Mecha. Girls. Plug suits. What can possibly go wrong?
And so in this alternate story for the Muv-Luv franchise (that means you don’t need prior knowledge of the original series), humans have made contact with extra-terrestrial beings. However, they’re not exactly the friendly type, and soon they slowly set forth in invading the Earth.
Cue, thirty years later after initial contact, and the aliens have already landed on the Earth. They’ve slowly but surely inched their way into conquering the whole world, and it seems like there are only a few countries left.
And so it happens that in Japan, our main character Yui, along with four of her female classmates, are studying in some kind of facility that trains them to be the next mecha pilots to defend the Earth. So no mecha wars here, just mechas to fight of the aliens. But why this is an all-girls training facility is beyond me. Maybe they have some kind of thing that only allows girls to be pilots. But nothing concrete yet so far.
Yui and her friends are all enjoying their peaceful school life, with some eagerly awaiting the day they will finally get deployed. Ok, maybe just Yui, who came from a military family. But peace never really lasts in the middle of an alien invasion, and so the aliens soon arrive to threaten Japan.
The girls get deployed as reserves to guard the supply bases, but war always go awry, and soon they are attacked.
So what could go wrong with a series featuring mecha and girls in plug suits? Apparently, the pacing. It was pretty slow. The entire episode appears to only a prelude to the main story, as cover art suggests an older Yui as the main character. While it’s not entirely bad to show a prelude to clear up the context of the series, I found it a bit overdone given the length of slice-of-life school days segments shown. I think they could have done it in half the time without losing anything.
So yeah, it kind of makes for quite a boring episode, sadly.
Seems like the only interesting bit is the plug suit…
