Full spoilers for Muv-Luv Extra and Unlimited, but none for Alternative.

Recently I've decided to do a reread of the trilogy. This likely won't be the only time, since I plan to reread this in Japanese a few years from now after reading older âge content, too. Additionally, a while ago I wrote a spoiler-free review on MLA, in which I called Alt my favorite story of all time. So, while my feelings on that haven't changed (and if anything, they got enhanced even further), this time I am reviewing what is essentially just the prologue to my favorite story of all time.

To get it out of the way, the Muv-Luv trilogy is impressive in its audiovisual aspects, as well as ambition. The music is good, and despite being a VN, doesn't feel static at all. It is crazy that this is a 2003 VN with how much animation there is, and it only gets more impressive in Alternative. It's genuinely insane that this is an early 2000s VN, especially compared to other VNs that came out at around the same time. It's basically an anime with how dynamic and lively it is. It's also ambitious with how unapologetic it is about its premise and structure. I genuinely am fascinated with how this even came into existence, to this day, three years after my initial read. Even after reading almost 90 VNs I am still as fascinated with Muv-Luv as I was after I read four VNs.

It's because of the fact that Unlimited is basically the prologue to the real meat of the story (making Extra the prologue to the prologue..?) that I feel like a lot of people, my past self included, see it as something to go through solely because they are interested in seeing what the fuss is about with Alternative. Some consider Extra, or even Unlimited a chore. And I think that's a pity, because this is already a well-put together story already.

Extra isn't really the romdrama slog that many expected it to be, at least for the most part. Most of Extra is overly exaggerated shitpost humour with chibi versions of characters shooting each other into the stratosphere with a single punch, or stuff like Meiya (the rich girl heroine trope but heavily exaggerated) leveling Takeru's entire neighborhood overnight or calling in choppers with world-class chefs for a school lunch. That part of Extra is fun for me. Humor is subjective so I can't speak for others on this, but I genuinely found it funny both in my original read and reread. I also now appreciate the references to Gundam with Meiya's and some other characters' hairstyles and things like the Evangelion reference through "Kei Ayamine", as well as other things due to my increased experience with media.

The other part of Extra is the romdrama aspect, which varies greatly in quality. On one hand, the rivalry of Sumika and Meiya is a fun drama that involves themes of inevitable partings and the sacrifices you have to make when making a decision, and how those around you won't stay in a status quo forever, same as yourself, really. Tama's route is also mostly lighthearted and focuses on Tama's fears and her overcoming them. However, on the other hand, you have the Kei and Chizuru routes. The Kei route involves a very frustrating drama involving Kei and a doctor who is ready to throw away his wife, family and job for a high school girl. The Chizuru route is not only the least relevant route for Unlimited and Alternative, but probably the furthest away in terms of what the rest of Extra is going for. It suddenly starts a bullying storyline with what feels like pretty forced commentary on bullying and society or whatever. Overall, though, Extra is something I don't really understand the hatred people have for.

Unlimited is kind of where you can start to see the true Muv-Luv, so to speak. Our boy Takeru gets isekai'd in a very abrupt fashion as minutes into the game he steps out of his house to find that it has become a wasteland. One very notable thing here for me is how impactful this moment was for me when I first read it. Before I was theorising how the hell this would become a mecha, and then it just up and happens. Another is how even 20+ years later, in a weeb fiction landscape full of isekai, you have a story that dedicated a noticeable chunk of its runtime to showcase the protagonist's old world, rather than vague or rare references without knowing anything more than superficial about the people in their old life or the life they led. Additionally, this also really works well of showing the calm before the storm. In a lot of media, you have basically the equivalent of the first half of episode 1 of a show of showing the town that's about to get attacked, and then suddenly you are excepted to be shocked or emotional once they do. While I get what they're going for, it rarely works on me because I don't feel like I've connected with the characters there. This kind of structure leads to slow pacing, but it's what makes Muv-Luv Muv-Luv. The idea of "hey, let's give a harem/romcom MC who doesn't know how good he has it REAL PROBLEMS!" is just incredible. It's not "subversion" for the sake of "subversion" either, you actually get to appreciate Extra more.

