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The shining beacon in a brave new world
"Shoujo Sensen!"

Girls' Frontline (Simplified: 少女前线; Traditional: 少女前線; Chinese: Shàonǚ Qiánxiàn; Japanese: ドールズフロントライン (Dolls' Frontline)'') is a free-to-play Chinese mobile Strategy RPG for Android and iOS.

The year is 2030. A series of events known as "Beilan Island Incident" caused a worldwide spread of Collapse Fluid, a highly radioactive substance that mutates humans exposed to it, with lethal consequences. Cities were devastated as casualties mounted. Entire populations were forced to relocate or die trying. Borders had to be redrawn in order to accommodate the resources and habitable spaces that were left untouched. Friction between surviving nations reached an all time high, until eventually World War III broke out.

In the embers of the third World War, humanity began to rebuild itself. Development of robotics and AI technology during the war gave rise to Autonomous Dolls, androids with superior physical abilities to a normal human and capable of emulating emotions. In a time where manpower is scarce, they were quickly deployed in almost all corners of life, from simple housemaids to factory workers — and, of course, as soldiers.

With nations lacking enough military presence to secure their own borders, Private Military Contractors began to proliferate. Utilizing Tactical Dolls, essentially Dolls with combat software installed, these mercenary companies are tasked to defend and pacify outlying regions of the state. One T-Doll manufacturer, Sangvis Ferri Industrial Manufacturing Company, Ltd., rose to prominence during WWIII due to their cheap, but effective dolls, and soon became one of the leading Doll companies in the world. At least, until their AI took over their robotic forces, slaughtering the entire human staff and waging war against the rest of humanity.

Fast forward to 2062, you are a newly-minted Commander of the Griffin & Kryuger Security Firm, tasked to manage G&K T-Dolls and defend areas from Sangvis Ferri incursions. Battles take place in a turn-based manner. Victory can be achieved by maneuvering your T-Doll echelons to capture the enemy HQ (though additional objective types have been added with later updates). Once one of your echelons encounter an enemy, the game switches into a real-time view where you can adjust your T-Dolls' position and manage their skills. Micromanagement becomes more important as enemies become tougher and more numerous. Each T-Doll also have unique skills and can strengthen other dolls with various effects, making team composition important for optimal play.

Developed by Mica Team and published by SUNBORN Network Technologies, the game is currently available in Simplified Chinese, Korean, English, and Japanese (the latter as Dolls' Frontline). However, all versions have Japanese-language voices.

During the game's fourth anniversary, MICA Team announced four titles set in the same universe:

  • Girls' Frontline 2: Exilium — A direct sequel to Girls' Frontline featuring full 3D graphics and Turn-Based Tactics gameplay in the vein of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Taking place ten years after Girls' Frontline, the Commander finds themselves embroiled in another conspiracy after a transport mission goes awry.
  • Girls' Frontline: Neural Cloud — An auto chess spin-off with Roguelike elements.
  • Girls' Frontline: Glitch Land — A pixel sprite fangame given official blessing by MICA with 416 as the main character. Shelved as of February 2022.
  • Reverse Collapse: Codename Bakery — A remake of Codename: Bakery Girl.

A hub for the aforementioned titles can be found here.

An official manga adaption which publish new chapters monthly on the 23rd can be read here on Chinese video sharing site Bilibili. The manga is also available in Japanese and published monthly by Comic Rex.

An anime adaptation, co-produced by Warner Bros. Japan and animated by Asahi Production, has aired in Japan starting January 7, 2022. View the trailer here.

Compare Kantai Collection and Azur Lane, both free-to-play games that also feature anthromorphized versions of military technology (in this case, ships). See also Codename Bakery Girl, MICA Team's previous game, and Arknights, which is developed by former MICA Team staff members.

Visit the official English website here

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This game provides examples of:

