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pocketbelt · 4 months

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Girls' Frontline: Slow Shock (iOS)

This is a long one so you probably want to click into the post so the Keep Reading break works properly.

GFL has had, among its circle, infamously wordy events before but this is probably the most direly it's ever needed an editor.

There are plenty of scenes and portions that could be flatly cut and not a thing would change or be lost, from pointless cutscenes where two villains speak euphemistically about something that never pays off to extensive, highly repetitious descriptions of cyber-zombie corpse and experiment destruction that do nothing but pad the run-time and the 'node count' (each 'node' on the event's level select is a cutscene or level) of the event to keep it in the 70-90 range major events usually have. And even then it needs a bunch of post-story minor detail cutscenes with a Sangvis Ferri squad to actually hit that.

And it still manages to leave out or skip over events for 'twists' and an in medias res start that just make parts of it incoherent or nonsensical. Pray tell, how did the other factions (Statesec and KCCO/Military) get spy devices into the beating heart of this super-populated cyber-zombie tower's control and spying platform in the heart of the ultra-bioradiation zone before we got there? Has everyone just always had their shit figured out and just been pretending this whole time to fuck with us?

The story itself is the first time since Polarised Light (TWO YEARS AGO) that your military commander character actually does some military command and carries out an actual campaign/assault on an enemy structure, and while I would like to enjoy it it just overly highlights how you've been doing either fucking nothing or the most incompetent operation executions possible in the last three events. Also, high-ranking enemies who were pretty impervious to bullets and standard attacks are suddenly, inexplicably quite pervious; Narciss two events or so ago needed to be literally Deus Ex Machina'd by Lunasia to save everyone because she was invincibly fast and powerful and now she gets triple-teamed by a Sangvis squad who don't event get hit, they just floss on her and shoot her while she's down and walk off. Nothing materially has changed in the Griffin camp's weapons (unless, inexplicably, we somehow canonically did not have the Sangvis bosses from Destroyer onward until right now) but even the normal T-Dolls can actually hurt the various super-Nytos they just couldn't before.

I realise this might sound stupid, given my prevailing complaint about GFL's story has been the inexplicable invincibility and random magic powers Paradeus has had for four major events or so now, but in just taking it away for no adequately explored reason you just highlight the fucking absurdity of it before now. It's not even completely gone; they somehow get a cyber-zombie girl with pure white armour and a cloak and a giant gleaming white scythe into a standard hospital in a populated area with a cyborg clone of a doctor in tow to kill and replace one. That scene is to show that they're going to do something evil to Kalina, your adjutant, while you're away but all drama around her well-being is out the window because we know from GFL2 pre-release trailers that she's perfectly fine.

It's a mess, it's just a mess. It isn't plotted well, it's padded to hell, there's just weird gaps all over and it spends too much time masturbating over trying to be spooky and sad by going over and over how the regular Nytos are poor little girls abducted into the cyber-zombie nightmare, but also they've been doing and saying that shit for multiple major events now and it's no longer shocking or spooky or worth reading. Nothing new is done with it.

I follow GFL1's main plot basically out of inertia, now, and because when the main recurring cast interact they are charming (the dynamics of Team 404, DEFY, the AR Team and Dandelion are all still great). Last event, Longtudinal Strain, was said to be the first event of "GFL1's final arc" when it was announced for CN however long ago, and miraculously the EN server is now up-to-date and level with CN for story content.

It feels pretty clear that they intend to have everyone hit the ending as close to simultaneously as possible, which is good, but GFL2 is in the "soft-release" open beta state if not officially released in China now, as of last week. With that in mind, and some of the issues here, I start to wonder if GFL1 isn't simply in a hasty wrap-up phase, given this event sticks even things as momentous as DEFY finally capturing the elusive William into a post-story node with no real fanfare (and spent the entire event building up Martha Meitner as the real brains behind all things Paradeus).

There is more underneath the cut below, but in short, man, GFL1 went off the rails after Polarised Light. Eclipse & Saros stands out as a high point post-PL, and Longtudinal Strain had some cool parts, but yeah I'm basically ready for this to tie its stupid plot off and get to those character-focus stories and mini-events they discussed doing (since they can't advance main plot much past a specific point now that GFL2 is out there and real).

