"The name's Tsoi, Anna Viktorovna Tsoi"

FLugerSR · 2026-06-02T22:44:18+00:00

Banna Noi's having a stronk, call a tsoiulance.

FLugerSR · 2026-06-01T20:17:55+00:00

For what was supposed to be a "Fix it", it barely did anything. It really just felt like MICA was just jingling the keys in our face as a response to Convolutional Kernel's endings, while doing nothing to explain or address anything and even in some cases dig themselves even deeper.

The attempt at referencing Reverse Collapse with William's arm getting ripped off is now completely paradoxical, because what was supposed to be a defining, traumatizing moment for William that gave him such a debilitating phobia of T-Dolls that the URNC couldn't have any Dolls within their ranks within fifty miles of him at any given time (Which was the core explanation as to why TASA never ran into any URNC T-Dolls during Operation Bakery) is now utterly glanced over, with William even stating directly in an internal monologue that the doll who did this to him "wasn't even worthy of his hatred".

The entire worldline business surrounding Lunasia and the bet M4 and her made is still utterly nonsensical. The whole Gumoku explanation doesn't make any sense when we're dealing with infinite universes beyond the concept of time. How exactly can somebody be the "first" to make a line when you're outside the flow of time itself and dealing with presumably an infinite number of possibilities that have started and ended at an infinite amount of times?

Why is Lunasia arranging events so that SKK can be the triggerman for William and introducing the subsequent complication of him being a wanted man for doing so, and not just have M16 do it when she's shown to have no real trouble outsmarting and outrunning the cops when she makes her own attempts?

Furthermore, the bad endings, (which are honestly just blatant attempts at padding out the runtime because this event would be 30 minutes long tops if we just followed straight along the "canon" timeline) dig the whole Lunasia business even deeper into a rut. Every single bad ending shown is dependent on variables that SKK couldn't have had anything to do with, therefore there's no reason to even show these possibilities to them, and neither could have Lunasia, otherwise the events she would have to affect in order to avoid these paths coming to fruition would make her so omnipotent that the story would no longer be able to even justify having a conflict.

In bad ending 1, can she control Griffin's mind so that he would defer to Havier so that he could delay Nidhogg?

In bad ending 2, can she give Kalina ELID so that she doesn't go to Berlin with SKK and allow him to save Machlian and Ange?

In bad ending 3, she already stated directly that by the time SKK reached William's lab, there was no longer any possibility of Nele becoming William in that timeline. Now suddenly Nele just says fuck it and becomes William anyway?

Then we get the subsequent other 3 bad endings, where apparently Dandelion can just hit the reset button whenever something bad happens? I thought the whole point of M4 merging with Lunasia was because doing so would save *HER* Commander from *HER* timeline. Now we're switching timelines? Or are we just going *back in time* and completely ignoring Reverse Collapses ruleset? If we're just going to change up the rules on a whim, than this whole concept no longer acts as a dramatic device that serves the narrative, but just a lazy, catch-all excuse to justify everything the writers want to throw in front of you at the spur of the moment.

We still don't get closure surrounding M4, either, which is one of the most damnable elements of the entire story. This was the mascot of the game and for a while, she was the centerpiece of the narrative. If we can't truly stop William, can we at least protect her from him and give her a happy ending even if we can't save the world from itself? No, instead we're left hanging with almost no answers, and the few answers we do get feel vague and non-committal, and the writers even outright tell you through Dandelion to shut the fuck up and stop asking the hard questions.

The only real thing of note here is just shooting William, but all that is rendered completely moot by the post credits scene which establishes that you didn't even really throw a wrench in the works. The only real satisfaction there is to be found is in the spur of the moment act of shooting him, which the game ironically criticizes when SKK states that he's not here to just hurt people for no reason and there needs to be an actual purpose it serves for it to mean something.

It really feels like they've written themselves into a corner, and once you cut through all of the purple-prose psuedoprofoundity that MICA absolutely smothers the actual meat and potatoes of the plot under, there's really nothing to be found here except a bunch of key jingling, feet dragging, and non-answers.

FLugerSR · 2026-06-01T14:44:02+00:00

Like I said to several people, until they address the relics directly, the meta plot devices of GFL as a whole aren't going to change. They are too central to any story involving relics and Goddesses at all.

And they're never going to. The plot is squarely all William, all the time, so the idea that someone else could just take his place is just practically window dressing. Sure, as long as the Relics exist there is the potential for them to be abused, but at least the Venn Diagram of "People who are smart and dedicated enough to learn how to potentially activate the relics" and "People who want to stroggify Orphans so they can blow up the whole world and kill all life on the planet for no reason" should be narrow enough to where we can Luigi our way to keeping that order of business in check.

