Episode Review: Muv-Luv Alternative ep 24: End of the Beginning

December 30, 2022Episode Review,  Mecha Discussion,  ,  
The world has changed and is advancing towards a new future
The final episode of Muv-Luv Alternative season 2 ended with capping off everyone’s retrospective and the aftermath of the Operation 21st from all perspectives. We see grief, sadness, but also growth and hope. As the world move forward an offensive future, Takeru and the girls from 207B also learn and grow from the first real anti-BETA operation

We open with some reports on Japan situation as well as the memorial for the Japanese Army. The anime also adapt the short story “Inheritance” from the Muv-Luv Alternative Chronicles short story – detailing Michiru’s sisters reunion after Op 21st. Akira, Marika and Yayoi share the devastating moment when they received the death notice of Michiru. As Special Task Force A-01 member, Michiru’s real cause of death and any other achievement cannot be made public, which tied in to Yuuko’s words in the last ep: she doesn’t have anyone to show it to even though her heroic sacrifice and achievement has been crucial to humanity’s survival. Such is the fate of a Valkyrie.

The senior Valkyries actually took Isumi’s death quite…well, considering they didn’t show pain as much as the younger pilots, including Takeru. The passing of responsibility now rest on Hayase’s shoulder. I find it pretty ironic since the mantle of A-01’s Commander was passed down from Kimi Ita’s main character to Kimi Nozo’s main character. Those 2 Visual novels are basically Muv-Luv’s senpais.

For Sumika’s reason of crashing, when the actual “why” was revealed, I’m sure newcomer to the series will definitely go “what the fuck?”. Which is understandable because it basically mean Takeru has an ecchi thought and that basically jeopardized the whole operation that caused the hundreds of deaths, destroyed TSFs and the Susano-O as well. However, Yuuko did manage to pull some silver lining out of the situation, by saying that even if the event hadn’t went that way, it could have also gone bad in another, and that may cost Takeru his life. As the course of event is unknown since Takeru has long passed his “saved point” in his loop, everything from now on is impossible to predict as it will go the way with the “highest possibility” due to A-01’s high causality mechanism.

Finally, we move on to Takeru’s original squad: Meiya, Chizuru, Kei, Tamase and Mikoto. I’m sooo glad that I was wrong in the previous episode because they did include Michiru’s parting words for each girls in this scene. Well, in the visual novel, it was also retrospective, but doing it in the anime is a bit weird. I guess it’s due to the restraint of runtime in each episode. On the other hand, Meiya is obviously the favorite running girl among Takeru’s squadmates. She got so many development this episode, as well as throughout the series (excluding Sumika of course). At this point in the story, everyone will “change” in one way or another.

No news or announcement regarding a season 3 just yet, and there is still about 1 season worth of plot to adapt, and the “decisive” stuff is still yet to come. Hopefully we will get a continuation and with the same or higher quality than this season, and hopefully we can keep Jam Project and Minami-san for the OST too! Full review for the season will come later. Stay tuned!

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