     A - D 
  • Ace Custom: Certain T-Dolls possess unique equipment that provide hefty boosts to their performance that no generic gear could match. These are usually gained from special map drops, or are up for exchange during certain events. Whether they're actually useful or not depends greatly on the item, however, as explained under Awesome, but Impractical.
  • Actually Four Mooks/Party in My Pocket: Much like the Nintendo Wars series, each "unit" is really a literal military unit comprised of up to 25 T-Dolls on the player's side and possibly twice as many for the enemy, represented only by their leading T-Doll on the battle map.
  • Adaptation Expansion: The manga gives more detail about the world of Girls' Frontline and how T-Dolls fight. In both the official manga and manga anthology, we also get to see the Commander and how they look when in-game they are usually an unseen, featureless protagonist.
  • All There in the Manual: Lore books released separately from the game explain much of the background history that led up to the events of the game. While the discovery of Relics was a diverging point from our own history, historical events such as both World Wars, the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union played out similarly to real history. The biggest diverging point is the Belian Island Incident, a catastrophic disaster when a massive reservoir of highly radioactive Collapse Fluid detonate, irradiating a huge portion of the Earth. This also caused Bolshevik elements within the Russian Federation to stage a coup and revive the New Soviet Union. Two subsequent Collapse Fluid disasters served as the catalyst for World War III, where Germany once again split in half between East and West. Humanity is now barely clinging on to what few habitable areas are left while trying to rebuild civilization.
  • Alternate History: The premise of the game is set in an AU where the Russian Empire discovered Precursor relics in Europe during the 20th century, that fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution, and later the Soviet Union. Complications of the Cold War resulted in a massive ELID outbreak that forced several nations to band together to survive. One such coalition being the New Soviet Union, which Griffin & Kryuger is technically a branch of, due to Bezerovich Kryuger being a member of its Ministry of Internal Affairs.
    • There was also extensive research into alien technology, which led into alien-derived weapons being tested by the US in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan. One of those tech was the OGAS system. In real life, it was a cancelled nationwide information network project similar to the internet. In Girls' Frontline, it was developed from a Precursor artificial intelligence and becomes a key to decipher their technology.
    • Isomer indicates that Germany didn't unify in 1990, as Gilda Ulrich, Chairwoman of the Pan-European Cooperation Initiative's Executive Committee, was described as having been born in West Germany in 2029. Polarized Light also reveals that K was aligned with The Stasi. Doesn't quite explain the presence of post-reunification and post-Warsaw Pact NATO weapons in the game, however.
      • Lore books reveal that the Soviet Union did eventually collapse in the 1990s like in real history, resulting in the reunification of Germany. However, in the wake of the Beilan Island Incident and several similar disasters, Germany became divided over the issue of invading Africa for desperately needed resources, or trying to restore irradiated territory. The divisions became so intense that Germany split into East and West again.
  • Alternate Universe: The VA-11 HALL-A crossover is set in two different Alternate Universes. The bartending segment is set in the VA-11 HALL-A universe in the year 2070: the Beilan Island Incident never happened, but T-Dolls still exist (and are treated as a different take on android technology than the Lilim), Griffin's war with Sangvis Ferri, KCCO and :Paradeus still happened, and the narrative takes place following the events of VA-11 HALL-A itself. The Griffin PMC of the VH universe are hired by Zaibatsu Corporation as Glitch City's new private police and security force after the city's previous police force, the White Knights, were disbanded after the group was revealed to be corrupt and working with the Mob (as per one of VH's subplots). The crossover storyline segment, which is a fusion of VH and Girls' Frontline, takes places in the far future of the year 3000 where the remnants of humanity now live in Griffin City after a man made disaster led to Earth becoming a desert wasteland. Where you... beat people up with French baguettes, the sky rains sand, and Dorothy Haze is Prime Minister. Needless to say, there's more going on here, and the two narratives are not unrelated.
  • Alpha Strike: MG/SG echelons are more often than not this. Either you wipe out the enemy with overwhelming dakka before you run out of ammo, or watch the survivors of your assault chip away at the health and armor of your SG tank(s) as you slowly reload, during which time you can't move. It's for this reason that these echelons, while grossly powerful, are not very viable against certain bosses.
  • Always Accurate Attack: In a sense. While thrown/launched explosives are in most cases aimed at random, and can result in the projectile/throwable landing somewhere that's less than optimal, they ignore the evasion stat of any units within their blast radius. This makes SMG dolls with the Incendiary Grenade skill exceptionally good at wiping out Scouts and other hard-to-hit enemies. Conversely, this also apply to enemy units.
    • Fairies with offensive capabilities will always hit their marks when their attacks connect, and are not affected by map conditions.
    • Averted with Hanyang Type 88's thrown bundle charge in her Mod 2 and Mod 3 guises. It is thus far the only throwable/launchable that is subject to evasion checks.
  • ...And 99¢: T-Doll skin packs are infamous for this. If they are not sold for real money, the gem costs of skin packs are almost never rounded up or down to manageable amounts, and always end in 8, thus leaving the player with a tiny amount of change that they can do nothing with.
  • And Now for Someone Completely Different: Most of Longitudinal Strain is told from the perspective of A-Dolls (civilian dolls) that have no combat experience and T-Dolls that are unaffiliated with Griffin and uninvolved in the Griffin/Sangvis Ferri/KCCO/Paradeus conflict. While there is a connection to the main story (Lyudmilla is secretly transporting a program known as the Archduke system and Griffin is the group who will retrieve it, while Paradeus is trying to steal it), the majority of the focus characters are in the dark about this until the final stages of the event.
  • The Anime of the Game: The Healing Chapter, a series of ONA shorts which began its run in July 2019. There's also Madness Chapter, which adapts some of AC130 and MADCORE's comic strips. A proper adaptation of the game aired beginning January 7, 2022.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • Players can obtain a T-Doll that they previously acquired, but currently own zero copies of, by going into said T-Doll's Index entry and tapping the "Recover" button, which gives them a new copy for the same number of cores it would normally take to Dummy Link her once, ensuring that no unlocked Doll can be rendered Permanently Missable Content, accidental or otherwise. This even extends to timed-exclusive T-Dolls and especially the four members of the Anti-Rain squad and RO635, who the game states repeatedly cannot be reacquired otherwise.
      • The catch is that one cannot use the system to acquire T-Dolls they haven't actually collected at least once before, regardless of rarity, so missed limited drops or event prizes are still lost unless stated otherwise. Furthermore, only one T-Doll may be recovered per week, and that the recovered unit will need to be releveled and retrained from scratch.
    • The game itself provides an option for T-Dolls to automatically retreat from battle once their health drops down below a certain threshold, though not during Boss battles. Even then, T-Dolls dying on boss nodes will not lose affection. An echelon with wounded T-Doll(s) will be marked with a "critically-damaged" pop-up on the battle map, letting the player know not to risk taking them to another fight.
    • A past update introduced the ability to "Smart Select" 2-star T-Dolls and equipment for either enhancement or dismantling, so that players don't have to manually pick every single fodder unit they want to use while also providing a safeguard against accidentally throwing away 3-star-or-higher materials.
    • An enemy command center can be captured instantly as soon as the turn ends and a friendly echelon is sitting on it, whether or not it's surrounded by other nodes that would deny it otherwise. Furthermore, since capturing by surrounding is turn-based and players move first, it's almost always a guaranteed victory if you could seize the points around an enemy Command node, even if they are doing the same to yours.
