Video Game / Codename Bakery Girl

Codename: Bakery Girl is a Strategy RPG created by MICA Team (later known for developing Girls' Frontline).

Originally a Retool of Girl of the Bakehouse and sold through physical and digital distribution channels in 2013. MICA Team later announced a remake of the game titled Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery, featuring updated graphics, extra difficulty settings, and additional story content that ties it to other MICA Team titles. It was released on Steam in March 22nd 2024.

This game provides examples of:

Tropes appearing in both games

• Anyone Can Die: While the Girls' Frontline cast members are safe in Reverse Collapse, virtually anyone else is fair game, even the main characters of Jefuty and Mendo. Thankfully, Jefuty can undo this with her death by sending her memories back to herself just before her escape, working to do better next time.
• Arc Words: "Bakery".
• Applied Phlebotinum: Collapse Technology enables the hypercompression of matter by "collapsing" the space between subatomic particles using Collapse Fluid. Reverse Collapse is the opposite: restoring the macroscopic orientation of matter as well as its size, effectively turning it back to normal. Combining these two principles allows the disintegration and reintegration of matter at will, and even transporting them over long distances. Antarctic Union's mastery over both technologies is partly the reason why they're capable of surviving decades-long isolation in one of the harshest climates on Earth, as well as matching the URNC's military might despite their small population.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Mendo, Jefuty and their allies are fighting for the Antarctic Union, who have done some pretty messy things in the First Antarctic War and utilize their Collapse Technology for ruthless methods of opposing the URNC. The heroes will kill entire battalions' worth of opposing URNC troops to survive, and even pose as wounded URNC soldiers to trick them into letting them in their base to rescue Lige. But the URNC are utilizing mass forces to invade and destroy everything in their path that even remotely offers resistance in an attempt to take over the AU's territory, some of it out of payback for their losing the war several years prior, and are fielding the Shrikes, who are entities that can destroy the world as we know it if mishandled. Then there's the "Three Goddesses Project" that created Jefuty, Noel/Lige, and a new, separate Lunasia, as both the AU and URNC temporarily worked together to try to create entities that could shift the entire fate of the world going forwards with highly classified and illegal research, effectively making both factions bastards that ended up going at each other's throats, even if the grunts on the ground level don't know this.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Since it's not bound by content restrictions in Apple/Play Store, Bakery Girl is much more explicit with its violence and gore compared to Girls' Frontline.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Fragmentation grenades deal damage in an area and do nothing else. The catch is that they're not subject to accuracy checks and can be obtained in bulk, so chucking grenades until you run out can be a viable strategy, so long you have the AP to throw them.
  • Crafted turrets also can't do anything but shoot an enemy once per turn, but they're cheap to deploy and retrieve, has surprising range, and enemies occassionally shoot them instead of your characters, potentially saving a medkit.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: Jefuty is armed with a Mosin-Nagant, a bolt-action rifle that is almost 200 years old by the game's setting, but she has no problems kicking ass with it. Her reasons for using it over modern weapons are that the lower amount of metal parts make it harder to detect during the scanning of refugee convoys, the nonstandard ammo make it harder to trace, and for the simple reason that she fell in love with the rifle on first sight.
• Geo Effects: Terrain provides bonuses and maluses to the unit standing on them. For example, forests increase evasion. High ground increases sight range and accuracy but makes the unit standing there easier to hit.
• Death of a Child: One of the earliest scenes in the game is Lige, who is visibly underage, being graphically blown apart by a URNC tank. Of course, this doesn't stick for long.
• Optional Stealth: Zigzagged. Stealth is mandatory in certain missions, but others allow the team to fight their way out if they're detected.
• Item Crafting: Using scraps gathered from the battlefield, it's possible to build items such as trip mines and turrets to help even the odds. Reverse Collapse justifies this through Mendo's material shuttle, which can reconstruct salvaged materials into more usable forms through the principle of Reverse Collapse.
• Multiple Endings: The game has different endings depending on your relationship with Jefuty.
• Super-Soldier: Jefuty and Lige have some sort of Healing Factor and adaptable combat capabilities that put them above any human soldier, and the URNC refuses to let them escape into AU hands, even if it means killing them. Turns out they were both part of a program using GAVIRUL DNA on human embryos, in an attempt to access Relic sites. Jefuty is considered the only success of the experiment, as she has this access ability, leading to the URNC and AU desperately trying to lay claim to her.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: The game is set in 2092.

