The 2012 anime Muv-Luv Alternative Total Eclipse has been for many western Muv-Luv fans the first contact with the franchise. Yet, the 2013 visual novel was never localized, until now.
On July 20, this will finally change with the release on Steam of Muv-Luv Alternative Total Eclipse Remastered, giving English speakers a chance to fully enjoy this relevant part of the Muv-Luv multiverse.
Yet, even so many years after its original release, not many fully know how Total Eclipse was born, and the philosophy behind its creation.
To celebrate the upcoming release, we sat down with Muv-Luv creator Kouki Yoshimune and executive brand producer, Kazutoshi “Tororo” Matsumura to learn more about this elusive visual novel, and perhaps receive a couple of small teases about the future of the franchise.
Giuseppe: The original Muv-Luv Alternative Total Eclipse light novel first debuted in 2007, so it’s one of the first large-scale expansions of the Alternative universe. How was the idea born?
Kouki Yoshimune: Muv-Luv’s Tactical Surface Fighters have a completely different design philosophy from, say, Gundam. Muv-Luv doesn’t make the foreign or mass-produced mechs look deliberately boring in order to make the main characters’ mechs look good by contrast.
For Muv-Luv, I wanted to make sure that every nation had a mech cool enough to be the hero’s own personal TSF.
The reason for this is that I wanted people from every nation in the world to be proud of their country’s mechs. I’d also hoped that this would lead to people from around the world making their own fan works. These TSFs ended up being popular on their own, apart from the Muv-Luv series.
After Muv-Luv Alternative came out, a model company called Volks created what they called A3 action figures portraying the TSFs. Despite being from an unknown visual novel with no anime, they still were a huge hit in Japan: we sold over 650,000 of them and had 64 models in total.
In order to help develop the series and bring it to more fans, I wanted to use the A3 figures for a magazine story project that would highlight different TSFs and surface pilots from around the world. I took the idea to TechGian [editor’s note: at the time, Japan’s biggest magazine covering visual novels], who were huge supporters of Muv-Luv, and we ended up doing a three-way collaboration with them, Volks, and âge.
This was the beginning of Total Eclipse. The original plan was to do a series of episodes set in the Muv-Luv Alternative world, something like what HobbyJapan was doing, where they’d take photos of the models and add in effects, then write a one-shot short story to go along with it.
I was supposed to come up with the basic ideas, the plot, the characters, and TSFs, and the actual writing would be done by a Techgian writer. Yet, when we actually got to the point where they were writing the scenarios, we ran into a problem. When the Techgian editor-in-chief, Oomura-san, saw what the writers were turning in, he said, “This isn’t Muv-Luv.” He was a huge fan of the series.
To give you an idea of just how huge, he was the guy who produced and edited the famous Muv-Luv Alternative Codex.
I made several attempts to work with the writers, commenting on their work and sending it back. But after several retakes, it was clear that what the writers were creating wasn’t enough to satisfy Oomura. I appreciated his desire for quality, but the retakes were becoming a serious burden on me, and taking time and resources that needed to go elsewhere. I ended up breaking our original agreement, where I would only offer supervision, and writing an entire version of the first episode.
I had hoped with this that I could get across to the writers what kind of story Muv-Luv was, and they could compare it to the things we’d rejected to figure out exactly what needed to change. But when I showed this to Oomura-san, he said, “This is Muv-Luv! You should write the stories!” And to make matters worse, this was only two months before the thing was scheduled to run!
I began to curse myself for ever writing my own draft. I’d wanted to reduce my workload, and ended up increasing it by a hundred times.
If I was going to take time and resources away from creating games to do this, I needed a way to tie it back into our main business, so I ditched the idea of one-episode stories and came up with a larger story that we could eventually turn into a game scenario. Thus, TE came into being in a completely different way than we’d first envisioned. (By the way, our original plan of using one-shot stories would actually be realized several years later in HobbyJAPAN magazine, under the name TSFIA – Tactical Surface Fighters in Action).
For TE to work, it needed to serve as an advertisement for the A3 action figure series. We needed a story that featured TSFs and surface pilots from around the globe and shared a world and history with Muv-Luv Alternative while not being a true sequel. I also wanted a story that would speak to readers about the next stage of growing up.
Alternative is, as its catchphrase says, a “fairy tale of love and courage”, a Kishu Ryuritan-style story about a hero who acts on a huge scale. But there aren’t many people in reality who can become heroes like Takeru. And at the time, many visual novel fans were otaku who lacked confidence in themselves, who looked down on themselves, and viewed themselves as “unimportant nobodies”.
That’s why I didn’t want TE to be the same kind of story as Alternative. I wanted TE to be a smaller story, an ode to the unimportant nobodies, who supported the heroes’ exploits, and without whom the heroes never could have succeeded.
The idea was that if Alternative is a story about Takeru Shirogane, a young man from early-2000s Japan (who represents the viewer) finding his place in the world and learning who he is, TE exists as a supplement to this.
It shows the next stage that comes after the growth that occurs in Alternative, which shows the growth that occurs where you have two different identities clashing. It was a lot of work to figure it out, but the result was the TE you know today.
Giuseppe: Total Eclipse followed a rather interesting and peculiar creative process. It was first published as a light novel, then there was the manga, followed by the anime, and finally the visual novel. Could you talk about how it evolved through all of these different kinds of media?
Kouki Yoshimune: As I said before, TE was originally a magazine project. There were no plans to make it a light novel. As soon as it started appearing in the magazine, though, it was a huge hit. The A3 action figure line was selling well, and it contributed a lot to Techgian’s sales. In all of Techgian’s reader survey rankings, favorite character, favorite game, favorite brand, Muv-Luv was always on top. Seeing this, Oomura-san said to me, “While we’re doing this, why don’t we make it a light novel under my company’s label?”
It was a really kind offer, but one I didn’t really feel enthusiastic about. I knew that the story was never designed to be split into books. Books are built around having each volume be a self-contained story, so with TE you would end up with a mess for each volume’s story structure.