I REALLY like the setting of the BETAverse. Before Muv-Luv I wasn't really too into mecha or sci-fi, but I think I just hadn't found my niche yet. The hard sci-fi real robot setting where they explain strategy and technology and history in a grounded, believable way that also is constantly actually used in the narrative is amazing. TSFs are vastly underpowered compared to a lot of mecha, but that's what makes the situations they get into more compelling. They don't have beam swords or easy space travel. And it makes sense why they were invented, too — tanks are too slow and bulky, and planes don't have easy access to three-dimensional movement without crashing. Hence, humanoid mechs with a focus on agility over durability. It's great. You get to see all sorts of in-depth world building on tech, strategy and world history that is tied to directly in the story and inspired a several hundred page textbook called the CODEX based on VN info alone (and it's outdated by 10 years! That's not even everything!) in such a believable setting. Even the fortified suits (despite the silly cadet ones, thank god they use better ones in Alternative) are so cool to me that now when I try another mecha I'm wondering where the neck braces and other commonly used Muv-Luv tech are to keep the pilots safe when they don't have Evangelion LCL or aren't in space. I also frequently miss Muv-Luv's detail in regard to tactics and strategy with a lot of other media. I can't help it, really — in ML you get given the main plan and three backup plans in case it fails, and you know what various terms like "Arrowhead-2 formation" mean. It doesn't feel like technobabble just for the sake of sounding cool. You get plenty of explanation for differing design philosophies for specific TSFs and countries and organizations. Even in Unlimited, which only has training fights and cutting a rock or shooting a sniper shot in terms of action, it's still really cool to me.

I would like to dedicate this section to comment on one misconception that people often have about the trilogy, as well as an opinion on the play order. So, actually, despite what some say, I don't think it is a spoiler to call ML a mecha, because it was advertised heavily in 2001 and 2002 (since before its release: example 1, example 2), on the original 2003 game box (including a quote about Takeru wanting "out of this f'ed up world" (paraphrased), as well as this, though I still think people should spoiler tag the isekai thing to make it more surprising for new people, as it isn't as well known of a plot point), and in the menu screen of the 2003 release (with the Extra menu screen having this in the background, and then changing to this when you unlocked Unlimited. So really you aren't spoiling anyone by calling it a mecha, and it never was a "spoiler that got well-known" — âge were never hiding it in the first place!).