    • Drops that are obtained for the first time, like unique equipment from night battles or T-Dolls, are unable to have their Item Get! screen skipped. This is so players don't accidentally gloss over things they may have been farming for. After the addition of Planning Mode (see below), the game also pauses the current plan when a rare drop occurs. A similar mechanic is also present for when high rarity T-Dolls are obtained from production.
    • An update released about a month before the Deep Dive event reworked Planning Mode so that players could plan over multiple turns and pathing through an allied echelon automatically switched them around. It's not without its kinks, however - players can't end a turn with Action Points to spare in Planning Mode, making some plans somewhat awkward to implement (Chapter 0-2 in particular requires wasting AP or deploying a second echelon on turn 1 instead of before starting). The same update also made Auto Battle more lucrative for leveling up and/or farming T-Dolls and equipment, as well as allowing up to 3 repeats of Auto Battle on the same map. Commanders with cash to spare can also buy an Auto Battle Monthly Card that increases the limit to 5 repeats and reduces the number of echelons required from 2 to 1.
    • The October 22, 2019 client update came with a new dormitory facility for Expeditions called the Forward Basecamp. As a translated developer comment from Yu Zhong puts it, Expeditions are "basically a new way of giving players free stuff", with Expedition results offering a small, random assortment of basically everything in the game - production contracts, batteries, training data, memory fragments, high rank equipment, etc. Expedition rewards also include "General Use Parts", which are essentially Enhancement Capsules for equipment, easing the need to farm low rank equipment for enhancement fodder. Lastly, the Forward Basecamp's Black Market allows players to buy more specific rewards through the use of Expedition-exclusive currency. To top it all off, Expeditions can be automated so that the Expedition echelon deploys itself three hours after returning from the last one.
    • The global version's Continuum Turbulence event had two; backtracking to a branching story path didn't penalize the player like in the original Chinese version, and the ranking map was unlocked after chapter 2 instead of chapter 3 as in past events, making it easier for players who don't care about the ranking map in the first place to walk in and forfeit for the free gems.
    • The Protocol Assimilation update introduced the ability for players to form Coalitions comprised of reprogrammed Sangvis Ferri units. Unfortunately, said feature requires players to toggle an Echelon into a Coalition, which can impact the player's overall unit composition (Echelon and Coalition units cannot mix). Coalitions also require a dorm, unlike their G&K counterparts. To alleviate this, the shop also introduced the ability to buy up to 14 Echelon slots and dorms.
    • Starting with the White Day 2020 event, players obtain Nova Medals and Platinum Medals when they fail to obtain a 4★ or 5★ limited drop, respectively, at the end of a battle or when S-ranking a map that can possibly drop either. These can then be exchanged in the event shop for at least one guaranteed limited drop T-Doll, providing a safety net for extremely unlucky players (though this requires 500 medals for one T-Doll, requiring hundreds of runs without getting the doll in question depending on how many enemies drop them). Some event also provide more medals per battle won for the harder stages, providing a faster alternative for farming them for the really geared echelons.
    • T-Dolls with skills that function differently (like UMP40's once-per-battle permanent damage buff or C-MS's Stance System) come with their individual Auto-Skill option already toggled off for them.
    • The September 2020 client update added a slew of quality of life changes. Enemies have more accessible information (enemy formation preview, AI behavior indicator), dailies and weeklies were reworked to be less tedious, an "Auto Formation" button was added to help new players form teams, buttons to quickly enhance or remove equipment items were added, and Equipment Production got a "Special Orders" feature which guarantees equipment of the player's choice for the first 20 items per week. Last, but not least, Target Practice was added to Combat Simulations, giving players a risk-free way to hold a mock battle against specific enemy formations, including time-limited event formations for enemies scheduled to appear in future events. The April 2021 client update later expanded upon this by allowing players to save up to any 20 enemy formations encountered in battle, making the feature even more useful.
    • All events after Deep Dive have separate "missions" that show only a related mission's opening or closing cutscenes, requiring little to no effort on the player's part (e.g. via Zero-Effort Boss or Absurdly Short Level). This addresses a few annoyances in past events; namely, mission opening cutscenes played every time on a restart for the first playthrough, and missions didn't count as being completed until the end of the mission's closing cutscene (which may be several minutes' worth of reading).
    • Starting from Dual Randomness, events have "infinity maps" which can be easily cleared in one turn, providing players with a convenient place to farm event currency and limited drops. The catch is that players still need to beat the chapter/event in the first place.
  • Apocalypse How: Class 1: Societal Disruption. The Beilan Island Incident caused widespread devastation in mainland China, with 400 million people dead by the first hour. This isn't helped by two subsequent incidents in Utah and Scandinavia which devastate the Americas and Europe as well. Many countries are overwhelmed by the influx of refugees or have their own land contaminated by Collapse Radiation (mostly both). The only ones who remains relatively unscathed throughout all this are African countries, and even they suffer when European countries descend into colonialism once more.
  • April Fools:
    • Starting with April Fools' 2017, Five-Seven turns into a walking version of FAL's mink pet, with its own chubby walking and shooting animations. Five-Seven and FAL are drawn by the same artist.
    • On April Fools' 2018, Mosin gets an update where she rides into battle on a horse in her in-game sprite.
    • April Fools' 2019 has RO635 get in on the action, but what she turns into spoils the events of Operation Continuum Turbulence and Chapter 11 for the EN and JP servers. She turns into her Dinergate form.
    • 2019 had a fake announcement for a movie called Shounen Frontline. Also, the English version's Twitter page had a fake announcement to add Berezovitch Kryuger as a Purposely Overpowered "T-Doll" with muscle-related skills.
    • 2020 had, on top of the other yearly shenanigans, tabby cat Kalina and underwater guns SPP-1 and ADS fire paintballs at their opponents. The official Twitter also had an announcement for a fake Dating Sim called "Dokyun Dokyun Griffin Club".
    • 2021's April Fools' Day gag decked Hanyang Type 88 in Gundam-esque Powered Armor among the aforementioned costume swaps as a nod to her MOD III look. DEFY members were turned into dogs. Players also received an in-game e-mail from the Bounty Feast NPC Dima, tying into a Chinese version announcement for playable Dima on April 31st, 2021.note  A work-in-progress victory animation was even shown to make it look more convincing.
  • Arbitrary Equipment Restriction:
    • Fairies aren't usable in any type of combat simulation. The reason for this is never given to the player, but the restriction's probably there to prevent players from cheesing simulations that are way harder than their gear and levels would allow, especially in defense drills.
    • There really is no explanation as to how some equipment are exclusive to certain T-Dolls and not others who should be compatible with them in reality. While more specialized mods such as M3's suppressed OSS barrel or the UMP trio's fire control chips could be forgiven, as they were made specifically to fit such weapons, there's no justification in the case of the more general ones, such as HK416's EOT XPS3 that should fit any firearm with picatinny rails, or AK-47's KST scopes, which should fit any other AK derivative in the game, but don't, or 7N9 SPP and SP-5 rounds, which are compatible with any firearm chambered for 9x39mm, but are in-game exclusive to the OTs-12 and AS Val respectively.
