Girl Café Gun is a real-time Action RPG gacha mobile game with Visual Novel and Dating Sim elements, developed by Chinese developer Seasun Inc. and published by Bilibili. It once had a previous version that was released by the developer back in 2016 and was shut down in 2020. First released in China's mainland on September 19th, 2019 on the iOS and September 21st on Android, shortly followed by publisher Marvelous on September 22nd, 2019 (however, the JP servers closed down on August 31st, 2021), then in Taiwan Province by Komoe Game on March 16th, 2020. A Korean release was published by BILIBILI HK for Korea on July 15th, 2020. The English release had a first version also published by BILIBILI HK on July 6th, 2021 on the App Store, with the second and official version released on September 9th, 2021.
The year is 20XX. Seven gigantic crystals that would each later come to be known as SOLOMON suddenly fell to Earth all around the world. These crystals, named "Ionus", polluted the environment around them into inhospitable wastelands within weeks and turned countless irradiated people into berserk monstrosities spreading Ionus until humanity was forced into fortified safe havens—that disaster is now known as the Outbreak. It was only afterwards that Ionus was found to be a mineral so advanced it sees everyday use in nearly all facets of present-day human society from currency to cutting-edge technology.
Of these havens, Princess Island is a Utopia supervised by Ro's Strategy Equipment (R.o.S.E.) Corp, guarded by elite soldiers called Battlefield Processors, and where the story starts a few years later after the Outbreak. You, the Manager, are one of its citizens who runs a café and leader of Battlefield Processor Squad 08 (all of whom are girls) that defends what is left of humanity and spearheads the effort to take back Earth from Ionus, and their source, the Alphas.
Gameplay primarily happens as a top-down Diablo-style Shoot 'Em Up, moving three girls at once through a Bullet Hell and activating skills tied to each girl, each with differing effects and Cooldown times after activation. The player is defeated when all three girls run out of health; the squad has a collective shield meter that takes damage before health and regenerates after a period of not taking damage, but health (which each girl has individually) does not unless you have healing skills for it. Combat is greatly affected by the player's squad preparation beforehand: there are a total twelve girls available to choose from (as of the current Global version there are fourteen with Nie Shirou and Aniya added, and two more coming in a later update), each having a variety of Character Cards (also called Dresses) earned through gacha that determine their element, skills, passive effects, and type of gun (which also have a gacha separate from Dresses) they use.
Here are their official page
and their wiki.
The game would later shut down on May 26, 2023, with the shutdown announcement coming around half a month after its official social media accounts announced it would no longer get any new updates.
The game contains the following tropes:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: As stated in the description above, the setting takes place on real-life Earth in the year 20XX where human society more or less would have been in The New '20s were it not for the Ionus Outbreak that happened a few years ago from present day, as evidenced by mentions of still-existing countries like North America and East Asia in the girls' Shared Moments and the Campaign story. Ironically, it is also because of Ionus that human technology makes a leap as we see In-Universe.
- Action Girl: Mandatory for every girl in the kind of setting the game takes place in. Squad 08 in particular is part of a military despite their individual quirks and, of course, are the playable characters.
- Action Prologue: As a new player, called "Manager" for some reason in-story, you get dumped straight into an attack on Princess Island—which would later be known as "Bloody Summer"—in progress, controlling two young girls with high-tech guns and suits fighting off strange crystalline monsters, amongst whom were humans covered in unknown purple crystals. Then you go up against a huge butterfly-shaped boss known as an Atala, which the girls whittle down, go after it by jumping on top of its crystal missiles and finish it off with a full-powered blast from their guns. Then in comes the Manager remotely controlling a flying platform to catch them safely. And this is just the first of many amazing battle sequences to come.
- An Adventurer Is You: Every character card is classed into one of five "Positions": Firepower, Assault, Defense, Support, and Medic, which determines the kind of skills they possess.
- Firepower, one of the two DPS-focused positions that emphasizes on damage and damage only, which gets better if the enemies gone into BREAK.