Tropes exclusive to Codename: Bakery Girl

• Cliffhanger: Both the Normal and Good ending has Jefuty leaving Mendo as he covers her escape, but not before she promises him that they will meet again.
• Retool: As stated above, of Girl of the Bakehouse. Bakery Girl carries over concepts such as the war between Antarctic Union and URNC, as well as Mendo and Jefuty's names, but reimagines their story. Whereas they were a war reporter and an orphan respectively, Bakery Girl casts Mendo as an AU special agent trying to extract Jefuty from the URNC, who seeks to use her to further their research into Collapse Technology.

Tropes exclusive to Reverse Collapse

• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The game will notify the player should they make a move that will expose a Stealthed character. This is important, because certain stages will fail instantly if anyone is spotted.
  • At the end of a battle, all reuseable items such as turrets are returned to the player's inventory, saving them the trouble of hunting their gear down and retrieving it.
• Adaptation Expansion: Reverse Collapse takes into account the plot developments of Girls' Frontline, Girls' Frontline: Neural Cloud, and even Girls' Frontline 2: Exilium in expanding Codename: Bakery Girl's story. The end result is a script that is ten times as long as the original.
• The Bad Guy Wins: For two individuals.
  • William gets Jefuty back in his hands to try to experiment on and figure out how to activate Relics sites with. Just her being in his hands before the game had a timeline that ended the world, and while she plans to sabotage his efforts, she's fully captured with no one aware thanks to Lusica replacing her.
  • Lusica was the original Shrike clone of Jefuty that ultimately ended the world, and spelled this out to a particular Jefuty in the Bad Future that so long as she exists the way she does, that future will always happen. So the two made a deal for Mental Time Travel, where they would both lay claim to an alternate failed clone equivalent that would become Lige post-Point of Divergence; once the deal is done and a Golden Ending is attained, Lusica makes due on her end of the deal and takes Lige's body back from the future Jefuty, before transforming the body into a Jefuty duplicate and creating a Lige Shrike clone to keep up appearances. Even if it's only temporary, as it's unknown how long the deception would last, Lusica gets to escape her "bad ending".
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • At the end of Chapter 4, Jefuty and Lige manage to board the transport to Antarctica, but Mendo and the other AU agents have all died covering their escape. Lige straight up says that "the future is meaningless" if Mendo dies.
  • With the Chapter 5 ending, everyone lives, but Jefuty has to return to her father William in order to prevent him from using the Shrikes to activate Relics, with Lusica taking on her identity in her place.
• Death Is Cheap: Sugar is seemingly incapable of dying permanently, on account of being a Shrike Progenitor, until Lige stumbles upon her weak spot: the False Heart.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Getting enough information to chart a path to the Chapter 4 ending, much less the Chapter 5 one, requires Jefuty, Mendo and the others dying many, many times across the various timelines. In almost all the 'dead ends', Jefuty takes her own life in the hope that the version of her in the next timeline can use her memories to chart a path forward.
• Elite Mooks: The Werewolf Commando Team serves as this to the regional URNC forces. Most human and mechanical enemy types also have an elite form, usually instantly recognizable by the addition of black or red paint.
• First-Episode Twist: The final Act of Chapter 1 reveals that Jefuty returns to the start of her escape upon death.
• Healing Factor: Shrike cells regenerate rapidly, making them difficult to impossible to kill with conventional weapons. Jefuty's (and Mendo's) blood suppresses the regeneration and dissolves Shrike tissue, although against the Shrike Progenitor even this is insufficient to do more than slow it down briefly. Jefuty also has her own regeneration capability which rematerializes destroyed tissue.
• Limit Break: Killing enemies will accrue SP for the entire team, which then can be used to cast character-specific skills.