    • Coalition-specific Combat Simulations restrict the player to using a randomized selection of T-Dolls to form an Echelon with. On one hand, this may be fairly limiting for veteran players, depending on who's in the selection. On the other hand, all of these T-Dolls have their levels, stats and skills all maxed, making it easier on newer players who just unlocked Coalitions and don't own strong T-Dolls to begin with. The materials gained from Coalition Combat Simulations and the Sim Energy required to run it are also separate from their non-Coalition counterparts despite being functionally identical, meaning everyone has to start from scratch.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Despite the mounting threat and the fact that even the unluckiest of Commanders should have more than four dozen T-Dolls lying around at their disposal, they are always limited to effectively five units at most at any given time in an echelon (Dummies notwithstanding, which can boost the count to 25 units), and missions typically enforce a four-team (or less) cap, especially during events.
  • Arbitrary Gun Power: Damage seems to be decided based on a given T-Doll's class and rarity instead of the real caliber of her weapon. This leads to oddities such as the G3 (2* AR) dealing damage about half that of the M1 Carbine (3* RF), despite the former's 7.62x51mm cartridge being more powerful overall in reality than the latter's .30 Carbine. On the flip side of the coin, damage values between members of the same class are usually consistent within their caliber groups regardless of rarity, such that for instance the two-star G3, when properly leveled and equipped, can usually keep pace with the five-star FAL. Usually.
  • Armor-Piercing Attack: ARs, RFs and MGs can be equipped with armor piercing rounds, or may come with active skills that circumvent armor. Otherwise, their attacks will do single digit damage against armored targets.
    • On the other end of the board, certain Sangvis Ferri bosses and heavies will shred through armor with their weapons, dealing full or close-to-full damage to any hapless SG standing in their way. Typically these will have explosive-based attacks (e.g. Destroyer), though there are exceptions.
  • Artistic License – Geography: The game is not exactly consistent in regards to where it takes place. You fight in all sort of places like snowy mountains, deserts, and tropical forests, but the in-game story implies that these zones are relatively close to each other. However, later game contents and major operation events heavily implies that this all takes place within Russia and its neighbors. Chapter 11 onwards are more specific in their setting and only feature terrain that would logically appear there, averting this trope.
  • Artistic License – Gun Safety:
    • Quite a number of T-Dolls twirl or generally mess with their weapons in their victory animations. UMP45 and ART-556 take the cake, though. The latter, in her 2018 Chinese New Year outfit, balances her weapon by its barrel on the palm of her hand, while the former, in her regular outfit, balances hers' by its stock on her index finger!!.
    • In fact, most long-gun T-Dollsnote  handle their firearms with reckless abandon.
      • Due to the chibi proportions leading to short and chubby arms, RF/AR T-Dollsnote  rest the stock of their rifles on their shoulders, instead of bracing the gun against it. Only shorter rifles (like FAMAS) or sprites where the rifle is scaled down too (like the FNC) are depicted as using proper rifle stance.
      • Following the trend, SMG and certain SG T-Dolls don't even bother with shouldering their firearms, and are depicted as hipfiring with the stock riding on the outside of their arms instead of inside, which would result in very awkward handling in reality. Averted with STEN Mk. III and Spectre M4.
      • Winchester M1887 is an especially flagrant example of this: Her attack animation is a direct Shout-Out to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which features her flip-cocking her shotgun after every shot. However, the shotgun itself has a normal-sized lever loop, which would twist against and crush the fingers of the shooter when a flip-cock is attempted, which almost happened to Arnold Schwarzenegger himself during filming when he grabbed the wrong prop before a flip-cocking scene.
      • Averted for the most part with the MG T-Dolls who typically behave the most sensibly among the cast by either going prone to lay down suppressing fire, deploying mounts, or both. Played straight, however, with BAR M1918 (who uses AR animations), M60 (who channels her inner Rambo by firing her machinegun while standing upright and cradling the ammo belt in her off-hand) and Chauchat (who empties her whole clip by firing from the hip).
    • Downplayed with HG T-Dolls, who mostly operate sensibly by adopting a proper Weaver stance. Or try to and ending up in an unsafe "teacupping" stance instead. However a select few firmly adhere to the principle of "one-handed no-aim firing".
    • One of ST AR-15's MOD 3 Live2D animations has her pointing one of her rifles at the camera. If this isn't bad enough, she actually pulls the trigger a second later.
  • Artistic License – Military:
    • There are some pretty weird classifications in the game:
      • Several carbines or short-barreled rifles are categorized as SMGs for "balancing reasons", most notably SR3-MP and G36C. This comes despite many of their variants being considered full-fledged ARs by the game.
      • FG42 is, for all intents and purposes, a paratrooper-pattern AR rather than a true MG.
      • Calling 6P62 an AR is a bit of a stretch. Practically, it's a magazine-fed heavy machine gun. Going by the intermediate cartridge aspect of the assault rifle definition, the caliber is way, way, way too big to be considered intermediate. The only part of it that can be defined loosely as "assault rifle" is that it was apparently designed for assaulting enemy vehicles.
    • While this does not affect gameplay, M14 refers to herself as a "civilian weapon" and the artbook also takes pains to point out her "civilian appearance." This is absolutely false: though it holds the dubious distinction as the US Armed Forces' shortest-lived standard-issue rifle (from 1959 to 1964 as standard and from then until 1970 as a "limited standard", i.e. still in use by those waiting to replace it with M16s after that was adopted), the M14 was designed from the ground-up as a military rifle. For a game that has done plenty of research into the guns, this is a glaring oversight. It would be accurate if they meant the Mini-14, which is indeed a civilian rifle designed by Bill Ruger & Jim Sullivan as a scaled-down M14, or even the M1A, which is another civilian rifle originally converted from surplus M14s. However, the fact that M14 is placed after M1 Garand and before M21 in the artbook, and that she has one of the highest rates of fire in her class - echoing the M14's infamously difficult-to-control full auto ability - are strong indicators the game's designers really do mean they're talking about the original M14, not the M1A or Mini-14. However, nobody seems to have told her artist, Rain Lan, of this fact, because her rifle in both original and MOD3 guise is clearly an M1A, as evidenced by the complete absence of a selector switch, as well as the absence of a hole on the receiver where the rod for the now-missing switch would've slotted into.
    • Skorpion vz.61 received her unique equipment in early 2020 in the form of RIP rounds. However, the specific caliber of RIP rounds is listed as .380 ACP, along with a straight magazine in the artwork, which would be correct for the vz.83 (.380 ACP variant, and uses straight magazines) rather than her .32 ACP vz.61, for which there are no RIP rounds available.
  • Ascended Glitch: In development, there was a bug that caused MG3 to fire indefinitely, circumventing the major limiting factor her weapon type is supposed to have. This was fixed before release, but to commemorate it the devs later added a unique piece of equipment for MG3, the Infinite Ammo Box, which increases her ammo capacity and has a description saying most of them were confiscated "by a certain mysterious authority".
  • Ascended Meme:
    • IDW's acquisition dialoguenote  has spawned several memes among the fanbase. Cue August 2017's Password Card Event, one of the password card missions for the bingo board is titled "IDW Da Meow!".
    • Episode 10 of Madness Chapter makes a nod to MP5's status as a Com Mon in Heavy Production (or, at least, the player base's perception as such). A brief scene shows a friend card bearing Saru's name on it (MP5's artist), with the description reading "May all your Heavy Productions be MP5!".
    • 6P62's joke status as Yuzhong's (Team Mica's producer and co-founder) Creator's Pet has been acknowledged twice now, with one of the Game Department dorm set pieces showing her locked up in an office-turned-prison and her being the sole member of the team assigned to the HQ Intelligence Center, described as "a vault of Griffin's most valuable asset".
  • Attack Drone: Fairies. While they fit the "drone" part in that they're literally military drones that project a hologram of a Super-Deformed girl, most of them are more along the lines of a Support Party Member and only a handful of them have any direct attacks (e.g. the Sniper Fairy).