- Assault, the other of the DPS positions that is often accompanied by passive skills boosting Stagger damage. Like Firepower, their active skills boast high damage.
- Defense gives protective skills against attacks, their active skills including erasing bullets or creating physical barriers that block them, and passive skills that usually activate at the moment team members are attacked.
- Support presents options that are not always lethal and naturally mean to supplement their other party members, preferably damage dealers, which range from gathering enemies in one area, inflicting debuffs on targets, and buffing team members.
- Medic not only has active and passive skills that restore shields in a quick pinch, they are the only way of restoring HP.
- Affectionate Gesture to the Head: A significant feature in gameplay and story:
- You can pat a girl's head (chances are stored up to a maximum of 5 times, recovering 1 every hour) to increase their affection and recover their mood consumed for café work.
- The Manager does this a few times in the campaign story, giving the player a prompt to rub their head.
- You get secret dialogues and endings in Café Talk this way, depending on how far you've gotten talking with a girl.
- Alternate Timeline: The Fantasy Oathsnote are mysterious 'dreams' sent to the Manager (potentially from an Alternate Self, who says in the intro message, "To my dear self. -V."), putting the Manager in the shoes of another Manager in a world that followed a different set of events (usually peaceful compared to the original) and is intimate in some way with one of the girls.
- In gameplay, every Oath consists of six stages that each has you fulfill several tasks in the form of nodes arranged in a constellation that can take a week or two to complete, like spending a certain amount of Oath Materialsnote on nodes or setting the girl as your Main Screen Girl for 180 hours (it still counts even if you are offline thankfully). Doing so awards you with the Oath's unique card, a Party Dress, which is upgraded upon completing further stages of the Oath.
- Anime Theme Song: Firm Resolution by onoken, used as the title screen's theme. You can also see Character Signature Song below for the girls' individual songs.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Like in most of today's gacha-heavy games, the featured banner has a pity system that nets you a guaranteed UR-rarity Dress after every 50 pulls, while the normal banner carries over previous pulls for its own pity system.
- Once training sessions in the café's courtyard have finished, there is a button at the bottom left of the screen that recalls all girls at once, saving you the need to check them out one at a time. You are also given the option to have the same girls trained again.
- For players who left the game after a long while and return, there will be a week-long event that grants you resources on each day, and a list of goals that grants rewards to ease players back in.
- Chose an option from a Dialogue Tree in a story cutscene, but wanting to go back to try out all the other options? You can always return to the scene and press the skip button, which will skip straight past dialogue you've already seen but always stop at dialogue branches. Options you already chose have their boxes colored blue, so go for the white ones!
- In Café Talk:
- You can reset a dialogue storyline any time if you feel like doubling back or you made a wrong choice.
- A check mark bubble will hover over a girl to confirm you've finished getting all dialogue story endings of her.
- Applied Phlebotinum: Ionus. In spite of its dangers, many organizations such as R.o.S.E. and JUDAS use it in many applications, most notably O.T.E.. In the case of Yuki, Moon, and the Alphas, Ionus is used as a supernatural power. Chapter 13 however has Rococo remind everyone of the fact that it has only been a few years (five or less give or take), yet R.o.S.E. has become a leading figure in Ionus research and application—as if preparation for the day the Alphas of the Otherworld invades.
- Apocalypse How: Class 2. The campaign story gives us a first-hand look into the mainland, now a wasteland of ruined cities covered in Ionus crystals, the worst of them being concentrated around one of the seven giant SOLOMON crystals that were the first instances of Ionus on Earth. Any humans and animals without Ionus-resistant gear start to crystallize into Ionus, losing their minds and turning into feral monsters that have to be put down. The only known human settlement is a single city on the mainland, with no other prominent collective of humans other than Princess Island and some other places like I Kingdom being known anywhere else, much less the world.
- Arbitrary Equipment Restriction: Each card is only allowed to equip a single type of the five firearm classes available:
- Pistols allow the user to damage two targets at the same time.
- Auto Rifles have a high rate of fire that spread their bullets the farther away they travel. This can be beneficial if there is a skill that needs someone landing attaacks.
