Almost the entirety of the story for Muv-Luv Unlimited has to do with the training of the whole squad. The first half of it is dealing with standard infantry training, and the last half of the story is dealing with mech pilot training. As such, it’s a bit more interesting than your standard high school harem romance, even if it still wears those influences. But if you are a military fetishist, there will be an additional draw to this particular story. As someone with personal experience in this arena, I could take or leave it. The one thing that I did like about it was that it was a break from the typical Japanese high school scene. The girls and his Squad Instructor are all more serious than they were in the other world, but their major personality traits remain. So even though he is a completely new person he seems to know a lot about them, and that helps him become a part of their team quicker than he normally would have. It also helps that Yuuko has told everyone he is special in some way, so that makes them very curious about him beyond him knowing things that he shouldn’t about them.
As someone who was personally trained to be a part of an extremely elite and exclusive part of the military, there were several parts of this story that were particularly resonant for me. They were also largely accurate about many things, especially the parts where they both work hard and they play hard. Another quite accurate aspect of the military situation is that it ends up leading to rather quick sexual encounters, so if anything their delay until the end of the romantic routes is more of an exception than the rule. I’m not sure how the Japanese military is, but in the American military, the heightened weight of the environment leads to a lot more frequent and quick sexual encounters (and unfortunately to some bad consequences, but I won’t explore that aspect here). Due to this aspect, and also the rarity of males in this world, it felt a little bit off that there was no harem route in Unlimited. I did not mention this for Extra because even if it’s common for harem Eroge, it’s often not the case in just harem Adult Visual Novels (a subtle difference). Honestly, it would have easily matched the world and the story, and they could have either made it fun or even romantic.
The general character designs for Unlimited were an improvement over the ones in Extra. But a large amount of the design budget went to fully produce animated scenes for particular events during the story. The focus was definitely on the mech combat, but there were also other animated sequences. This has become a fairly standard practice in major Visual Novels recently, but back in 2003 this would have been a pretty big deal. The animation and design quality is still good, but it is no longer great, so when you see the Operation Rainfall game awards for 2016 you should know that I was not one of the ones who voted for this one to win anything for design. I certainly would have voted it for an award 10 years ago, though. Many other games and visual novels from over a decade back do not hold up quite as well as this one does, so don’t take my criticism to mean that it’s necessarily a badly visually designed game, just that the gaming medium has grown over the years.
There is a good balance of humor and seriousness during Unlimited. As you can imagine with the world setting, there are a lot more serious events to unpack than there was during the entirety of Extra. Thankfully the writers did not take it too far and create a morose setting and story. They kept the story fairly breezy and you don’t have to deal with any extreme tragedies. Perhaps that is not realistic for the setting, but it made the reading experience much better (unless you really enjoy reading tragedy). So even if I’m not the biggest fan of military stories, overall I just simply enjoyed the story for Unlimited a lot more than the story for Extra. Frankly, if I enjoyed the military stuff more I would have considered the story to be enormously better, so I would expect almost anyone would consider this experience to be the best one. It’s not perfect, though there is certainly some confusion about when exactly Takeru traveled to this world and how much of the previous world he experienced. That confusion is intentional, but they do not explore it, and that’s my largest issue with Unlimited. Way too many hanging threads by the time you are done with the story. It’s not only impossible for you to resolve the major issue of this world and why Takeru would have been sent there, but they explicitly point out how wrong that feels during the story and you are left with the impression that it will only be resolved in a sequel.
Other than the alternate ending with Yuuko, each of the 5 girls has two different endings. It’s fairly obvious how to reach each girl’s ending, and the two different endings come down to a single decision at the end of each relationship route. It’s fairly apparent which decision leads to the two different endings, especially after your first one. So it becomes pretty obvious where you would need to save in order to see each different ending. So you really shouldn’t need a guide to reach all the 11 different endings in the game, but I would not begrudge you the use of one, there are a lot of decisions that don’t seem to affect the story all that much overall. There is really only one decision that determines which your romantic choice is, and then one decision that determines which ending you get within that route. Even beyond the 11 different endings, the overall story is slightly longer than Muv-Luv Extra was, so that combines with the other version to make a fairly long experience. To see every ending in Unlimited, I would surmise that it would take 20-60 hours, depending on how much skipping you want to do.
Other than the couple vocal songs in the game, the music for this title is merely okay in my opinion. It frankly just sounds like a really standard Visual Novel soundtrack. The overblown music during the melodramatic events is, unfortunately, applicable across both games, which was my least favorite track. But I will give a shout-out to the end credits song for Unlimited, which is one of the better VN songs I have heard in the last year. Where this game falls a little flat with music, it counters by being extremely good with voice acting. Given the choice, I would actually prefer the voice acting being stellar because that can really ruin a visual novel if it’s bad. All the girls are quite pleasant to listen to, and some are frankly extremely adorable. This obviously helps develop affection for all these girls.
The adult scenes were done slightly better in Unlimited than they were in Extra, but much like the other story, there would be a massive hole in the story if they were completely cut. So I can only recommend that the game be played in its full version. One unfortunate result of that is it raises the overall price of the package. The 18+ Director’s Cut patch to the game is available from DenpaSoft, but it adds an additional $9.99 to the overall price of the game. The main portion of the game is available on Steam for $34.99, which is a lot more expensive than other Visual Novels on the platform. When you add in the patch price, that makes for a $45.00 experience. I’m not going to say that it’s not worth the price because you get a lot of story for still less than the price of a standard AAA developed game. But the price is worth discussing because it’s more expensive than most Visual Novel fans are accustomed to. I wouldn’t say that anything about the game makes it one of my favorite Visual Novels of all time like it is for some people. I would not even put it in my top 5 of the last year, but it’s still a really good game and I’m happy to own it. And moreover it is a real pleasure to finally have a proper translation of this classic game available on our shores.
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Review Copy Provided By The Publisher