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • MG T-Dolls can be this since they need SG teammates to be truly effective. They also represent the largest ammo sinks in the game due to the sheer volume of their firepower.
      • On that same note, an MG/SG echelon setup is probably the closest thing to a straight-up deathball in Girls Frontline, being capable of frightening DPS and the hitpoints to back that up, essentially allowing them to just steamroll over most mobs with ease. However they also chew up resources like nobody's business, especially Ammo. Unless your economy is superb, overuse of these echelons is a great way to go bankrupt, especially if there are two or more MGs included.
    • "Bamboo" RF Dolls fall squarely into this category as of the current meta for a variety of reasons.
      • These RFs are usually plagued by low rate of fire, thus limiting their DPS potential.
      • It also doesn't help that their skills typically have long cooldowns, and even when they are usable, they would still require a rather lengthy "warm-up" time before they can let loose, during which they cannot move or attack, therefore putting a large dent in the fireteam's already average DPS, on top of leaving them wide open to enemy nukers. Many are also even worse in that they have to charge for several seconds even once the skill is available to get the most damage out of it, wasting several more seconds in which other doll types can simply put out a more reasonable amount of damage normally.
      • Additionally, since there are not that many enemies with hitpoints mandating the use of heavy firepower in the game at the moment (and those that do are often dealt with using Fire Support Echelons), their excessive damage per shot is pretty much wasted.
    • The main shtick of Shield-type SMGs is high HP and temporary invulnerability at the cost of poor evasion. While they make effective tanks at earlier levels and during normal play, they don't hold up well when fighting certain event bosses due to their Shields' lengthy cooldown making them sitting ducks once they're down. Later maps where KCCO enemies make their appearance also stomp their utility to the ground with row-wide attacks and/or additional gimmicks that bite the SMG T-Dolls hard once their shields are down.
      • This can be slightly mitigated by stacking up an additional shield during the initial cooldown via the Shield Fairy, which protects every SMG T-Doll in the echelon, though only for 150 damage each. And most event bosses and KCCO heavy hitters don't just attack for 150 damage per salvo, either.
    • The Stun Grenade skill for certain T-Dolls has now become this. Despite being able to completely halt enemies from moving and/or attacking for the duration of the effects, Stun Grenades have long cooldown and a significant wind-up period after activation before enemies are incapacitated. Furthermore, they no longer work on bosses, whereas Smoke Grenades still do, making them vastly inferior utility-wise.
    • M16A1's ability to equip armor plates as well as her Stun Grenade skill makes her an excellent frontline tank... at earlier levels, or an invaluable... "component" in corpse-dragging. As Stun Grenade no longer works on bosses, she has no real utility when fighting them. On top of this, despite being able to equip both armor plates and exoskeletons, she neither has base Armor stats to truly shine as an effective armor tank, nor is she sturdy enough to fully replace an SMG on harder maps, thus putting her in an awkward position during the late game.
    • Cloaks are this for RF T-Dolls. While they confer a huge boost to critical damage, they also turn the wearers into Mighty Glaciers due to their movement speed debuff, making them very susceptible to attacks that target or could hit the backline. When fighting bosses, especially event ones that have special gimmicks which forces constant reshuffling of your echelon, putting cloaks on your RFs is just plain bad for their survivability.
    • Unique gear items. They usually possess increased and/or additional stats compared to a generic item of the same kind, though most players consider them to be highly impractical. With few exceptions, such as those of MOD3 AR team members, unique gear are usually frowned upon, due to the stat bonuses usually not being all that impressive for their cost, since they require triple the amount of fodder and resources to enhance compared to craftable ones. That, and some custom equipment do require a lot of calibration themselves before they can be used, as well.
    • Using Heavy Ordnance Corps for anything other than countering the White Faction's force shields can fall under this. Bombarding enemies to smithereens using DPS HOCs sounds neat on paper, but they require insane amounts of several different types of resourcesnote  before any of them even begin to have respectable damage. Even then, they're bigger ammo and ration hogs than even MG T-Dolls, and their generally slow rate of fire means that strong T-Dolls will likely destroy an unshielded target faster than an HOC can.
    • While Coalitions are generally versatile and way stronger than similarly-leveled T-Dolls, they're about as hard to acquire and upgrade as Heavy Ordnance Corps and their power is often lost on standard maps. As a result, they're more likely to be shelved until either Theater or Ranking Map events, where their power and extremely high resource cost is more justified.
  • Background Music Override:
  • Badass Adorable: Several T-Dolls are cute and adorable, as Kalina even states, and at the same time can kick ass.
  • Badass Biker: The Prince's Frontline procurement event features costumes for AEK-999 and PzB 39 that give them kickass bikes. The official artbook also shows an elite Sangvis Ferri unit called Beak who rides an armed motorcycle, who makes her official debut in Operation Isomer.
  • Badass Cape: Available as an equipment for your RFs. They increase critical hit chance but decrease movement speed. High tier capes are described as camouflaged, culminating with a thermoptic camouflage as the top-tier offering.
  • Badass Crew: Anti-Rain Squad, 404 Squad and Team DEFY. The first is a group of custom T-Dolls made by 16Labs itself, based on AR-15 derivatives. The second is composed of mercenary T-Dolls including one made by Sangvis Ferri, based on H&K weapons, and is G&K's go-to squad for covert operations. The third is a team of high-quality military T-Dolls using fifth generation AK variants (plus AN-94) and is used as special forces by the Neo-Soviet military until they join forces with G&K.
  • Barbie Doll Anatomy: Implied by the ending reel of Madness Chapter episode 9, where MADCORE's Commander is seen assembling a large amount of Type 80 T-Dolls from basic parts, whose bodies are completely featureless prior to being clothed.
  • Beach Episode: The 2017 Summer Event introduces several swimsuit costumes for your T-Dolls as well as summer furniture.
  • Beef Gate: In Operation Singularity, this trope is in play when fighting against Agent. At two different points in each of her battles, she summons a barrier that serves as a DPS-check, which must be destroyed within a set period of time, as failure to do so will result in Agent unleashing an attack that hits every single member of your squad for 9999 damage. Teams that do not have sufficient DPS during the two times where she spawns the barrier are thus unable to defeat her.
  • BFG:
    • Some T-Dolls carry positively massive guns. Both NTW-20 and IWS-2000 are shorter than their own weapons, while machine guns like M2HB and M1919 dwarf even battle rifles with their sheer size.
    • The Heavy Ordnance Corps also qualify, since their weapons are often large enough to mandate an entire dedicated crew to serve them. So large, in fact, that they cannot be deployed onto regular-sized helipads, but it helps that they could provide additional fire support from multiple tiles away.
    • Some SF enemies and bosses also carry remarkably huge weapons that they employ against your own echelons.
  • Big Badass Battle Sequence: Operation Aeneas, which is comprised of the events Fixed Point, Longitudinal Strain, Eclipses and Saros, and Slow Shock, features the all out assault on Paradeus' German headquarters, the Avernus Tower.
  • Body Backup Drive: T-Dolls are able to backup their digi-mind into a server. Should their current body die, the digi-mind can then be installed into a replacement body. This is the in-universe justification why your T-Dolls cannot permanently die. Even Sangvis Ferri dolls possess this ability, which is how Destroyer is able to return as Garm and later as Gaia.
    • The only ones that can't (initially) backup their their digi-mind are AR Team members, whose unique neural architecture is not compatible with the current backup system.
