Girls' Frontline

Published: 27 Aug 2024
Last updated: 20 Mar 2026

Girls’ Frontline

Girls' Frontline Steam banner

The first gacha I picked up during my broke university years, sinking a fair number of hours into it.

As gacha’s go I found it very F2P friendly (no premium currency for getting characters is a big boon in that regard), although more time consuming as a trade-off. What gameplay there is, is meh - creating and theorycrafting teams/echelons teams of 5 is fun, the actual map based combat not-so-much (especially in late-game/ranking content where micro is a must), this is an extra issue given the consistent client and performance issues that plagued the EN client throughout.

The art is great and the story is more competent than an average gacha - honestly, I’d love to play an XCOM-like, or just a non-gacha game in this universe MICA’s created (and it looks like Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery is exactly what I’m looking for).

(Minor kudos to doing a VA-11 Hall-A collab and getting me to play it!).

Girls’ Frontline 2: Exilium

Girls' Frontline 2: Exilium Steam banner

Be careful what you wish for, eh? An XCOM-like (or rather Fire Emblem-like given the focus on individual dolls/characters) should have been a slam-dunk for the series, especially given MICA’s past experience in making Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery as well as the general theme/worldbuilding within Girls Frontline. It does the bare minimum of what any anime gacha needs to be successful (a slick UI and general artsyle, heavy focus on making good character models and individualising them - GFL handled the 2D to 3D transition well, and the standard VN-esque story) but very little else, and despite the glow-up (and the massively increased degree of fetishism, you gotta make the money back via whales somehow) it feels a waste of potential even for a gacha - because the gameplay, despite all the artificial complexity with mechanics, abilities, gimmicks etc. is extremely shallow (you’re either under-levelled, over-levelled, or haven’t whaled enough, and that’s all the tactical skill expression that exists). Combine with the use of the Hoyoverse-esque gacha system - a system much more punishing on the wallet compared to GFL1, and the standard problems that a long-running, ever-present gacha story has (GFL2 lacks any kind of in-game wiki system for certain terms, a fact more baffling by the very same inclusion within Reverse Collapse).

It definitely feels very foolish to expect a gacha game to be more than a formalised Skinner box with just the most rudimentary/perfunctory gameplay tacked on, but MICA has past experience in both making decent games both gacha (GFL1) and non-gacha (Reverse Collapse), and there’s evidently a lot of effort put in creating the underlying strategy game base and the myriad mechanics, abilities, gimmicks etc. that it just flatly refuses to use in any meaningful way (let alone some of the new characters that have come out - mainly Klukai and Voymastina - that have only trivialised the very little difficulty that was present), leaving nout but a mediocre VN and a glorified/polished Koikatsu clone. I haven’t even mentioned the skin gacha fiasco, heh.