These are things that Takeru himself doesn’t understand, and they are supposed to be questions that the audience should keep in mind as we go through the story. But other parts of the episode are supposed to be confusing on purpose, such as why Yuuko allows Takeru into the base and goes along with what he is saying, or just what exactly Alternative IV is and how it is related to fitting billions of parallel circuits together. Some parts of the episode – mainly the flashbacks to previous events that Takeru has experienced – are supposed to be fairly straightforward, and only become confusing because the episode plows through them so quickly. Maybe the biggest problem with the episode is its failure to identify for the viewer which parts of the story are supposed to be confusing. I suppose I took these changes to mean that this anime was willing to make radical changes to the original work, which is why I was taken aback by just how “faithful” this episode was to the source material.
And obviously, they’ve added the anime-original episode 1 to ease new viewers into this world. I’ve already pointed out how they changed the fortified suits to remove the chin section, and the visuals for the opening theme reveal that they’ve revamped the trainee suits, just as everyone has always suspected they would have to.
The character redesigns and the new voice actors are the biggest change, of course. The hell of it is that the anime has already made a lot of changes to appeal to a new audience. Again, I can’t know exactly what the anime staff members were thinking, but it’s hard for me not to suspect that this aversion to change was at least part of why this episode turned out so literally. I had hoped that a similar process could be applied to Muv-Luv Alternative to make it more understandable to a new audience. I’ve long said that something like the Kimi ga Nozomu Eien anime – which freely changed things around to make the story flow better as a standalone dramatic show – could never be made in today’s environment. From my perspective, this was a shift in anime fandom that solidified around the mid-to-late 2000s – prior to that, it was much more common for anime adaptations to change things around. I’ve seen several interviews with producers and the like where they’ve straight up said that they’re too afraid to make changes to an anime adaptation because they know fans will revolt against them. But I will also say that nowadays anime fans have a well-known hatred for changing the source material.
It’s very possible that they genuinely believed this to be the best way of presenting the story. I’m not going to pretend to understand the mindset of the people who made the show. With the right amount of effort put into adjusting the script, this episode could have been at least reasonably understandable for people new to the franchise, and I think it’s a shame that that level of effort wasn’t put in. I know some people will just shake their heads and say that it was simply never possible to start with Alternative and have the story make sense, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. As the first episode to introduce the main cast and story, it absolutely needed to be accessible to new viewers, and it just isn’t. I think most people understand why, so I’m not going to belabor the point. I’m not going to lie: that was a rough episode.
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