- Shotguns fire a spread of five shots that require getting up close for all shots to land on the same target, or backing up to hit more enemies.
- Sniper Rifles have a basic shot that pierces through enemies and travel farther than the other weapons, making them useful for damaging groups in a straight line.
- Grenade Launchers fire a projectile that spreads damage in an area upon landing.
- Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You can only bring three girls in a squad into battle, and there cannot be a multiple cards of the same girl, regardless of clothing. The restriction doesn't apply to Support Positions, but you can only slot in three cards into every card.
- Badass Adorable: Eksistere, Soshi, Aniya, and Kaanal to name a few examples.
- Battle Harem: You play as the Manager, leader of a military group full of girls that undoubtedly care for you.
- Bottomless Magazines: You could have your girls keep firing and never run out of ammo... well, they do reload after some period of firing, but there is ultimately no end to the bullets they could fire.
- Break Meter: Certain enemies termed 'Elite enemies', as well as bosses, have a blue bar under their health bar. When depleted, this gives them the Stagger state, during which they are paralyzed in place and receive more damage from your squad's attacks until they get back up after a few seconds.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: Naturally for a gacha game. You can find offers using real world money in the Shop's "Special Supplies".
- Cap:
- Each Character Card starts off having a base level cap of 40, which can undergo Limit Break each time to raise the cap by ten until they're Level 70. To upgrade their skills, they can go through Awakening until they reach twelve points by fusing card duplicates (gives three points) or Gestalt Trainers (which give one point)note .
- This upgrade system is mostly the same for Weapons which have their own upgrade materials, only that they can limit break until Level 80.
- Character Signature Song: The first twelve girls of Squad 08 each have their own song on the official wiki. Shirou, Aniya, Kaanal, and Yui eventually get theirs later.
- Costume Porn: The Character Cards you roll for. Each girl features at least over a dozen sets of cards (excepting the most recent members Shirou, Aniya, Kaanal, and Yui), which also unlocks a new appearance you can set for their sprites and café chibi models as well as new lines and changed backgrounds in certain cases.
- Darkest Hour: Campaign Chapter 12 qualifies. Princess Island, one of the last paradises on Earth, is invaded by the Allied Army and the Alphas. Squad 08 gets split up after the battle with Allocer, who survived, with the members dealing with problems on their own ends while they try to regroup at a pre-designated point: the café, where the Manager wakes up to two high-ranking Alphas attempting to convince him to join.
- Deflector Shields: Your squad has a collective shield meter in gameplay that takes damage before health, determined by the Dresses' shield stat; when fully depleted, this is shown by blue shards shattering across the screen. So long as you don't take damage after a few seconds whether or not it's depleted though, it'll regenerate.
- Die, Chair, Die!: There's plenty of breakable objects on the field, but aside from dropping the occasional Crystala, there isn't much point in shooting them when they'd get caught in the crossfire anyway.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: There are five Attributes that deal 50% more damage and take 50% less damage when matched against those they are effective against. The first three Attributes are effective against the next in this order: Biological > Psionic > Mechanical > Biological. The last two are Immune and Erosive, which deal more damage to each other but take no bonus damage from their own Attributes.
- They also come in colors: Biological = Red, Psionic = Green, Mechanical = Blue, Immune = Yellow, and Erosive = Purple.
- Fanservice Costumes: Quite a number of the character card arts have the girls in racy clothes and/or, ahem, compromising positions. This sometimes gets lampshaded and justified in their stories with them being from the Manager's point of view.
- Girls with Guns: The main draw of the game—heck, this trope is a word and no-'s's away from being a Title Drop—along with being a Science Fiction Dating Sim.
- Gotta Catch 'Em All: But not so much the girls as their offshoot character cards. All of Squad 08 eventually becomes playable as their lowest-rarity cards as you progress through the campaign, but higher-tier cards have to be rolled for in the gacha and are far more effective than their low-rarity counterparts (as long as you promote them) in gameplay. This is played straight in the case of the guns.
- Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Characters In-Universe will usually refer to you as "Manager" but will also sometimes address you by your inputted nickname.
- Hyperactive Sprite:
- Every named character, bar a few exceptions that later get updates, are live sprites with moving mouths for voiced dialogues. The girls of Squad 08 in particular have the most played-prompted actions, which is expected since players will be interacting with them the most.
- Further enticing players into obtaining 4-star Character Cards are some of them having animated, interactive art that replace the home screen entirely as opposed to other cards giving clothing only, such as New Year Wuxia doing a flower arrangement against the backdrop of the dawn sun, and Gingko Grainne lying down on a picnic blanket and smiling at you with gingko leaves around her. These particular cards are denoted with golden squares rising from the bottom of their cards.
- Improbably Female Cast: While there is a score of named male characters (including... maybe... Kiriko), the females well outnumber them. Squad 08 is all young women for one, with the exception of the Manager who is explicitly a young man.
- An Interior Designer Is You: The café, as well as two bedrooms and a backyard (although you can change only its exterior).
- Level-Up at Intimacy 5: When you manage your teams, each Character Card can have up to three Support Positions you unlock for every 10 Affection Levels of the girl featured on the card. These slots let you put in other cards to serve as Stat Sticks.
- Military Moe: Given the apocalyptic setting crawling with crystal monsters and superpowered invaders from another world, militaries like the Battlefield Processors are a necessity, so much that young and cute girls are recruited to them. Of course, you can get into romantic relationships with them.
- Mordor: The mainland for the most part is a wasteland mixed in with ruins of fallen cities, and what wildlife out there has mutated and became hostile from Ionus-induced Crystallosis.
- Multinational Team: The girls of Squad 08 all have different nationalities, which is listed only on the official wiki rather than in-game, but even without it being mentioned they clearly come from different races and cultures. For example, Irene carries a cross necklace, Wuxia, Wuyou, and Xiaozhen have Chinese names, and Nola is an alien, later including Kaanal and Yui (specifically a creation of the Alphas).
- No-Sell: Downplayed in gameplay; each Character Card has one of five elements that determine the one debuff they resist by a set percentagenote , although cards with the Sync feature can be upgraded for complete resistance. Cards of one element have a pool of debuffs they resist:
- Biological: Resists Slow, Poison, Freeze.
- Psionic: Resists Paralyze, Blind, and Burn.
- Mechanical: Resists Stun, Bleed, and Enfeeble.
- Immune: Resists Disease and Weaken.
- Erosive: Resists Immobilize and Silence.
- No Tech but High Tech: Downplayed; although R.o.S.E.—and Princess Island by extension—is the leading innovator of Ionus application in the entire world, this is concentrated in their Battlefield Processors in response to the threat of Crystalids and Alphas, as seen with their O.T.E., the highest-class firearms you can roll for, mecha, drones, computers, and so on, with the civilian sector being barely different from what you'd expect of a real-life developed city in the 21st century today. The Allied Army is second to R.o.S.E. in terms of technology, but the gap between them is high enough that it's a big reason why they invade Princess Island for their resources. This is justified by the fact that the Outbreak, along with the introduction of Ionus, happened a few years ago, which wouldn't have given much time for more Ionus-based technologies to emerge.
- Our Monsters Are Different: There are two types of Alphas: the mindless "low-order" species that are animalistic, and their human-looking "high-order" leaders, including the Four Swords of Grace and whatever higher-ups commanding them.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The Crystalids, which encompasses any biological life irradiated by Ionus fluctuations, start to grow purple crystals all over them in a process termed Crystallosis and mutate in some cases until their bodies are only vaguely human, automatically becoming feral and hostile to anyone else living. The ultimate end for them is to turn into Ionus crystals that also irradiate its immediate environs, which, as the Four Swords discuss in the campaign story, is what happened to those who died when the SOLOMON crystals first arrived, and the Ionus that Princess Island sources from.