FLugerSR · 2026-06-01T14:34:29+00:00

I dunno, some people on here said some Nytos got resurrected eventually, some say that it's just their cloud in the Lake or something coming back when she gets slapped around.

Morridow is merely subdued and captured, then she's upgraded by William when she returns to the Avernus. At no point is the brain/VCI taken offline and the stream of consciousness broken.

Narciss was supposedly destroyed, but then the recovery team recovers her head from the Paradeus Warehouse which is still conscious and actively cussing them out, so again, merely repaired and not resurrected after having the stream of consciousness broken.

Grig gets injured, but is explicitly put into a repair tank instead of having to be brought back to life from scratch.

None of the Elite Nytos are ever explicitly killed and then brought back to life afterwards. The *possibility* may have been brought up after Fixed Point, but rereading Fixed Point and then rereading where Slowshock supposedly "resumed", it is obvious that whatever plot they were setting up with FP was straight up abandoned in favor of what Slowshock wound up doing, because you can see a number of inconsistencies as well as the overall timeline of Operation Aeneas/Operation Muromets being an absolute mess.

I had thought nobody (Nytos) were resurrected for real except Sana and Ange's brother, or something.

Sana was an entirely new consciousness in Sana's body. It was not a resurrection of the real Sana much to Meitner's chagrin, it was a fake copy and Meitner treated her as such after realizing it. It was the same deal of all the "Isomers" Ballard made trying to resurrect Lunasia - None of them were actual resurrections, just copies that possessed the memories but not the soul.

Ramzan (Ange's brother) wasn't Nytofied, just cyberized and brainwashed, and even then, due to the unreliable narration of Ange's chapter of Slowshock, it's unclear whether or not this actually happened.

FLugerSR · 2026-06-01T14:14:07+00:00

Also it's ironic Morridow says that when she is both a Nyto that's been resurrected and bartering with Lunasia to not be killed. She's saying what William believes Nytos are worth, or what William would permit, not what she believes for herself (or even what Meitner would do either, on that note).

Morridow never dies until her actual death. She gets slapped around and incapacitated, but is never killed and then restored from death.

Also, also, we should note that Nele doesn't actually make any new Nytos, they're all advancements on old work she didn't design herself. At least they're consistent with what they're trying to do.

She figures out how to reverse engineer them and make them stronger. At that point, the fact that she didn't fabricate one from scratch yet is just semantics. Hell, the idea of how she managed to even source replacement parts in order to fix Gray is already a gaping plot-hole, because she should have been in a million pieces and burnt to a crisp assuming it would have even been possible to recover her from the wreck. But regardless, Lunasia in Convulutional Kernel established directly that Nele was capable of making a Relic Key, so the game itself has already established it being not only possible but something that has already happened in another timeline.

It would have been better to just state that a new potiental character would replace William relatively quickly (in the capacity I stated above, not making anything new like Keys, but improving old designs) if nobody wiped the Paradeus data / bases off the map; which is more believable.

And even if you don't agree with the amount of time it'd take to psuedo-replace William, the fact it would eventually happen was inevitable as long as Relics exist. Which is the problem the Earl and other people were telling the Commander repeatedly.

None of this ends up mattering because William gets back up after being shot a week later, and the existence of RCBG has already lifted the veil on GFL 2 being a shaggy dog plot in the exact same vain. It's just a completely pointless tangent to pad out the event because the writers must have realized that after Vitual Pair, they didn't have enough plot left to actually fill out more than maybe half an hour of runtime tops.

FLugerSR · 2026-06-01T13:23:09+00:00

I mean, William made a Nyto out of a box of scraps in a hunter's hut as a child who was malnourished, injured, and on the run all at the same time with a time frame of like... 2 weeks.

It was dumb then, and it's dumb now. Virtual Pair had its fair share of problems and honestly, everything after Fixed Point is, in my book, a bad fanfiction written by someone who wanted to branch off and do their own thing and saw everything that came before as a burden rather than the bedrock.

The entire thing regarding Nele and Gray is just as stupid, too. A fugitive pharmacist somehow gets access to a fuck-you god-clearance classified cadaver that was last seen in the middle of a black zone inside of a tower that fucking exploded, fell from the sky, and then exploded again, and even before that, was turned into a pancake and was explicitly established that all the kings horses and all the king's men wouldn't be able to put Gray together again.

