Muv-Luv Alternative Strike Frontier

~ the eulogy ~

Muv-Luv is a Japanese visual novel series with a reputation far out of proportion to its sales, built on a premise that opens as a school romance and turns into a war against an alien species called the BETA that humanity is comprehensively losing. Strike Frontier was its browser game, published on DMM from 20 September 2016, with âge, the studio behind the original novels, supervising the work.

The framing device deserves its own paragraph. The player character lives in Yokohama in 2016 and goes out one day to find the city replaced by ruins. He and his childhood friend Minori Shirakawa are picked up by the United Nations base standing where their school should have been, and told they are in 2001, in a world that has been fighting the BETA for close to thirty years. The base's scientist, Yuuko Kouzuki, takes the two smartphones they arrived carrying, takes them apart, and uses the components to build a combat simulator for training recruits. Everything the player does from that point on happens inside the simulator she built.

Mechanically it was a squad of five, one commander and four Tactical Surface Fighters, which are the series' humanoid machines. Pilots and machines could be paired however the player liked rather than in the combinations the novels had established. You clicked where you wanted a unit to walk, and it engaged whatever came into range on its own, with an AUTO button that ran everything except the skills.

~ the dossier ~

~ the phone that was already in the story ~

On 29 January 2018 DMM released a smartphone application version. Pre-registration for it had passed 50,000. In February the game ran a crossover with Attack on Titan, which was roughly the largest guest star available in that period, limited to a little over two weeks.

On 4 June, âge and ixtl put a closing notice on the official site. Service ended on 5 July 2018. The app that let you play a simulator built out of a smartphone, on a smartphone, had been available for five months and six days.

~ the thank you gift ~

The closing notice carried a promise that is rarer than it ought to be. âge said it would put something up on its own homepage after the servers went down, for the people who had played. A browser game vanishes more completely than most software, because there is no install left behind anywhere, and a studio volunteering to host a parting gift on infrastructure it controlled itself is an admission that it understood this.

The browser edition had shipped in two forms, a general one and an adult-rated one carrying an R on the end of the title, which is ordinary practice on DMM and says more about the platform than about the game. Neither one left Japan. Muv-Luv's English-reading audience spent years campaigning for official translations of the main novels and eventually got them, which makes the gap visible: the novels crossed over and this did not. It opened and closed on a Japanese storefront without an English version at any point in its life.

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