On the off-chance you know, feel free to explain/answer any of the things I'm going to mention here, I'll cop to being wrong; but, if your answer/explanation is "well in this side material broadly not released to anyone outside China" maybe don't bother. If your story needs supplemental material to just stand up and work at all your story's fucked and you need to go back and redo it (starting with putting all that shit into the actual story).

So here's one; when RO frees Ange in Slow Shock, she pops a glorified fitbit on her wrist that tracks her vitals and reports to Persica about her status. This happens at a very specific point in time; the assault teams creeping up the Paradeus tower base are made aware of the fitbit's activation and know then that RO has succeeded (and are able to tell when RO has received their comms or not besides). After this, they are locked in combat with the super-Nyto procession, fighting Grig, wounding Bramedb, getting into various computer rooms, dealing with the Evangel Axis and freeing Aliana from its grip and so on and so on. Also, at a very specific point in time, given as 10 minutes from when the Commander issues an order to an aerial-support controlling T-Doll, bombers will take off to come and annihilate the towers and wipe out the Paradeus base.

In and around all this, AN-94 and AK-15 manage to ace their way up the tower, find SOP-II and nudge her toward RO, then find and abduct William and exfiltrate completely undetected by anyone, and the Sangvis Ferri assault squads bring the rear looting the tower and recording video of its technologies for analysis and such. Toward the end of the assault, Ange's vitals are reported as flatlining, RO runs and checks, and Ange is just gone.

So, what the fuck was RO doing that entire time? Between rescuing Ange and finding SOP-II/being told of Ange removing the fitbit and fleeing (presumably being swept along by DEFY because the Nyto possessed by AK-12 also just vanishes), she seemed to just space out, just went into a corner to disassociate for the entire rest of the event until that moment. Ange was barely alive and needed extensive medical equipment to keep her body ticking over, why did RO just leave her and wander off? Where did that entire time span go? RO explicitly did not join the fight or have to hold off a Nyto or anything else!

To talk of padding, the first chapter is rife with it; it's focused on Ange and her memories, of when she was a child, then when she joined the Military, then Griffin and then finally a hilariously false faking of the manor fight against Grey from previous event Mirror Stage (I think it was MS). The idea is Martha and presumably RPK-16 are doing Nyto-surgery on Ange and fucking with her memories to see if she would ever change her actions or decisions, and she doesn't, and also casts 'mystery' over what actually happened in her past.

Why have the faked Mirror Stage sequence at all? Ange's actions didn't matter there because Nyto-Grey and the Paradeus forces invincibly beat everyone and walked through everything that might've stopped them, teleporting soldiers in from nowhere and shrugging off anything they got hit with. It seems like it might be a brainwashing thing because it changes the Paradeus win to a hilarious loss and makes Statesec go evil to kill Ange, but the post-sequence scene is the exact same "she makes the same choices every time" spiel and also clearly ends with the entire sequence breaking down and not working. What does it achieve? Nothing, really, except to remind you of an embarrassingly bad sequence and prove that the protagonists only get to achieve things or be cool in literal dream sequences/fake realities.

The other sequences there are also too long for what they want to convey (introducing Martha and Sana, revealing Martha to be former Relics Agency and also the true origin of Paradeus, giving Ange's motivation for being hellbent on fighting Paradeus because it hilariously has not come up until now) but they at least have things they're doing that obviously matter for the plot. That fourth sequence doesn't.

On that note, the entire handling of Martha in isolation is fine, but in the context of the wider plot it's fucking stupid. Martha made the base tech underpinning Nytos, she has always had a callous disregard for ethics and human experimentation, she was doing it all along to try and resurrect her daughter Sana who died in a terrorist attack during World War III. Okay.

So why is she only coming up now? Why did they just graft the motivation for William, to this point explicitly said and shown to be the origin of Paradeus and beating heart of it all, onto her as well? Because William has clearly been chasing the means of resurrecting his sister Lunasia (who also died in a terror attack!), so why introduce this other character to co-opt and do all of it too and be the actual origin of all the cyber-zombie collective consciousness shit? What did William bring to any of this, then? The cult stuff that doesn't seem to matter? His dad's money?