- Outside-Context Problem: The event Non-anomalous Asylum gives us "Non-anomalous Entities", Eldritch Abominations that would fit right in SCP, Entities getting serial numbers and the Cleaners being The Men in Black equivalent (minus the Neuralyzers) and all. One feature of Entities is that any of them could take the form of literally anything, with two examples being a floating black hole and an amusement park; their defining feature is that as long as any one of them stays on Earth for enough time, their presence becomes accepted by people rationalizing their existence in spite of how alien they are.
- Play Every Day: There's always a default sign-in event that gives you a small gift the moment you log in, on top of another one if there's an ongoing in-game event.
- Polyamory: You can bond with as many girls as you want without the squad coming into conflict with each other over their relationship with the Manager. This gets lampshaded in-universe several times until it comes to a head in the New Year 2022 event, Festive Fortune, where the girls arrange for the Manager to wander around the festival grounds dating one girl at a time.
- Power Equals Rarity: Character cards come in four rarities from lowest to highest: Common (White), Rare (Blue), Super Rare (Purple), and Ultra Rare (Gold); cards have greater stats the higher the rarity, but conversely get more expensive to upgrade. This also applies to weapons and items.
- Private Military Contractors: R.o.S.E. sends out its Battlefield Processors, including Squad 08, on various missions that are not always limited to protecting Princess Island or retaking the mainland.
- Punch-Clock Villain: While the Four Swords of Grace act as the Greater-Scope Villain for most of the campaign's story, Leraje and Forneus in particular show up in a few event stories and mess around in mostly harmless ways. Then in the Born Shopaholic event story, Riina gets this treatment too in trying to harass Squad 08's girls, only to get ignored in favor of shopping and even have her baozi snack taken like she's thin air—not even fighting made the girls acknowledge her existence.
- Rare Candy:
- The Basic and Adv. Gestalt Trainers, the former of which upgrades 1- to 3-star character card skills, while the latter for 4-stars. Very handy for when you don't have duplicates.
- The Silver and Gold Rifles for Weapons. Like the Gestalt Trainers, they're for 1- to 3-star and 4-star weapons respectively.
- Red Baron: The Four Swords of Grace, who are made up of Leraje, Forneus, Allocer, and Riina.
- Regenerating Shield, Static Health: Each Character Card has two stats: Health and Shield. Your shields are the collective sum of your cards' shield stats, are the first to deplete when getting hit in battle, and eventually regenerate when left alone without taking damage; using Medic skills or picking up item drops from killing enemies can quickly/instantly recharge it by a set amount. Your health, however, is exclusive to each girl, does not regenerate after taking hits once your shields are down, and unless you have a Medic, you won't find any health pickups for recovery, permanently knocking out the girl should their bar hit '0'. The others who still have HP can still fight, but without their now-downed squadmates, you'll find yourself working with vastly reduced firepower.
- Relationship Values: Every girl in Squad 08 has Affection Levels, which can be raised by 1) headpatting them (you gain another chance every hour, up to a maximum of five times), 2) sending gifts, 3) having them train in the café's courtyard, 4) replying to them in your terminal, and 5) completing a daily request one of them has. This unlocks more of their profile (labeled "Bio") and Shared Moments, their own Fantasy Oaths, and more secondary card slots for each girl in team loadouts.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: Soshi Mizuki, an intelligent robot known as the Type-95 Torpedo that later obtained a humanoid body, and Aniya Jung, an AI-based android.
- Secret Art: Both the girls of Squad 08 and Elite enemies have them.
- Every Character Card has its own unique active skill tailored to the role they are in. What is consistent is that they only have one skill each, and they all have varying cooldowns before they can be used again.
- Shout-Out:
- The Achievements get in on this a lot:
- A series of achievements for raising your account level is called "Savior of the Century's End". Very fitting for a protagonist who's also fighting for humanity's sake in a desolate urban landscape.
- Collecting the Tactical Equipment cards of your first twelve girls gets you "Full Metal Jacket".
- Triggering a 10x bonus when exchanging Earth Coins for Crystala is "The Choice of Ionus Gate".