• Golden Ending: While the 'normal' ending comes at Chapter 4, collecting all files in the game thus far leads to Chapter 5 which gives a happier outcome where all the party members live and the world doesn't enter an apocalypse from the Antarctic Relic activation.
• Godzilla Threshold: The mobilization of the Shrikes, as the URNC has their problems with it but ultimately deem it a necessity to overcome the Antarctic Union and get Jefuty back. Turns out there's a good reason for this being a threshold: in extreme conditions, a Shrike can be "invaded", transforming into a Body Horror Eldritch Abomination that needs killing immediately to prevent the entire region from becoming a no man's land. One Shrike going uncontained wiped out thousands of miles of life before it was stopped.
• Guest-Star Party Member: In Chapter 2-2, Betty (IDW), Abigail (M500), Ruby (P2000), and Valmet (M82), who are now part of the Global Relief Foundation, work with Mendo and Jefuty to break through a URNC checkpoint. They appear again in Chapter 5-2 to help Jefuty's party hold the line against a massed UNRC assault. Evidently thirty years of service hasn't dulled their fighting strength, since they retain skills from their time in Griffin & Kryuger.
• Gun Accessories: Like in Girls' Frontline 2: Exilium, attachments dropped from slain enemies can be equipped to guns for various stat benefits.
• I Surrender, Suckers: Jefuty's game plan in the Bittersweet Ending is to let herself be captured by William once again so that she can sabotage the URNC's Shrikes from the inside-out, and hopefully sidetrack William's intent to awaken Relic sites.
• Me's a Crowd: By the end of the game, there's effectively four different versions of Jefuty: the mental time-traveling one we've followed who manages to finally make an Everybody Lives Ending, a more cynical and depressed version of herself from a Bad Future that was mentally inhabiting Lige throughout the game to try to change the past, a Shrike Progenitor clone of Jefuty named Lusica who is fully immune to Relic and Shrike consequences and became an Apocalypse Maiden who caused said bad future yet collaborated with the future Jefuty to prevent it from happening, and Lige herself is a "failure" alternative of Lusica thanks to Jefuty making timeline-altering decisions in regards to lying to William about specific details. And all of this confusing stuff comes before Lusica takes Lige's body back from the future Jefuty.
• Previously on…: Loading a saved game will trigger a short cutscene recapping the previously-completed chapter.
• Tranquilizer Dart: Soporific Darts inflicts Asleep on the target enemy, but can only be used when the unit isn't exposed.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: In the very original timeline that kicked off this entire mess, Jefuty was brought clones of herself by William to see if she could "feel anything" with them, in his attempts to create a "fully-immune" individual for his own purposes with all of Jefuty's benefits. In that very first timeline, she was honest enough to say yes to the clone that would become Lusica — who would proceed to become the Shrike Progenitor, and activate Relic sites across Earth as an Apocalypse Maiden, essentially destroying everything. When this same Jefuty was later armed with future knowledge of these events thanks to her abilities, combined with the clone mentally begging for help, she lied to William, resulting in his research on the subject folding, that clone instead becoming the failure known as Lige that Jefuty would take under her wing as a sister, and William instead resorting to the creation of Sugar as a separate, inferior attempt at the Shrike Progenitor, setting into motion the events of the game.
• Wham Episode: Going into Chapter 5 with the failed negotiation with Beria, Lige drops the big bombshell that she's actually a Jefuty in control of their sister's mind the entire time, trying to carefully manipulate events to prevent The End of the World as We Know It. In this path, with Mendo and the rest of the AU team dead, she ultimately makes an agreement with the main Jefuty for one last attempt to go back in time— with the added hitch that William's successful clone of Jefuty in the original timeline, named Lusica, is now seeking to take Lige's body — "her" body — back from the future Jefuty as part of an agreed deal many, many timelines ago.