So this year I played Muv-Luv Alternative. I wrote an article about my path to the game, you could give it a read if you haven’t. But what I didn’t do is write a review or anything of that sort. This won’t be a review either. What I would like to discuss is whether you should play the Muv-Luv series.
I would say, probably not.
CW: Rape
Ok, that’s flippant, lets dive a little deeper. Muv-Luv, and particularly Muv-Luv Alternative was one of the Visual Novel holy grails. It is currently the highest rated game on The Visual Novel Database, and has had that position for a long time. So it is clearly held in high regards by, at least, English speaking (or reading) visual novel fans. As we all know, popularity doesn’t equal quality, and the VNDB user base is highly self-selected on top of that, but its the only real metric we have to go on. So it would seem, if you want to play The Best Visual Novel, you’d play Muv-Luv Alternative.
The problem is that Muv-Luv, in general, has a ton of problems. And I’m not just talking about how you have to get through all of Muv-Luv Extra and Muv-Luv Unlimited first. Which you totally do. If you want to play Alternative you absolutely must play those first. Not an option. But….should you? Assuming you don’t really know anything about Muv-Luv, haven’t wanted to play it for a decade+, talked about it incessantly with other people who have. Well. Probably not.
Muv-Luv suffers from the same problem a lot of visual novels do, that their ideas and concepts are really neat, but are wrapped up in a lot of baggage that has become attached to their genre. Most notably, too much text and porn.
Now, the second you’d think is taken care of. Muv-Luv is on Steam with no porn. This is true! And while in Extra and Unlimited you can certainly tell where the porn was, its removal doesn’t make much of a difference. I don’t need to see Takeru’s penis going to Meiya’s vagina to understand that they are having sex as a culmination of the relationship they’ve developed. Plenty of media has sex scenes that aren’t porn. The problem comes in Alternative. Where there is a scene that…well, I don’t want to describe it, since its a massive huge enormous spoiler. The problem is, this scene shouldn’t exist.
This scene is, quite frankly, a rape scene. And a really, really bad one. It didn’t need to be one either. It honestly should not have been done the way it was, even in the original “porn included” version. Because making this scene what it was actually diminishes its impact. The goals of the scene could have been accomplished without the sexual aspect at all. Even in the non-porn version of the scene, its clear what is going on, and its obvious that originally you were able to see what was going on.
If you only played the non-porn version, the unedited version of the scene is done in a way intended to be erotic to the viewer, and it completely destroys the intent of the scene. Its ruined due to how other visual novels have used the same imagery.
Its nearly impossible for me to recommend Muv-Luv in good faith because of this. Its a shame, because the game is quite interesting (despite the aforementioned too much text problem), and uses the multi-route structure of visual novels in an elegant way.
However that scene, the way it is done, and how much it is embedded into the core of the story, is deeply, profoundly unfortunate.
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Thanks for writing this, and for the heads up – I’ve heard enough about MuvLuv to know that it’s almost certainly not for me, but it’s kind of nice to have some additional weight to that perception.
TBH, I’ve always been a little leery of visual novels, though I worry I’m being unfair to them. It seems like whenever I read about an especially popular one, I end up feeling quite turned off for one reason or another. Both Fate and Umineko give off these vibes for me pretty strongly, but having not actually read them I often feel bad about not giving them a chance.
Glancing over VNDB, so many in the top ten are 50+ hours – I wish there were ways to dip my toes in without such an enormous time commitment. But hey, I’ma give Steins; Gate a go, maybe that will give me a good entry point?
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I actually thought you were talking about a different scene at first. I was thinking “Actually, I’m pretty sure that scene wasn’t a porn scene in the original version”…. and then realized which scene you were actually talking about. I was going into this article thinking it was about an almost-rape scene (but still definitely sexual assault) involving a different character a bit earlier in Alternative.
For the scene you were actually talking about, I pretty much agree completely. I wouldn’t go so far as to completely not recommend it, but I’d have to include heavy caveats and warn anyone that that kind of stuff was coming. And making it a porn scene really does completely ruin what they were going for. It certainly didn’t have the intended effects on me. I actually found it near comical in how tone deaf it was.
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