Review for Muv-Luv Alternative. Game for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the video game was released on 24/02/2006 The version for PC came out on 30/09/2016
In a period in which we are looking towards the future, towards the great games for home platforms shown during E3 2018, perhaps also thinking about the next generation of consoles, we find ourselves taking several steps back to discover and rediscover the past. We must, that is, dust off our PlayStation Vita which, contrary to the easy puns about his death, is still in business, thanks above all to the works arriving from the Land of the Rising Sun. It is in fact from Japan that Muv-Luv comes, the first chapter of a series of visual novels born in 2003 on PC (from which manga and anime were then generated, as often happens).
You need to do some clarity right away, though. Right now, two games are available on PlayStation Store: Muv-Luv and Muv-Luv Alternative. The latter will be covered in a different review, while we will talk to you today about Muv-Luv, which in turn it is made up of two very different chapters, both for style and quality: Extra and Unlimited.
Muv-Luv Extra
Let's start from the beginning and let's shed some light on âge's work. Everything comes from Extra (Unlimited is blocked until the completion of the first chapter): we are Takeru, typical senior high school kid without particular distinctive features. We have a typical childhood friend, Sumika, in a typical that could blossom into love at any moment. Our life, however, completely changes the morning in which, upon our awakening, we find a mysterious girl named Meiya in our bed. The young woman is the only daughter of a very rich Japanese family and, for unclear reasons, she is obsessed with us.
As you will have guessed, Muv-Luv falls into the dating-simulator visual novel category, or those stories in which the protagonist will find himself surrounded by many girls suddenly attracted to him. Like any VN, we will have to read dozens and dozens of lines of dialogues, making a few choices from time to time and arriving at one of the various endings, generally linked to one of the female protagonists.
Extra is a typical VN dating-sim, with all its classic stereotypes and with the typical characters whose characterization can be foreseen from the first moment. We have the distracted and messy girl, the neko-loli moe and kawaii, the class representative dutiful and so on. Extra, let's face it without beating about the bush, not surprising even for a second: the depth of the characters, the variety of scenes and events proposed, the themes covered, everything is bland and generic. Overall, Muv-Luv Extra tries to be a light opera with a ready beat to make us smile, but it fails. Slice of life worshipers might perhaps settle for the set of Japanese stereotypes seen and revised in dozens of anime, manga and other visual novels, but most gamers won't find anything interesting in Muv-Luv Extra.
Unfortunately, graphics and sound also bury the work. The environments are few, static, banal and made only discreetly. The dubbing is typical of Japanese visual novels, for better or for worse. Even the background music is not striking in any way.
Muv-Luv Unlimited
The situation changes a lot when you switch to Unlimited. The work opens in the pre-final phase of Extra. Takeru will wake up in his home but, once outside, he will find that the neighborhood has been completely destroyed. As he will later learn, Takeru is now in a parallel world to his own, a version of Earth where aliens called BETA have invaded our planet and decimated the population.. The only hope for humanity are combat mechas. Takeru decides to become a pilot (classic videogame lover's dream as he is) and attends a military school where he finds (almost) all of Extra's knowledge. Just as the world is different, however, the various girls will also be different. We will therefore have to recreate a with the various team members, discovering their backgrounds and the motivations that drive them to fight. Extra's cheerful and carefree tone is abandoned in favor of a constant feeling of tension.
This second chapter is much more interesting: the topics covered are deeper and will test Takeru who, let's remember, comes from a world where war was not his daily life. Each character on the team will have more space to express themselves and be discovered, in addition to what we will claim through our choices. Also in this case we will be able to create a love with one of the girls, but it will only be one of the themes of the game. This new world is much more intriguing to discover and immediately we will understand that there are some mysteries to unravel. Unfortunately the work does not end with Unlimited: Muv-Luv continues with Alternative (which, let's repeat it, is sold separately). As for the technical and stylistic aspects, Muv-Luv Unlimited rises a few steps compared to Extra: the quality of the designs is similar, but the variety is greater. Also, Unlimited indulges in some more than enjoyable anime footage. Dubbing and sound, on the other hand, are identical.
Muv-Luv is a double-sided game. Extra never hits the mark and will be indigestible to anyone not living with Japanese stereotypes. The saga finds its identity (and good quality) with Unlimited and its parallel world torn apart by a war with aliens. The truth is that the Extra + Unlimited combination is only interesting if you start with the idea of facing Alternative, otherwise, the game loses much of its charm.
► Muv-Luv Alternative is an Adventure type game published by 5PB for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the video game was released on 24/02/2006 The version for PC came out on 30/09/2016