Second, the Extra and Unlimited routes (if you can even call the highly similar endings for Unlimited "routes"). For a while and to this day, in both the English-speaking and Japanese communities for Muv-Luv, it's been a commonly accepted fact that you should at a minimum read the Sumika and/or Meiya Extra routes (more so the Sumika one than the Meiya one, so you could just do both just to be safe) before unlocking Unlimited. This consensus is heavily influenced by the fact that in the original release (no longer the case in the Steam one), to unlock Unlimited, you needed to do those two routes. They also happen to be the routes you need to understand Unlimited and Alternative (except for a one-minute direct reference to the Kei route of Extra, after which Takeru dismisses it and the story moves on). You won't really be lost with this if you only did the Sumika and Meiya routes, you'll just go "huh? Okay, whatever" like Takeru does and just move on. That character hardly focuses on the same stuff that their Extraverse self did. In the English-speaking community, the fan translators not liking Extra also influences this, so many readers wanted to get it over with ASAP. In reality, Sumika and Meiya are nearly an identical route and give you the same actual information. So at the very least you would want to read Sumika's route and/or Meiya's as well before Unlimited. Despite Miki's and Kei's routes having reappearing characters that later appear in Unl and Alt, when he meets them there, Takeru still acts like he's met them for the first time, like with Miki's dad. In fact, in my view, in Unlimited, the main benefit of these routes comes from the contrast — in the Extraverse Miki is an archer, in the BETAverse she's a sniper, and they both have confidence issues. Her dad appears in both the Extra route and Unlimited and has a similar dynamic with her in both. It's not really something you would be clueless about if you hadn't read the side routes before Unlimited with, though, as you've likely interacted with Tama in her dojo in Extra anyway and they reiterate Tama's confidence issues and the Kei/Chizuru conflict in Unlimited, but it's nice to know. It's kind of similar for Kei in regard to Alternative, though much harder to use as an argument for Chizuru in Alternative, who probably has the Extra route with the least relevance for the overall story. Even the parallels to her arc in Alternative are much more vague than the contrast between the Extraverse route arcs and BETAverse arcs for the other girls. It certainly is beneficial to do all of them, since that would increase the impact of Alternative even further than the impact it already has. It depends on the reader, really — it's not like you HAVE to rush while minmaxxing with only the essential content to get to the good stuff or that you HAVE to 100% both Extra and Unlimited, but I think experienced VN readers should certainly try to read all of them, though not at the cost of dropping Muv-Luv or Googling and getting spoiled if they don't already have a friend who's read the trilogy to give them this information (my first read was without anyone else I knew who'd read Muv-Luv or VNs in general, so I had to make some decisions for myself without Googling and risking getting spoiled, which would be the worst possible outcome). While I wouldn't downplay it and say that doing everything and not just the completely essential routes, as well as one or a couple Unlimited heroine endings is content that only marginally improves your experience of the trilogy and especially Alternative (in fact, there is definitely a benefit and increased payoff that you get by doing everything, given that it is the grand finale that wraps up the entire trilogy), it truly does depend on the reader. It's not like Alt will not be impactful if you did the minimum required content, but if you can and/or want to do everything, by all means, do it. It becomes more complicated and questionable over whether it's even worth doing with Unlimited where every heroine except Yuuko gets the same pair of endings, and the amount of skipping and unskippable cutscenes is pretty insane, it takes more than two hours. It's essentially the same route with mildly differing variations of the Game Guy addiction arc, playing with cat's cradle, juggling or marbles, and some other interactions. So while you do get some callbacks to these in Alternative, I would say do at least one Unlimited heroine's pair of endings, and then see how it goes before Alternative. Maybe you'll be able to 100% it.

Muv-Luv is a somewhat rare case where you cannot judge how you might feel about the later parts at the beginning. Extra has no direct showcase of what's about to come in Unlimited and Alternative. Ideally, you would enjoy all three parts of the trilogy, but I've seen cases where massive Muv-Luv fans hate Extra. For example, I even know a person who rated MLE a 1/10 (???) but rated Unlimited and Alternative rather highly. And even the biggest Extra haters that I've seen end up appreciating it and what it represents after the genre shift. You can't truly show the contrast between peace and war without showcasing what peace is like, I guess.

Overall I am very satisfied with this reread, it's made me increase my score for MLE/MLU from an overall 7/10 to an overall 8/10. Even those are ahead of what most VNs aim for on a technical and ambition level. It made me appreciate Extra and Unlimited even more, not solely for foreshadowing, but just in general. Unlimited especially strikes a comfy balance of the dread of the BETAverse and slice of life comedy during training. I am really looking forward to my Alternative reread. My review for it will be spoiler-tagged unlike my existing spoiler-free one, so I will be able to talk about anything in it freely.

So, here we are. The worst Trails game. I will never understand how there are people out there stupid enough to try and defend this shit, but the Falcom fanbase already feels like it's made up entirely of braindead simps so I don't know why I'm surprised. I could sum this whole thing up by saying that I genuinely cannot think of a game, JRPG or otherwise, that's as disappointing to me as this one. That this was my reaction to the series as a whole once I finished CS IV. But for an actual explanation as to why Cold Steel IV is one of the worst games I have ever played, here we go.