- During Eksistere's side story, "Long-range strike", she invites the Manager to play a flight sim game that's difficult for him because of its huge amount of controls and plane management, no different from real aircraft. This is because they really are controlling one Eksistere secretly arranged to fly to destroy a Structural Research Institute lab. The girl chides the Manager for thinking it'll be like Mobile Seat Gundam.
- One of Eksistere's Moments topics is wanting to play Monster Hanger with the Manager.
- The 2023 anniversary event has their roadblocks loaded with references taken from other games and popular media. One (described) example is that of a blue crystal standing in your way accompanied by the words "Hear... feel... think..."
- The Achievements get in on this a lot:
- Status Effects: Besides the simple girl-exclusive buffs that include boosts to health, attack, health regeneration and so on, debuffs can universally happen to both the girls and their enemies. These can be countered by having passive skills that grant resistance to specified debuffs. Notably, each Character Card resists one type of debuff that applies only to the individual, not the entire team, unless they say otherwise (cards with the Sync feature often have this when it's upgraded).
- Burn, Bleed, and Poison are Damage Over Time effects that prioritize shields with their individual flavors, so they are highlighted purple, not red like the other debuffs.
- Freeze, Stun, and Paralyze all force the target to stop moving or attacking.
- Blind causes attacks to have a 50% chance of missing.
- Disease stops HP or shield recovery.
- Enfeeble increases damage taken by 50%.
- Immobilize prevents movement, but still allows for attacking.
- Silence stops the afflicted from attacking or using skills, though unlike Freeze, Stun, and Paralyze, it does not stop movement.
- Slow reduces movement speed by 50%.
- Weaken reduces attacks by 50%, though it does not affect fatal (elemental weakness) damage.
- Stylish Protection Gear: Ionus Tactical Equipment, or O.T.E. as they're referred to in-universe. If anything, it's easier to count what clothes would look fit for combat over the rest that qualify more for an Unlimited Wardrobe. The latter case is justified by the Manager's Ionus-insulating power and the dresses being high-tech O.T.E. too, thus allowing the girls to stay protected from Crystallosis either way.
- Super-Deformed: Girls in the café (plus No. 7 manning the register) take on little downsized forms in addition to the customers they serve there. They also have chibi-fied portraits in their management screen.
- Take Cover!: The Archon boss enemy has an attack where it hails down Ionus crystals, which you have to take cover from by hiding behind a barrier of crystals left over from one of its attacks.
- Transformation Sequence: Whenever the girls' clothes are changed, they glow pink, showing their body outline before their new clothes appear over them in a flash. Seeing as O.T.E. can be instantly materialized over the user this way, as seen during the game's prologue, this is likely why the transformation is flashy.
- Urban Fantasy: Besides the Apocalypse How, most of the story takes place on Princess Island and the Ionus-radiated ruins of the mainland, where humans have advanced themselves through utilizing Ionus and Ionus-enhanced individuals using Psychic Powers become prominent throughout the story. Later after Squad 08 leaves Princess Island in Chapter 13, they take up shop in S City in the next chapter.
- Video Game Dashing: In gameplay, there is a joystick next to the movement button that allows the girls to dash in the direction it is dragged in (or where the girls are faced if only pressed), avoiding damage during the dash. However, it only stocks up three chances at once, and one chance can only be regenerated after 6 seconds.
- Visual Novel:
- The storytelling uses this format, with some multiple dialogues that the player can choose from to elicit different trains of dialogue or reactions from characters, but are otherwise linear plot-wise.
- The event Doki Doki Wonderland is all about this, where the Manager is the protagonist trapped in a game simulation in virtual reality he was beta testing, sussing out bugs the Alphas may have left, trying to find the one responsible and interacting with the girls now roleplaying as the typical archetypes (if played to the extreme as typical of the girls) seen in classic dating sims.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The game has several moments where characters argue over this especially when it comes to the Ionus-related races, such as the Brains-in-Jars in the campaign story or Irene protesting the overly cruel way humans put down Alphas.It is widely agreed that "Crystallids are not humans." Therefore, killing the Crystallids is not regarded as murder.— Loading screen quote