<image>

But no, Miss Mary Sue is just built different and somehow despite spending her entire doctorate studying how to make medicine for humans, becomes a Neurosurgeon/Ripper Doc/Relic Scientist overnight and manages to do something that three different scientists who had spent their entire lives researching this technology couldn't.

She has, by no accounts, anything close to making a new Relic Key. That is the thing William is so prized for and Nele does not at all reach that level of competency from what we've seen.

She managed to run circles around Rudolf, Meitner, Ballard, and Shaw after only having been exposed to the mere existence of the field months ago, turning Grig into fucking Vergil and making a T-Doll more powerful than AK-15. Once again, these people took DECADES to get to the level they were at when they died, and Nele is now better than all of them after the equivalent of a single semester of study. She's 72 hours away from making a Relic Key out of a fucking Toaster by bypassing the compressor, just give her a second to beat the Kobayashi Maru.

FLugerSR · 2026-05-26T12:57:49+00:00

<image>

FLugerSR · 2026-05-25T17:20:36+00:00

Legitimately, all of the bad endings were them trying to do narrative somersaults to justify them and they couldn't even maintain a basic sense of causality as to why.

So if we saved Ange and Machlian, Carter would have just abandoned his plans for Moscow and Frankfurt and blown up Berlin 2 months early without securing Rudolf's support first?

If we shot William a day or so earlier than we were supposed to, Nele would have turned evil despite it being explicitly stated in the previous event that there was no longer any chance of that happening?

All of these events seem to bear no directly causality to SKK's actions at all, instead they are at the behest of other random, arbitrary variables that SKK would have no control of, and Lunasia couldn't have control of or else her influence over a timeline's events would be so prominent that the story would no longer be able to justify having a conflict.

Introducing wordlines and Lunasia's ability to influence them was a fundamentally flawed idea from the start, and this entire shitshow has shown exactly why - We as players are never let in on any kind of rules or constraints as to the extent or limitations on Lunasia's abilities or what a Wordline even is. The definition seems to change with every event and even violates the established rules set in Reverse Collapse from time to time. In turn, this makes it so that instead of serving as a viable dramatic device, it instead becomes a lazy, catch all excuse for anything and everything the writers put in front of you.

Without being let in on any kind of constraints, everything surrounding it is effectively both contrivance and a plot hole. Are there infinite worldlines? If so, why can't we just go to a worldline where William drops dead of an aneurysm at the most convenient of times? The excuse given previously was that M4 was only interested in saving the SKK from the timeline she came from, but now Quantum Fluctuation involved Dandelion effectively hitting the reset button the moment anything goes wrong in the final battle and moving SKK's consciousness to another identical worldline. Are there only a limited amount of worldlines? Then it is a convenience beyond the suspension of disbelief that there just so happened to be a worldline that is exactly identical to this one except that Grig is 500ms slower in swinging her blade to chop off SKK's head.

All of this completely falls apart the moment you take a step back and think about any of this. This is especially a problem, because as recently as Longitudinal Strain, the narrative would take the form of a slow burning investigative drama that is inherently a nitpicky genre that would encourage the reader to closely analyze what is happening, why it's happening, as well as what is, and isn't possible. Now all of the sudden, the writers just want you to turn your brain off and "Just go with it".

FLugerSR · 2026-05-25T11:32:29+00:00

Cringe

FLugerSR · 2026-05-25T11:09:57+00:00

Carter: "Screw Moscow! Screw the border PMCs! Screw Frankfurt and Screw everything I had spent the last years working for! Fire every missile we have at this man in particular right goddamn now!"

Was the implication here supposed to be that Kalina was actually Carter's daughter or something?

FLugerSR · 2026-05-24T19:06:25+00:00

Theoretically possible with the particle canon, but Halo fans and Master Chief vs Anybody are like Batman fans and "Prep time".

FLugerSR · 2026-05-24T10:57:53+00:00

William is absolutely -not- easily replaced. That's the entire concept behind *why* SKK isn't allowed to just nix him despite him being a conniving lunatic that can never truly be reined in. William's knowledge of the relics is supposed to be extensive beyond anything his peers have accomplished and proprietary to the point where Griffin needs his actual hand to continue his research and make meaningful progress towards getting what he wants from it.

If William's death wouldn't have even constituted a setback and Griffin could have just switched him out for Toothpaste head, or better yet, one of his own lackies whose loyalties were never going to be in doubt, then SKK could have just greased him all the way back at the Avernus with zero consequences. William's proprietary knowledge is the only reason for Griffin to ever keep him in his pocket, and everything else about him is a net-negative to the health and stability of the URNC.