First off, I'm skipping over the good section because Falcom does not get credit for anything in this game that's good. The overall gameplay and combat are identical to how it was in CS III, both on foot and in your Divine Knights, so they don't get points for that. You don't get to say "Hey they fucked up the story but at least they didn't fuck up the gameplay too!" and act like that's not the bare minimum. And when you market your game as a story focused RPG, with literal hours upon hours of cutscenes, and your story feels like it was written by a 10 year old, then you have failed at what you set out to do.

The writing in this game is some of the worst shit that I have ever seen in my life. In any form of media. I have read literal fucking fanfiction that is better than this. I don't know what happened between this and CS III, but every character is an idiot now. They all either waste their time with shit that doesn't matter while the actual plot advances offscreen, or they just constantly talk about how much they want to fuck Rean. Rean has been turned from a deconstruction of the stock Light Novel/Anime hero, to just being the stock Light/Novel Anime hero. They have stopped trying to do anything interesting with his character anymore and just turned him into what everyone who hated him said he was. This is capped off by him getting a God-awful redesign that looks like someone's Deviantart OC circa 2006.

They continue to use the Curse as a crutch so every villain sucks and has the same exact "they were just brainwashed" motivation. And making things even worse is that the pacing is somehow worse than CS I! The first 2 Acts of this game do not matter. They are pure filler built around bullshit fetch quests and saving Elise, who I am now calling the single worst character in the entire franchise. Elise Schwarzer is Estelle Bright if Estelle Bright was completely unlikable and written by a dude who is jacking off to Lolicon as we speak. She is every creepy anime incest trope rolled into one insufferable package. So of course, she's perfect for this game.

The only time anything remotely interesting happens is during Fragments, which is ruined when Catgirl Celine shows up because you've got to get that money from the Furry crowd apparently, and Eventide. Eventide feels like what the rest of this game should have been, and it's nice solely because you get to see this massive cast of characters actually interact with each other like people for one of the first times in the series. But even this is immediately undermined by how contrived and poorly written the Finale is.

First off, Osborne's motivations in this game win a special award for managing to out nonsense everyone else in this garbage plot and ruins the ending of Azure in the process. If everything he was trying to do was to free Erebonia and the world from the Curse, and if the Curse only affected the people of Erebonia, THEN WHY DID HE NEED TO ANNEX CROSSBELL? The entire emotional crux of the ending of Azure was Crossbell getting annexed by the Empire despite everything and then it turns out that not only was the occupation not that bad if you go off how everyone acts in CS III, but it apparently only happened because the people making the decisions are the dumbest motherfuckers on the face of the planet. Osborne was originally written to be an Otto von Bismarck/Napoleon expy who loved his country and wanted to annex Crossbell because he wanted Erebonia to eventually rule over the entire continent. Them trying to pivot to all of this being a big plan to stop the Curse not only turns one of Trails best villains into a dumbass, but it feels like a massive retcon that only happened to make this specific game fit in with the rest of the series.

In the end, to borrow a quote from the RPG Site Review, Trails of Cold Steel was a mistake. It took everything that could have made this the series best arc and fucked it all into the dirt beyond the point of redemption. CS I & II, when taken on their own, are worth experiencing since they're at least coherent and feel like they're building up to something. CS III is good as long as you stop right before you finish Chapter 4. But I cannot think of single reason for anyone to play this game other than sunk cost fallacy. The writing is terrible, the characters have been bastardized to the point that they might as well be different people, the plot makes no sense if you put even a moment of thought into it, and the whole thing feels more like it exists out of obligation rather than as the "climatic finale" to the Erebonia arc that it was supposed to be. I'm going to see Trails through to the end, but every game that I play going forward will be with a massive amount of hesitation in the back of my mind. Because after seeing this and the ending of CS III, I know now that Falcom can fuck it up at any time.