  • Biting-the-Hand Humor: Episode 1 of Healing Chapter Season 2 opens with two of the animators' avatars quivering in fear of Sunborn Games's CEO (depicted as a dark gray monolith bearing the company's logo), making "insignificant demands" like doubling the episode length from 2 to 4 minutes so that the CEO's friends stop calling him short.
  • Bolivian Army Ending: Fixed Point ends with the majority of the team sent out to rescue Ange either being KIA or MIA under dubious circumstances. UMP9 sacrifices herself to save UMP45. SOPMOD-II, Mona, Rhino, No. 9, XM 8, Architect, and Gager are least seen fighting losing battles against superior Paradeus forces. What happens to RO635 is unknown after she makes contact with Ange. M16A1 and Beak disappear to fulfill their own agenda. Pretty much the ONLY team members confirmed to have made it out alive are AN-94 and AK-15.
  • Bottomless Magazines: With the exception of MGs and SGs, no T-Doll needs to reload during battle. Also, while battles do actually cost Ammunition, it's always a flat reduction of 20% of the echelon's supplies, regardless of whether it was a five-minute war of attrition where the MGs and SGs reloaded a dozen times or a three-second execution where everybody fired at most one shot per enemy.
  • Bowdlerise:
    • A large number of T-Dolls with skimpier costumes had their artwork touched up to show less skin to appease app store Moral Guardians. However, for some of them, the new designs look better than the old ones (or, at least, less ridiculous).
    • An oddly specific example: The VA-11 HALL-A furniture set "Jill's Apartment" edited the pink shirt hanging off of her laundry line to read "SLOT" instead of "SLUT". This is despite the fact that said shirt is right next to a row of panties, which one would think would be more likely to be edited out.
  • Bragging Rights Reward:
    • Most events reward players who complete the whole event with an Elite Griffin Medal, which is both a wall decoration for dorms and also something one can pin onto their ID card. It has no use other than for its aesthetics.
    • Typically, any event with a ranked challenge map will likely have one of these.
      • Operation Deep Dive has the Golden Fairy, which does nothing beyond providing the basic stat boost and serving as proof of one achieving a high ranking on the challenge map. It doesn't even have a proper skill, merely displaying a visual effect when activated instead. For even more vanity, one can try to achieve and maintain one of the top 100 spots on the server's leaderboards for the Tier 3 skin, which is just that same fairy but gold-plated. Both the skin and the Fairy itself are unobtainable otherwise. In short, the Golden Fairy is fairly useless aside from being proof of merit, and for Index completion, and would better fit the bill for a Cosmetic Award if not for the status buffs it also gives.
      • Operation Singularity has the Cooking Fairy, whose skill buffs one random stat, but sometimes has a chance to instead inflict a damage debuff on its attached echelon. Also, just like the Golden Fairy, high-ranking players can get a version of the Cooking Fairy with a "Chef" talent which simply makes its echelon briefly sparkle and not much else.
    • The Furniture and Effects tabs in the Forward Basecamp's Black Market are effectively these, since they are extremely overpriced furniture items that give little Comfort and equippable cosmetic particle effects for T-Dolls, respectively. The most expensive furniture items are a pair of arcade machines that require 15,000 City's Gift tokens each. There's also a set of black squares and triangles called "Moon Rubbings" that are 300 City's Gift apiece (an 8 hour expedition with no currency multipliers nets slightly less than that); players that are looking to make big wall murals with these will find that it'll take them a few months' worth of currency. All of these things mostly just serve as a means to show off one's Forward Basecamp income.
    • In events with True Core Masks, one redeemable item is not a Doll at all - it's an avatar icon of the True Core Mask with the event icon in the corner indicating where it came from.
  • Break Out the Museum Piece: Quite a number of T-Dolls wield firearms that are obsolete by today's standards, never mind 2062's. This is because there are laws which prohibit PMCs from fielding weapons that were developed during or after World War III. Not that this stops them from kicking ass.
  • Breaking the Fellowship: AR Team starts fragmenting as early as Chapter 6, as members are incapacitated and new ones are cycled in, but it breaks for good when the events of Singularity drive them apart:
    • M4A1 and ST AR-15 join AK-12 and AN-94 in Team DEFY;
    • SOPMOD II and RO635 eventually reunite with the commander and keep working for Griffin; and
    • M16A1 succumbs to the Parapluie virus, gets an Evil Makeover, and joins Sangvis Ferri.
    • By Shattered Connexion, M4A1 and AR-15 have rejoined AR Team. However, in Polarized Light, M4A1 is teleported to an unknown location.
    • By the end of Fixed Point, both RO635 and SOPMOD II are missing in action, leaving AR-15 the only remaining member of AR Team confirmed alive.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: Diamonds, the premium currency, can be used to purchase consumables, resources, and infrastructure. You get a small sum of diamonds from log-in rewards, weekly share, or clearing maps for the first time with an S-rank,note  but paying for them is obviously much faster.
    • Recharging Gems for the first time also gifts the player with a free copy of either a 4-star Springfield (First Payment award on CN/TW/KR server until July 2018) or 5-star FAL (from July 2018 onwards).
  • Broke the Rating Scale: T-Dolls are rated in rarity from 2 to 5 stars, but MOD 3 upgrades boost their rarity by at least one star - 2- and 3-stars become 4, 4-stars become 5. Those who were already 5-stars, as such, get a new 6-star rating.
  • Brought Down to Badass: T-Dolls who have been "dismantled" are not destroyed, but merely have their combat cores and gear stripped from them, making them unfit for battle. They're still statistically superior compared to a human, however, as they are still in principle A-Dolls, with enhanced strength and agility among other things.
    "For T-Dolls who have had their cores and weapons removed, please prepare your resume."
  • But Thou Must!: In the VA-11 HALL-A event, giving Jill's customers something other than what they ordered doesn't seem to do anything. This is especially notable with HK416, who gets intoxicated anyway regardless of whether Jill gives her a Big Beer or Cobalt Velvet, since she can't hold her liquor. As a result, in either case, she ends up creating the Dream Land the event's campaign takes place in while in her alcohol-induced sleep.
  • Bulletproof Vest: One of the type of craftable equipment. They increase armor and are only equippable by shotguns and M16A1.
  • Cap:
    • The game puts a limit on many things, but chiefly the maximum amount of the four resources that natural regeneration will add up to, after which the only way to gain more is to complete missions or logistic expeditions. While this maximum amount is increased per Commander level, the absolute hard cap of every resource is 300,000 that not even expeditions could surmount, though achievements and quests are still fair game.
    • T-Dolls have a level cap of 100 and Affection limit of 150. Digi-mind-upgrading them will increase both of these, with the new level and Affection caps at MOD 3 being 120 and 200, respectively.
  • Cataclysm Backstory: The ELID epidemic caused innumerable casualties on top of rendering vast swathes of land uninhabitable.
  • Central Theme: Despite being oft-memed, Love and Hope lie at the heart of Girls' Frontline's story.
    • Many characters are driven by at least one of The Four Loves. The AR Team is most obvious, as it's their sisterly bond that carries them through many, many conflicts and tragedies. Even M16's defection is rooted in her Big Sister Instinct. Similarly, UMP45's quest to uncover the truth behind the Butterfly Incident and exact revenge on those responsible can be traced to UMP40 sacrificing her life for her. On the villainous side, Elisa's primary reason to instigate the rebellion is to prove that she can become the ideal AI her father would have wanted, not unlike the Nytos, who compete amongst themselves for their Father's affection. William himself is willing to commit atrocities because he adored Lunasia so much, even if it means seizing god-like Relic technology to ensure her resurrection. Most (if not all) KCCO soldiers are patriots who love their homeland and show camaraderie with each other, despite going rogue and committing domestic terrorism to achieve their goals.