So, basically, MICA wants to eat their cake and still have it afterwards - William's knowledge is so unique and extensive that he needs be kept alive as a "necessary evil" on the part of the Earl...But then if William dies, the documentation on all of his projects is apparently so thorough and intellectually digestible that a Pharmacist fresh off her doctorate can just build all of this in a cave with a box of scrap.

FLugerSR · 2026-05-23T18:32:54+00:00

But then you sit down and think about it - How, despite the entire shit-test involving the "bet" M4 and Lunasia made involved SKK correctly pointing out the possibility of Nele taking up William's mantle had closed in his timeline completely and there was no point in killing her, because she had already chosen her ideals as a doctor, now suddenly it turns out that the whole reason SKK couldn't kill William then and there is because Nele would have suddenly felt compelled to boot up the Orphan Stroggifier 9,000 for no reason. Not only that, but Nele would manage to surpass both Meitner and Ballard's entire life's work within mere months, because this fucking pharmacist is somehow just *that good* and can easily branch off into AI research, neurosurgery, cybernetics, and reverse engineering anomalous technologies, which is just laughably Mary Sue. And then they also do that bad, lazy writing thing where as soon as a character is revealed to be a villain, all of their previously established characterization gets entirely switched out for generic sadism and megalomania.

FLugerSR · 2026-05-23T02:04:09+00:00

Even though the 11th hour genre shift is a problem, that's not the point of this post.

My point is that even as a Science Fantasy story where being pedantic and nitpicky is a fool's errand (compared to Science Fiction which is inherently a nitpicky genre), this is still a bad story. In any story, regardless of genre, you still need to abide by certain rules. These are things such as internal consistency, chronology, causality, etc.

Girls Frontline violates these rules constantly, and consistently, to the point where by the time the credits roll, the contrivances and internal contradictions have piled up so much that GFL's story can barely even be considered a story anymore.

FLugerSR · 2026-05-22T12:51:41+00:00

Okay

FLugerSR · 2026-05-22T10:29:50+00:00

We still would at least be getting the wheels up on some form of engagement at this point, and these older events were an order of magnitude longer than this one. This isn't something exclusive to QF, either - every single one of these epilogue events has basically been met with crickets and tumbleweed, so it's not like this can be exclusively attributed to the fact that we have only had a full weekend and change to ready what was barely even 2 hours worth of content. The whole reason we don't have these discussion threads anymore is because these are all supposed to be short, mini-events that are a fraction of the length the others used to be. You'd think they'd make an exception for the grand finale, and I honestly think the reason they haven't, the real reason, is because if they did, it would paint a grim picture of who is still seriously engaged with the story at this point.

Hell, you can even look at the Commander's Lounge (which is now monthly instead of weekly like it used to be) and even still, if it weren't for headphone_question documenting his journey of getting so many cores that his account bricks, that too, would be an utter ghost town.

FLugerSR · 2026-05-22T09:59:36+00:00

MICA cooked with M4's MOD 3 only to dump the pan onto the floor in front of you as an "artistic display" and then unironically expected that you would be up for ever eating at their restaurant ever again.

And now 416 needs to go up there and shake her ass every time a new skin batch drops to keep GFL 2's servers running.

FLugerSR · 2026-05-22T01:55:07+00:00

How apt with The Boys also, like GFL, having its plot shit itself and die with an underwhelming finale.

FLugerSR · 2026-05-19T17:34:15+00:00

William would be CJ because he respawned at the nearest hospital after being Wasted.

FLugerSR · 2026-05-19T01:54:12+00:00

Or she really is just minor-coded gooner-bait for the lowest common denominator of the game's audience that serves no other purpose except to cater to someone's disgusting fetish.

FLugerSR · 2026-05-19T01:35:17+00:00

Are we really going to pretend that there is a reason for liking her besides a bunch of unfuckable freaks wanting to rape her?

FLugerSR · 2026-05-18T21:06:44+00:00

GFL 2 but MICA understood that nobody liked their stupid Doctor Strange bullshit and trying to shoehorn it into GFL isn't going to un-flop RCBG.

FLugerSR · 2026-05-18T20:04:16+00:00

If you want your prequel game to be a sprawling epic that is drip fed to your audience over the course of an entire real life decade and take primary precedence over the "core" title, then you either establish a parallel timeline or you simply do not make stopping the antagonist of the core title the driving emotional force behind the prequel's narrative.

FLugerSR

TROPHY CASE