... yeah, Meiya's death was amazing, if a death can be thus defined.
She was going to be physically and mentally overcome by the Primary Objective, but she endured.
She knew the Primary Objective could be defeated only if Takeru shot at her, and she requested him to do so.
And finally she also had the opportunity to confess her feelings to him, telling him she wanted to die at the hands of the man she loved.
In Extra, I didn't like Meiya, expect for some tratis of her personality and some events. In Unlimited and Alternative, she became my favorite character, because she really fit this context and the role of guiding light for Takeru. Many will say that Sumika is the central girl in Alternative, and they are right. But Meiya was the one who supported Takeru in his most difficult moments. She was the one who took the most difficult decisions because she wanted to take them. This is one of the rare times where my opinions about a character have such a big and complete inversion throughout a story.
In the mission, Sumika died as well. But the most surprising thing, at least for me, was that Sumika was the reason why Extra's Takeru came to that worldline, became a causality conductor, and continuously looped after each deaths. In fact, I thought the reason might reside in the Primary Objective. Instead, it was mainly Sumika's jealousy (and would she be better than Meiya?). A good plot twist is that the spy has always been Sumika, because of the ODL purification for which the reactor was used.
I feel to have missed some pieces of the puzzle in this Kasumi's explanation, though. Theoretically, at each loop, muscle memory carries on with Takeru, while the memory doesn't because of Sumika's jealousy. But, if we assume that each route in Unlimited in a separate loop (as it is explained), each time Takeru not only loses all his memories (and this is coherent with Kasumi's explanation), but also his muscle mass. Another doubt is: why was the last loop, the Alternative route, different? How did he keep his memories?
Now, we come to the end. Takeru returns to Extra's worldline, and... he forgets almost everything. When he sees Sumika, Meiya, Marimo, etc. his eyes are moist, but he can't understand why. There are also Yuuhi and Kasumi now, thanks to Alternative's Sumika. So, it is a happy ending, where however... all the development Takeru went on completely disappeared. Memory of the Alternative's world might have been a burden for Takeru, I understand that. But he overcame his fears and flaws, so he would have been able to appreciate what he achieved. And besides, Kasumi herself has the memory of her Alternative version, so... why not Takeru as well? That would have been a happy ending as well, but a more grounded one.
MLA thus ends. I feel this bittersweet taste because of this ending, but the journey was fantastic, in particular from the coup d'état ahead on.
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