Oct 27, 2021
Muv Luv Alternative is the adaptation of one of the most acclaimed visual novels in the west as you may have already read a million times.
It is also a terrible attempt to cram an story made to be told in 80 hours into 8 hours of anime, it fails not only as an introduction by having a lightning pacing with poor exposition, but by having a low production quality and poor direction, meaning that if you want to relive the scenes from the game it would be a better option to just download the game and select the chapter you want.
However I must say that
...
the first episode of this anime was good, it was everything I wish the show was: An introduction of the Muv Luv universe that showed unexplored characters and battles that happened off screen in the visual novel, but instead what we are getting is a show that fails to both appeal to old fans and make new people interested since everything happens too fast and there are only crumbs of good animation and direction, outside of the first episode the only department where I'm confident this anime will deliver and has delivered up until now is the mecha action and the CGI department absolutely deserves to be praised.
It is not a question of not being loyal to the source material, the problem is that trying to adapt it would be an impossible mission with their resources, if this show tried to tell an isolated story or an spin-off it would surely be much better.
I'd recommend that you only watch the first episode and then do something else, so in case you want to have the Muv Luv experience but you don`t want to go through 80 hours of powerpoint presentations I will give two recommendations that are literally the inspirations for Muv Luv and will probably take less time to watch, those are:
Gunbuster (1988): A six episode mecha/alien anime that follows a similar plot structure to Alternative, it is also shorter, much better produced and a timeless classic made by Hideaki Anno with an almost perfect pacing.
Starship Troopers (1997): A 129 minutes sci-fi book adaptation that was made by a director that hated the book, it has a nice production for the time and cool sci-fi shenanigans but it is above all a parody and a criticism of fascism, militarism and the pointless wars those two things promote.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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