Like I don't think that's a "well wait and see where the story goes next" thing; why is Martha here at all? She hasn't been mentioned to this point or mattered and this is, by the devs' own proclamation, the final arc of the story. A lot of what Martha is here for is to explain why Ange has been running herself into her grave doggedly hunting Paradeus, because without a deeply personal angle her antics are just insane after a point, but why couldn't you just make that William? Why introduce a whole other character to do all this instead of just...using William, the mystery man we've been pursuing since Continuum Turbulence three years ago (five years if you're on CN). If you want to be truly surreal, have Martha be William and go nuts with it, some alchemical rebus shit giving it's all about pursuing immortality and resurrection in insane and obviously stupid ways.

I'll specifically call myself out if that happens in the next event but I'm pretty confident it won't.

Last thing and this is minor by itself, but in the post-story bits with the Sangvis squad sweeping the tower to look at the weird shit around the place, they find a series of projection rooms that are set up to display recordings of key events in Martha's life, such as when she got fired from the Relics Agency or met Von Oberstein in Germany and so on. And like, why? I guess they could be set up for her to reminisce about, but they're unlocked, unprotected and are set to instantly delete themselves if they detect an unauthorised person enter...which would, presumably, be everyone in rank below the unique super/boss Nytos, right? The regular ones get nothing out of it and are often kept from seeing key files or knowing anything about the Paradeus leaders.

Like it's for us, the player, even if the sequences are so fucking short as to tell us nothing that we didn't already know or couldn't just infer (or show us Paradeus Magic happening again with a recreation of Paradeus killing a press cluster and a politician on an airfield to replace him with a cyborg clone, somehow no-one saw that, just more fucking cyber-zombie magic), but why not just have them be video files sucked out of a damaged mainframe like the other scenes shown? It's just weird, is all, like why would they build these and put them there?

You might ask "why question it if you know it's mainly for your benefit" and sure, I grant you that, but GFL for a good lot of its run was actually pretty grounded despite the anime girl Terminators core concept. Their guns were real guns with real limitations and capabilities, the Dolls with anti-materiel/anti-tank rifles didn't show up for a while so tanks were super threats back at the time of Singularity/Continuum Turbulence; even the fictional tech was pretty grounded stuff, the T-Dolls have real constraints like battery and wireless comms issues and being hacked and ammo is a constant concern, their rules are pretty straightforward and all. This made the Neural Upgrade/MOD process especially cool because in-universe it was technology advancing, the addition of HOCs and Sangvis Capture and son were grounded advancements and cool because of that.

It's why the KCCO and early Paradeus were effective villains; they had similarly realistic/grounded constraints they had to work around, even the special Paradeus forcefields had limitations (couldn't block heavy ordinance, for example) that made sense even if the tech was unknowable cyber-future-esque stuff. It's why later Paradeus fall off, because they start being able to silently mass-evacuate dense residential zones to teleport their pure white soldiers and mechs and hyper-destructive tentacle-and-robe cyber women into places and no-one notices or sees. There's a little tidbit in Slow Shock revealing the news broadcaster Shadowless is actually on the Paradeus payroll but she's one lady and there's no way they can black-out an entire residential block complaining on social media (which does, explicitly, exist, T-Dolls even use it too) about the cops shuffling them all out for a few hours (and this happens multiple times!), especially when some have to come back to destroyed apartments and so on. That requires explanations and money to smooth over/cover repairs, which makes trails somewhere, and if the world is so grounded then this is the stuff the spy agencies would be finding and the Paradeus conspiracy wouldn't be as secretive as it has been.

But they don't because Paradeus are Magic and don't have any limits or concerns or operational and logistical constraints until the plot needs them to. And stuff like the Plot Projection Rooms just glare in the same way; they don't make sense for the style and tone GFL set for itself, and it doesn't offer any explanation for why Martha has three whole unlocked and unsecured rooms dedicated to projecting 3D recordings of key points of her life that are rigged to self-destruct if someone with a low-ranked or no ID badge walks in.

Yeah, it's a minor thing, it doesn't matter for shit ultimately, it just annoys me, you know? This is just the best way to explain what my brain damage is, is all.

#pocket-media-tag

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