[Hagoshod]

Originally Posted by Wild Goose

I will note that this same criticism ought to be leveled at Macross Plus as well; the show establishes that this is a dangerous verse and that the VF-11 cannot hack it anymore as a frontline fighter.

You know what Macross Plus has over Total Eclipse, though?

At least Bryan Cranston is consistently the main character.

Or, hell, Inside Delta Force. The beginning of Beckwith's memoir establishes that this is a dangerous world and that terrorism is on the rise and the US govt and the US Army need to get their ass in gear.

Cue several hundred pages of selection, training, preparation, training, psych evals and more training. *shrug* But you're right, they're not out there kicking ass, so it's a misleading fault.

So the book opens with the author describing terrorism is a bad thing and needs to be directly fought, then segues to dudes training to fight terrorism.

But... that's actually closer to what we see in the first episode of Total Eclipse compared to the rest of the mindless schlock after episode 3.

Originally Posted by Darthtabby

The first two episodes were necessary because the anime adaptation needed to be accessible to newcomers, and the Total Eclipse novels didn't have a very newcomer friendly intro.

This is the most pretentious excuse I always hear.

Muv-Luv did not invent the Sci-Fi Alien Bug War genre. You don't need to spend an hour brutally depicting the bug war before your audience understands there's bugs in your fictitious universe and humans fight the bugs. Again, if you DO write it that way, you completely misrepresent the setting, tone, and main character of your plot. If anything, it makes your story MORE confusing to newcomers because they're the ones who won't know ahead of time your main plot is really about a completely unrelated cast of test pilots jacking off in Alaska. If you just start the show from the third episode and say "There's a bug war and these people build weapons to fight the bugs," your audience isn't going to be thoroughly lost or confused as to wtf is going on.

Fuck, they could have just used the proper Starship Troopers format by opening the show in the middle of the laser gun mission in Russia, then backtracking to explain how the test base characters met each other and wound up in Russia. There's plenty of more coherent ways you could have started the Total Eclipse anime other than dictating the plot was about a vicious losing war in Japan, and then making the rest of the show be absolutely nothing about the vicious losing war in Japan you used to hook your audience and never referencing the vicious losing war in Japan again.

And because I know these arguments are coming up

>They can't open the Total Eclipse anime with a scene of the Yukon characters fighting a bunch of holograms (or whatever) because that would be boring!
But that's the whole problem. Total Eclipse is a boring story where a whole bunch of nothing that has no bearing on the outcome of the war happens. The best you can do is go the 08th MS Team or Gundam 0080 route and write it in a way where the story finds a way to be dramatic and memorable in its own little context. But for Christ's sake, DON'T start your isolated side story with two whole episodes that completely undermine all of the bullshit that happens in the rest of the show.

>The brutal blood-and-guts-everywhere style was really meant to get you interested in reading the VN trilogy
Then fine. The first two episodes are a good introduction to the kinds of things you see in the VNs. That doesn't change the fact it's still a mindnumbingly retarded way to introduce a TV show adapted from a completely separate series of light novels.