    • The world of Girls' Frontline is a broken one, but no one thinks it should remain like that. Most of the large-scale conflicts in the lore are about how humanity should rebuild itself. It's how Rossartrism came to be, an ideology that promotes equality for all people through the use of advanced technology, while its masterminds are preparing for a One World Order. This hope for a better future is one of the main reasons why the Commander fights, something that gives them the drive to pull through even in the direst of situations. In fact, the intro scene of Girls' Frontline 2: Exilium is the Commander refusing to join forces with someone (implied to be Mr. Griffin and the Rossartrists) because, despite all they have done, the world hasn't changed enough. On the flipside, the game also shows how hope can be easily twisted for malicious purposes, like how Paradeus lured refugees into Tallinn by promising a radiation-free zone, or how they manipulate rebels and terrorists by making them think they're fighting to free people from an oppressive government.
    • Preserving the status quo. This comes to a head in Fixed Point when Ange bluntly asks the Commander what they are fighting for. The Commander comes to the conclusion that preserving the present by saving what is tangible and right in front of them is the most important priority, as evidenced when they regularly defy directives and greater agendas to save their dolls and friends. Fighting for the past leads to hardliners like Carter and the KCCO, who want to bring back glory days that have long since passed or never existed at all. Fighting for the future leads to schemers like the Earl and William, who use abstract and intangible ideals to bring about some sort of utopian future as a way to justify morally reprehensible actions.
  • Cerebus Syndrome: The storyline gets progressively darker after the death of ST AR-15.
  • City Noir: The city of Belgrade, the setting for Chapter 11, is depicted as this. Sugar and tobacco are rationed, and protest marches are common. Citizens are separated into classes, and those who are not economically well-off live in crime-ridden slums. Anti-doll sentiments is implied to be somewhat widespread as well. Fittingly enough, the main plot of this chapter is a Film Noir-esque search for a mysterious person.
  • Clothing Damage: Sufficiently damaged T-Dolls will get their clothes shredded. At this point they will automatically retreat from the battle unless on a Boss node. If a critically-damaged T-Doll re-enters a fight during this state, they are at risk of being downed.
  • Cold-Blooded Torture: Torture as a means to gather information is a recurring theme in the story. Whether it's effective or not varies:
    • Continuum Turbulence is framed as the Commander being interrogated by Nytos about the events immediately after Singularity. They already know most of what happened; they just need the Commander to confirm it and fill in the gaps. The Commander feeds them false information to stall for time under the pain of torture. Ultimately, the Commander does stall long enough to be rescued, leaving the Nytos with minimal intel.
    • In Dual Randomness, AK-15 beats up a plainclothes police officer who is tailing her and RPK-16. The officer immediately coughs up the entire plan, allowing RPK-16 to trick Bremen Police into revealing their HQ's location. This scene is played more for comedy. However, RPK-16's earlier torture of Dr. Leone is much more serious and demonstrates just how ruthless she can be.
    • The beginning of Mirror Stage has the Stasi interrogating Ange for 48 hours straight. Not only do they fail to extract any information from her, Ange pretty much slept off any lingering effects of the torture and resumes her mission the very next day.
    • In Poincare Recurrence, Morridow proves to be especially resilient against the AR Team's best efforts. As Morridow herself points out, she can simply disconnect her pain receptors to make physical beatings ineffective. She only cracks when Dandelion and M4 expose the emotional insecurities buried deep inside her neural cloud.
  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience:
    • Generic Sangvis Ferri units are grey and purple, while bosses are simply black and white.
    • Armored Sangvis Ferri units are tan with grey and purple accents.
    • KCCO units are mostly green with various shades of grey.
    • Paradeus's units are white with blue and orange accents.
  • Color-Coded Item Tiers: The game categorizes T-Dolls, Fairies, and Equipment through a combination of star grades and the color of their unit frames or backgrounds. A gray-green background denotes 2-star "Common", blue background for 3-star "Rare", light green background and portrait frame for 4-star "Epochal", golden background and portrait frame for 5-star "Legendary", and purple background and portrait frame are reserved for Extra-grade T-Dolls. Last, but not least, neural-upgraded Legendary T-Dolls have a red background.
    • Oddly enough, the game doesn't seem to have a proper 1-star rarity. While Extra-grade is represented by one large star, it is about on par with Legendary in terms of importance instead.
  • Commonplace Rare: Several of the expedition currencies that can be exchanged in the black market are actually mundane items. LEGO bricks, for example, are scarce and counterfeit-proof enough to serve as currency in war-torn areas. Acorns are prized by illegal wildlife collectors and are worn as bracelets by gangsters to show off their wealth.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
    • SF echelons on the map can move to and capture nodes instantly without having to end their turn.
    • In some event missions, important story characters are represented by pre-deployed "friend" Echelons that are comprised of just that character. Despite being leveled appropriately for the mission, they can single-handedly take down enemies that would steamroll them normally. If the player tries to pull the same feat, then they'll just end up with one critically damaged T-Doll unless the enemy is severely underleveled.
  • The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: In the formation editing screen, you're told that the rate of fire stat is capped at 120 for all T-dolls except for shotgunsnote  and machine gunsnote . Outside of Steyr AUG and SAR-21 using their skillsnote , this is true on all servers... except for the English one, where ARs and RFs actually cap out at 108 instead. This discrepancy actually existed from even the very beginning of the original Mainland Chinese server, and was carried over to the Taiwanese and Korean servers, until the release of version 2.010, which not only eliminates the discrepancy by actually setting the cap 120, but also includes various quality-of-life features. The reason why the English server even had this behavior even though it was fixed on existing Asian servers was because, for whatever reason, it launched with a pre-2.010 version of the client, in which this discrepancy still existed. This ended in late October 2018 when the English version's client was updated to the same version as used by not only the three Asian servers that existed prior, but also the Japanese server, which not only launched after the English version, but launched with the same client version as the Mainland server had at the time. A further explanation as to why this discrepancy even exists for game clients prior to version 2.010 (which eliminated it) can be found here.
  • Connected All Along: For the majority of ‘’Longitudinal Strain'', the plot follows characters with no obvious connection to the conflict between G&K and its various enemies. Then the Commander sends in reinforcements and we learn why the train is so important - one of the passengers, Erma, is transporting a communications network that can pierce through the jamming in Avernus, allowing them to reinforce the dolls taking part in Operation Aeneas.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: Bosses were made immune to flashbangs in late 2016. However, when they're fighting alongside Agent as part of a Boss Rush, they become vulnerable to flashbangs once again.
  • Cool Train: G&K and KCCO both have armored trains. The former is used as a mobile command center by the Commander while operating outside of their usual area of operations, the latter use them as infantry transports and heavy artillery; they're even named after the biggest railway gun in history.
  • Creator's Culture Carryover: Despite G&K and its founders being ostensibly Eastern European, the Commander and T-Dolls celebrate a plethora of global holidays throughout each year, from Christmas to Easter, and even the Chinese and Japanese New Years, respectively.
  • Crosshair Aware: Certain boss skills will mark tiles on your side with warning symbols. If one of your dolls is standing on top of it, you better move her fast.
  • Cross Cultural Reference: The default badge slot item in the Commander's Closet storage is the shoshinsha mark (🔰), a Japanese symbol used to denote beginner drivers (and, in some other video games, beginner players) — which is bizarre, considering Girls' Frontline is developed by a Chinese studio and set in Eastern Europe.
  • Crossover:
    • The Type 81 Carbine's character design and character art is identical to the character Liang Lingwei from the doujin series CHINA RAILWAY GIRL, and her art is done by the same artist as the original.
