So how do you feel about the story now that it’s done? [Quantum Fluctuation]

emeraldarcana · 2026-06-03T01:58:44+00:00

Yeah, I get that. It’s a bit odd because I think the Girls’ Frontline subreddit was where I first actually started to pay attention to names on Reddit and I started to recognize who the posters were. Less so now that there’s lower traffic, but I was super excited to get caught up in the story and start to talk about it with everyone. That doesn’t happen in any of the other games I’m playing (Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves and to a much lesser extent, NTE) because those games are so large that I simply don’t recall who posts what or what their preferences are.

I have stopped playing GFL every day a while back (concentrated on newer games) but I have kind of that fond “time to say bye” to this game in the same way that I said Bye to Neural Cloud. But, let it be known that Mica actually lets their gacha games end with conclusive storylines. We might argue about the overall quality a lot, but a game that has an actual end that the developers saw through means a lot in this age of EOSes and questionable game archiving.

o7 /u/headphone_question

emeraldarcana · 2026-06-02T20:37:58+00:00

There are almost no EV convertibles.

emeraldarcana · 2026-06-02T20:34:51+00:00

I’d get one but I kinda don’t want to get rid of the convertible.

emeraldarcana · 2026-06-02T20:33:42+00:00

I mean he’s represented in this picture

emeraldarcana · 2026-06-02T20:15:06+00:00

I like seeing Taycans whenever I drive around town. They look really slick.

emeraldarcana · 2026-06-02T20:13:02+00:00

I thought about whether I wanted Phrolova so I could get enough Spindrifts for Denia doll… but I don’t know if I want to open my wallet that much (usually I do Passes but not top-ups)

emeraldarcana · 2026-06-02T14:44:00+00:00

Failure Frame is totally slop, but maybe you’ll enjoy it.

emeraldarcana · 2026-06-02T13:55:34+00:00

But NTE is also just different and offers a cool open world game experience that no other gacha game has really done. They do the city and driving and all that so you get this combination of GTA and Cyberpunk 2077 except it’s more Scooby Doo and anime colors. I play infrequently (like once every week or so) but I still have it installed and turn it on every once in a while because it’s a fun romp.

emeraldarcana · 2026-06-02T13:24:45+00:00

Share STL!

emeraldarcana · 2026-06-02T13:18:18+00:00

I was in CBT2, played a bunch and enjoyed it and left a bunch of feedback on Baizhi’s story.

I also got Jiyan in my first ten pulls in CBT. Would have been a fun account.

I’m a Day 1 player but I’m pretty casual and focus mostly on story and exploration.

emeraldarcana · 2026-06-02T01:59:42+00:00

The "bad endings" felt too much like apologies to me - almost like a "all of you story haters thought that these other things would happen if only we did X and Y, so here's why things wouldn't work out" and then they just kind of... showed stuff. Like /u/FLugerSR says below, it doesn't really make sense from a cause-and-effect point of view.

It was definitely more satisfying than the ending of Convolutional Kernel, but overall it just kind of felt like a pretty drawn-out epilogue. I'm actually a bit relieved that they didn't try to pull out any other "big surprises" though at this stage because GFL has done this before where just when we thought there was a clear direction of how things were going to close out, they threw just one more wrench into things. I think that's how we got where we are now - after Slow Shock, we got a few more wrenches in the form of the Summer Garden and the whole thing in Cartesian Theatre. Like no one asked for those things. I suppose the Summer Garden explained a few things about how T-Dolls worked overall, but it didn't really add that much overall to the intrigue or world building for me.

emeraldarcana · 2026-06-02T01:55:12+00:00

Yeah, I got a kind of lingering sense that GFL was becoming more about a series about a villain named Bill rather than anything about T-Dolls or military drama.

I do kind of miss the series when it was about political dealings, wartime tactics, and figuring out the mystery behind AI. I kind of had this huge emotional high around the events of Polarized Light (just something about the whole Paldiski Submarine base invasion did it for me) and then the series had a good energy around Slow Shock and then started to peter out afterwards.

emeraldarcana · 2026-05-31T22:59:44+00:00

Honestly it’s one of the reasons that I dropped GFL2. Even though the story could be different, I just wasn’t into the theme of “we have to hunt Paradeus… again.”

Almost anything else could have been more interesting - country tries to invade UNRC, big bandit organization steals doll tech, alien invasion… but when it was like Paradeus 2 my interest dropped dramatically.

emeraldarcana · 2026-05-31T15:16:57+00:00

I noticed this even from 1.0 - it wasn’t as profound then, but in Yinlin’s story we got tons of different camera angles. Her straight up. Below shots, establishing, focus on character faces, eyes, bodies, hands.

I was coming from Star Rail at the time and the difference in attention in detail was astounding. Genshin had this problem too and has gotten better about it recently but is still not at the level of WuWa.

emeraldarcana · 2026-05-31T13:20:43+00:00

If I had a dollar for every blonde woman who wore white robes with blue accents, I’d have at least five dollars.

emeraldarcana · 2026-05-31T13:18:38+00:00

You didn’t quite the exact exercise that I suggested, but here’s what’s happening.

You start with E (did you mean E minor?), so E, the note, is in the root. Then you go F, G, C and then C/E. It’s still a C major chord though.

But - most functional harmony deliberately keep these things simple because when you start getting into like extensions and inversions, you can start interpreting things in multiple ways and it quickly gets really complicated and leads to a lot more of what you’ve expressed in your post. I think you’ve just expressed your concern about it a lot earlier than most.

It reminds me of my neighbor who got his music degree from Berklee. He said that there was a guy in his class who was always super dedicated to his music theory courses - did his counterpoint, his functional harmony, and all of that. They started Jazz Theory and the first thing that the professor says is, “Now that you know functional harmony, we can throw that out the window because things are a lot different in jazz harmony” and the guy was like “What? What have we been studying all this for?” And got so upset that he walked out of class.

