Girls' Frontline

[Ratman]

You need two hostages for the gold medal. The mission is set not to auto-end after fulfilling the minimum requirements, so that it doesn't rob you of the medal if you're going for it.

There should be a 'combat settlement' button in place of where 'terminate mission' had been before, press it.

[Tenzen12]

Oh right, thank you very much.

[Rue]

Singularity (and AK-12, Yay~) is coming so it got my lazy bum to actually start finishing Story chapters, almost done with Chapter 10 but I still got a lot of the Emergency Missions to finish too.

Darkest Dungeon gacha is also coming...I hope I have enough Tokens & actually get lucky there.

[Krushwax]

Yeah. I really should get through Chapter 10 myself.

[Deathhappens]

...I'll just read the manga I guess.

(BTW, the manga is actually very good, I wholeheartedly recommend reading it).

[Rue]

Going through Singularity very, very slowly. Like a couple of chapters a day & then just finishing easier maps for the daily lottery loot limit.

Speaking of loot...

Yay~

Now lets try to get Tokarev's later....

[Tenzen12]

Anime!

I mean ACTUAL anime!

[SeiKeo]

This truly was a Girl's Frontline

[Deathhappens]

I thought it was Dolls Frontline.

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I really hope it comes out good, as noted earlier the manga is actually amazing (as in, I'd totally read it even without having ever touched the gacha).

Maybe I should log in one of these days, I'm sure G3 missed me.

[Ratman]

Studio has absolutely no credentials beyond doing things with other people who have credentials, so I don't have a lot of hope. 30min OVAs is good at least.

Also, GFL tells its story about as well as Guilty Gear. From midway through, and nothing makes any sense at all to the uninitiated until the game offhandedly begins to establish a bunch of worldbuilding you can otherwise only know by reading log dumps in Bakery Girl. Even then it only starts explaining the entire setting in the first place after 6-8 chapters of not much. Some of that stuff back there matters quite a bit too, like Deep Dive. It's a big pretzel of a story to tell because you really want to start with Winter Warfare and end with Singularity or CT, but then you have to explain a whole bunch of stuff like what happened to AR-15 and M16 etc but the stuff leading up to it is filler at first glance.

[SeiKeo]

I thought it was Dolls Frontline.

something something someone is copyright squatting on the Girls' Frontline name in JP because the original licensing agreement fell through, so they think it's Dolls' Frontline because it's a slight rebrand.

[Deathhappens]

Studio has absolutely no credentials beyond doing things with other people who have credentials, so I don't have a lot of hope. 30min OVAs is good at least.

Also, GFL tells its story about as well as Guilty Gear. From midway through, and nothing makes any sense at all to the uninitiated until the game offhandedly begins to establish a bunch of worldbuilding you can otherwise only know by reading log dumps in Bakery Girl. Even then it only starts explaining the entire setting in the first place after 6-8 chapters of not much. Some of that stuff back there matters quite a bit too, like Deep Dive. It's a big pretzel of a story to tell because you really want to start with Winter Warfare and end with Singularity or CT, but then you have to explain a whole bunch of stuff like what happened to AR-15 and M16 etc but the stuff leading up to it is filler at first glance.

A lot of the actual plot is told in anachronistic order (which isn't inherently bad, although it certainly complicates the work of an adaptation) but most of the setting lore is fairly intuitive: Earth undergoes some sort of crisis event (in this case, massive biochemical destruction), resources are scarce, wars are now fought with androids (or gynoids, in this case). There are a few more specific details that could be introduced (like how PMC's like G&K are limited to using repurposed civilian T-Dolls or how the whole mess with Sanguis Ferri kicked off), but those aren't strictly necessary to understand the story.

[Ratman]

There's quite a bit more to it than that, mostly regarding Collapse Technology being ayy tech and the entire plot of gfl being about three uncooperative scientists trying to engineer a way for humans to commune with it. Human xenocuriosity is the end result of their drive to externalize oneself, or, 'greed'. At low level this begins as just a way of expression, but eventually you would try to insert yourself into objects and the world, like sticking a flag onto the moon. That's why flawed replicas of humanity in various mediums are a big theme.

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Spoiler:

[Deathhappens]

There's quite a bit more to it than that, mostly regarding Collapse Technology being ayy tech and the entire plot of gfl being about three uncooperative scientists trying to engineer a way for humans to commune with it. Human xenocuriosity is the end result of their drive to externalize oneself, or, 'greed'. At low level this begins as just a way of expression, but eventually you would try to insert yourself into objects and the world, like sticking a flag onto the moon. That's why flawed replicas of humanity in various mediums are a big theme.

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Spoiler:

I know, but the farther down the rabbithole you go (particularly most of the Bakery Girl lore) the farther you delve into stuff that, plainly put, doesn't actually matter that much to the main story. There's a GFL2 already announced, with pre-registers open and everything, that will possibly get into some of that, but...

[Deathhappens]

EDIT: Also important to note, Codename Bakery Girl is getting a remake Soon (TM) which will be on Steam and various other inferior platforms (like the Switch). So it remains to be seen which of its lore will remain valid and which might end up retconned away.

[Deathhappens]

Year over, still nothing on that GFL game.
I actually thought ICEY was it for a hot minute when I first saw it, but no dice. Fun little game, tho.

[Ratman]

Been a lot of GFL2 updates at least.

in the meantime, don't mind me just building these manticores to trivialize the game

[Deathhappens]

Broke: TCM a meta shotty
Woke: TCM your waifu
Bespoke: TCM a random doll because you got her costume in the gacha and hate to see it sitting there

So yeah, I was catching up with the manga and somehow wound up getting sucked back into the wormhole at the most opportune time (5th anni plus ZLS collab, holy shit). The game's improved quite a bit in the grindathon department (and/or throws bucketfuls of resources at you nowadays) so I think I'll stick around for a bit and maybe see the story the manga hasn't gotten to yet before GFL2 goes global (even then, I really don't like what the PVs have shown so far).

[Ratman]

Girls Frontline Line is really just an actual videogame (and sseth degree jank at that) masquerading as a gacha in order to trick the lowest common denominator into playing it, and tell a good story to those kinds of people against their own will. The first six chapters are basically the tutorial, when the game takes its kid gloves off, around Deep Dive/Singularity, is also when the story becomes really good.

For reference of what kind of gacha it is, I'm f2p, and out of 360 dolls, these are the ones I am missing:

Spoiler:

STUPID USELESS BUNNY REEEEEEEEE

Neural Cloud is, unfortunately not that way, but it's also nowhere near as well written, so there is no real reason to play it.

81914

[Five_X]

GFL came out in the relatively early days of modern gacha games when everybody was trying different resource systems. So they copied KanColle in that way almost down to the letter, which is terrible for monetisation but KanColle and GFL both are still alive so there's clearly some spark there that works. Unfortunately they're creeping in more monetisation with the battle pass garbage but it's barely relevant. We can only pray that Exilium actually ever comes out at this rate.