mundane actions of the “commoners” that give her pause. In contrast to the sheer implausibility of her actions, though, Meiya is remarkably cool-headed. Another says “Meiya’s car is 60 metres long and nobody can work out how it turns corners”. ![]() One of my notes says “a helicopter full of chefs just arrived”. It transpires that Meiya is the heir to a vast family business capable of almost anything, and over the course of EXTRA, she wields that power in a variety of increasingly bizarre ways. No immediate explanation is given for her arrival, and after the initial shock wears off, nobody is tremendously concerned about what’s taken place. Takeru wakes up one morning, near the beginning of term, to find Meiya lying next to him in bed. Meiya’s presence transforms Muv-Luv into something deeply and inexplicably weird, and, at first, interesting. And then there’s Meiya Mitsurugi, a transfer student who takes one look at the traditional structure and conventions of a high school romance and throws every possible spanner into every possible work. There’s the bossy Chizuru Sakaki his childhood friend Sumika Kagami the quiet and vaguely terrifying Kei Ayamine cat-like Miki Tamase, and Yoroi Mikoto who is constantly being dragged on misguided and disastrous holidays by his adventurer father. Set across the winter term, it is ostensibly a sort of high school romance as he gets to know, and falls in love with, the various members of his class. The first, EXTRA, tells the story of Takeru, a student at Hakuryo high school in his final year. Muv-Luv is a game told in two parts, with a third, standalone part set to be released later this year. Reading back through them, there is a very specific note at which everything goes downhill, and it just reads “ugghhhhhhh”. And then, bullet point by bullet point, they start getting shorter, sharper. ![]() For a while it’s clear that I’m being carried along, in a sense, by what’s happening. Despite knowing a chunk about the game beforehand, it’s clear I’m not entirely sure what I’m getting into, and the notes continue in that vein for a while as the story unfolds. ![]() The notes I took while playing Muv-Luv, a 2003 adult visual novel that’s just been released in English, tell a story.
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