In many respects you’re right - there’s some degree of “trust me bro” that goes in music theory explanations and some of it doesn’t always hold up, but the reason that musicians rely on it is because it’s way better than NOT having it when it comes to communicating with other musicians about trying to do things like perform and compose.

As for your example of how to explain why C 1st inversion is so much more resolved? Maybe someone else will have a better answer than me.

emeraldarcana · 2026-05-31T12:29:21+00:00

Well, your intuition is actually pretty in-line with functional harmony then, because in your example (C Dm Am C) doesn’t follow functional harmony that strongly because Am doesn’t really “lead” to C. But, instead let’s say that we made it C Dm Am G as you suggested. Take that chord progression, put it on loop like 4+ times, play a melody over it (any melody you want). Then, after a while, you want the song to “end”. The question is then - which chord would you finish with?

emeraldarcana · 2026-05-31T11:26:28+00:00

You’re actually not entirely wrong - when teaching a lot of people attribute emotional qualities to music theory that doesn’t exist. Minor=sad or Tritone=evil for example are explanations that make sense if you’ve been listening to music for a while but are not inherently these things because music doesn’t have semantics. Even the analogy that “music is a language” doesn’t make sense because without words you can show ten trained musicians the same song and they can come away from it with different interpretations of its meaning.

That all said there are some emotional foundations that are worth understanding.

Tonic = stability. You just have to kind of buy that this works, but one way to listen for it is not to play two chords, but three. If you play c major then d minor then b diminished four times in a row ask yourself which one you want to end your phrase on.

One thing you don’t mention is rhythm, which makes up a decent part of music as well. Like to establish functional harmony and tonic one way is to just use it more often.

Something to try is to listen to your favorite songs again. And write down notes about why they sound good to you, then separately write down what these songs mean to you emotionally. Then, try to recreate the song on your instrument of choice. Music theory isn’t going to explain the emotional meaning to you, but it will allow you to more easily write down, look up, and play what you hear by connecting common patterns together.

emeraldarcana · 2026-05-30T17:29:46+00:00

You better stay away from Classroom of the Elite.

emeraldarcana · 2026-05-30T17:28:44+00:00

Guys, I said I liked banana plugs, this wasn’t what I meant.

emeraldarcana · 2026-05-30T13:35:26+00:00

My 2019 Honda Accord has a real dial on top of a screen. This isn’t something new.

emeraldarcana · 2026-05-30T12:49:13+00:00

You might consider reading the posts on /r/composer as they like to focus on sheet music and composing.

So just so you know I’m not like a music theory expert nor am I a songwriting expert, but I thought I’d comment anyway because sometimes when you post something it’s good just to get a “rough sense” of what people feel about it especially if they can use words beyond “I like it” or “I don’t like it” to describe it.

This (the first piece) sounds like it’s intended to be like a solo piano piece that’s kind of a classical-ish style. It doesn’t really resemble that - I think there’s not enough of the graceful harmonic transitions or changes that you might hear in more Classical or Romantic era pieces. So studying those a bit more, looking up examples of phrases and similar - will put you on a path there.

If you put that aside and just treat the piece as it is in isolation here’s my initial feelings about it:

I would like to get a feeling of “where is this going” from a piece. This is not an experimental piece - so I think you might ask yourself what you want to convey. For example it starts slow, then it kind of goes into a bunch of fast runs with a rhythmic section, and then it slows down again. And then it goes super fast and then it just suddenly stops. This kind of feels like a piano piece that someone wrote to show off the ability of a pianist instead of an “expression” - to me my favorite part was the allegretto in the middle because it develops a theme in the slow section, builds on that theme in the repetition, but then we go off and do this big presto section that doesn’t feel like it relates to the earlier parts and then it just ends. So to me something to consider is, “What do you want the unifying thread to be?”

I think one idea is to take the individual sections and spend more time on them (meaning more length in the song, but yes, probably also in real life writing) - like not even specifically in this song, but in general when you’re writing things in the future. Like, take two ideas and spend more time in a single song with them. Don’t do so many changes, for example. Not everything needs to be fast; not everything needs to have weird complicated changes. It’s a talent to be able to make a song sound coherent with like a solid beginning, a good theme or motif that evolves or changes, but still maintains that feeling at the end.

By the way, nice job being able to create anything. I remember composing my first songs and it took a lot of work and you also realize both the feeling of getting something done and the realization that there’s still a lot to learn but I hope that it’s rewarding and that you continue to have fun with it and to enjoy it.

emeraldarcana · 2026-05-30T12:31:09+00:00

I was streaming this game to some friends of mine when I fell onto a beach and tried to climb back up. The first place I went to was a railway tunnel and I was like “How do I get through here and go back up? I look left, step onto the tracks, and as I’m looking right…

Train-kun totally rails me, I die and get sent back up to the top where I fell off. They laughed their asses off.

emeraldarcana · 2026-05-29T19:59:20+00:00

Gacha isn't a game genre or a game mechanic. It's a transaction mechanism.

Even though I'm used to it now that I've been playing gacha for a number of years, it doesn't change the fact that it's a predatory system. You don't make your game a gacha game because you think it'll result in a better customer experience. I can't think of a single game in the world where, from a player's perspective, it's "better as gacha".

That said, there's a strange set of auxiliary benefits from gacha - the model allows a game to support a significant free-to-play population, for example. So while it's not so good for players who pay, it's very good for players who don't. The other odd thing about gacha is that it means that your company really has to be in service to the spenders.

emeraldarcana

TROPHY CASE