    • The June 2017 event Operation Rabbit Hunt is a collaboration with Arc System Works, which made the video games BlazBlue and Guilty Gear, and the two main rewarded T-Dolls, Noel Vermilion and Elphelt Valentine, are from these two respective works.
    • November 2017 features the Single Master event, a crossover with Collapse Academy 2 (better known in the west as Guns Girl: School DayZ). As with Operation Rabbit Hunt, the event rewards Extra-class T-Dolls and fairies. The only downside is this event was only available on Digital Sky and Bilibili.note 
    • Another crossover event was held in May 2018, this time with DJMAX. The event featured both versions of the girl on DJMAX Respect's box art (El Clear and El Fail) as "handgun" units, and players even got to play a few songs right in the game itself.
    • Mid-2019note  saw the release of a VA-11 HALL-A crossover, which introduces Jill Stingray and some of the patrons she encounters in her bar. These characters have a unique mechanic in that Jill can mix specific drinks (read: "equip" drink ingredients to her equipment slots) to make specific VA-11 HALL-A characters stronger in battle, at the expense of Jill herself not even owning a handgun despite being classified as one.
    • One with Gunslinger Girl was announced for Q1 of 2020, though it was pushed back to Summer 2020 (likely due to the COVID-19 outbreak). This event features the original five SWA cyborgs (Henrietta, Triela, Rico, Claes, and Angelica) wielding their respective signature weapons (and being statistically the same as their T-Doll counterparts). It's also the first time flesh-and-blood humans feature as enemies in the form of Padanian terrorists.
    • The Bounty Feast event was held on December 2020, crossing over with The Division. Since the protagonist of the game is a Heroic Mime and Virtual Paper Doll, Mica Team opted to create two Original Generation characters (Agent Vector and Agent 416) instead of crossing over any Division characters directly.
    • A Dropkick on My Devil collab was announced late January 2021 and took place in November 2021.
    • Another collaboration event was announced in the Sixth Anniversary stream, this time with Zombie Land Saga Revenge.
  • Cutscene Power to the Max: Typically, if an event features certain T-Dolls, especially new ones and they are AI-controlled, those specific Dolls will always be obscenely powerful, capable of mopping the floor with nearly everything they run into on the map, all on their own (and their dummies), while boasting combat scores that would make any Commander green with envy. Once you've gotten your hands on these featured Dolls, they become significantly less impressive.
    • Played dead straight during the first map of Continuum Turbulence Chapter 3, where the node consists only of AK12 and AN94, both of which are AI-controlled. During this stage, both Dolls have combat scores in the low 150,000s, and are veritable One Woman Armies in their own right. Needless to say they are nowhere near as powerful when you get to control your own AK12 and AN94, and such staggering CE scores are impossible to attain in the current meta even with a fully-kitted, fully-leveled echelon, and maxed fairy.
  • Cyberspace:
    • Zener Network, the backbone of inter-machine communication, is depicted as this in Deep Dive. Justified, as UMP9 had G11 and HK416's interface to be modified so that they can familiarize themselves faster.
    • Every scene that happens inside a Doll's neural cloud technicall alsocounts as this.
  • Damage-Increasing Debuff: Several T-Dolls and other units inflict what's known in-game as "vulnerability", either increasing allied damage on their targets by a certain percentage or tacking on a Fixed Damage Attack to every damage-dealing hit to said target for a brief period of time. M4A1 MOD III's Seal of the Avenger is likely the first example of this trope most players will run into, although she specifically only buffs the damage of her fellow AR Team members on her targets.
  • Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Played for laughs in the official 4-koma on the subject of Fairies. While we never get to see what the Commander might have been up to, it's clearly evident that he botched it and accidentally summoned Shoggoth instead. He then tries to pass it off as an ELID Infecteenote , to unseen results.
  • Darkest Hour:
    • By the end of Singularity, the military arrests Kryuger and disbands G&K, branding its former members as fugitives in the process. M16 completes her defection to Sangvis Ferri and takes off to parts unknown with Elisa in tow. Both Angelique and the Commander survived a collapse fluid detonation, but they are stranded in the middle of a radioactive wasteland with little to no support. By the time of Continuum Turbulence, they've been separated, with Angelique on the run on her own, and the Commander captured by the new faction introduced in the event.
    • Somehow, Polarized Light ends on an even bleaker note: during the first half, the Commander gets utterly destroyed fighting KCCO, DEFY is unable to stop them from using Coastal Guns to disable Griffin's escape train and Yegor is moving in for the kill. The second half ends up on a barely brighter note: the Commander manages to turns the tables on Yegor with the help of K, Yegor dies, KCCO troops are crushed while their higher-ups in Moscow are being arrested, M4A1 finally defeats M16A1 and Ange makes it out with the juvenile Isomers... But the Commander is wounded in action, almost all T-Dolls (inclunding all Sangvis Ferri ringleaders save maybe Intruder and Beak) involved in the battle are gone (the only confirmed survivors are AR-15, RO635, SOPMOD and SL8), Team DEFY is wiped out after performing an Heroic Sacrifice to slow down Yegor and M4A1 is trapped at the bottom of the rapidly flooding base with Elisa, who partially connected with Starfish. And, as Mirror Stage would reveal, Kalina was irradiated by Collapse Radiation during the events.
    • Would you believe Poincare Recurrence contains another one? Carter returns to lead a rebellious force and attack PMCs operating in Soviet border regions. This, of course, includes Griffin & Kryuger, which still hasn't fully recovered from the thrashing they got in Polarized Light. To make matters worse is that the Commander and AR Team are currently busy doing Mr. Griffin's errands in Germany, depriving G&K from their most valuable assets - and further, they had literally just answered the Commander's request for reinforcements by sending over the Sangvis Ferri Ringleaders. The ensuing bloodbath leaves only G&K senior command staff (that is, Mr. Kryuger and Helian), a handful of dolls, and Persica as the only survivors. With the future uncertain, Kryuger declares that G&K is disbanded and gathered whatever is left to rejoin the Commander. On the Commander's side, Ange is still out of reach, both Morridow and Grey manage to escape capture, and the KCCO are now working openly with Paradeus. The only silver linings are that the Commander managed to recover AN-94 and AK-15's neural cores; the Stasi and the Commander threw a wrench in Paradeus' plans in Germany; they managed to implant a tracker on Morridow, allowing them the chance to pursue the Nyto; and the vital Neural Cloud servers remain intact, allowing Persica the chance to recover all the lost Dolls from the attack. It's telling that the Doomsday Clock, which chimed midnight at the start of this section, ticked to 12:01 at its conclusion.
  • Death Amnesia: When T-Dolls get destroyed, they're rebuilt with the same body using the last set of memories stored in G&K's backup servers, essentially making them forget what happened between the backup and their death. Some cutscenes in the Continuum Turbulence event and at least one cafe side story released with it revolve around the nature of said memory loss — Cx4 Storm likens their Resurrective Immortality to a curse, wondering if they're even the same person after getting rebuilt, while Thompson begs her unit to remember her if any of them survive while the White Faction is barreling down on them so the "current" her lives on in their memories. Outside of the event, UMP45's MOD III cafe story explains her insistence on keeping her old, battered body — it contains encrypted memories of UMP40 deep in her subconscious, something she wouldn't be able to keep if she got a new body.
  • Death Is a Slap on the Wrist:
    • All you get for a T-Doll being downed are the long time to repair her and losing a chunk of affection. Nevertheless, it's still not advisable to just let your T-Dolls go down, as high affection provides stat buffs, while a T-Doll's affection going below a certain point instead gives penalties to her stats.
    • Averted for playable Sangvis Ferri echelons. If any of the T-Dolls in the echelon hits 0 HP, the entire echelon is automatically retreated and they cannot be deployed again in the same battle, even if they're repaired out of battle.
  • Defeat Means Playable: The Protocol Control Center involves capturing Sangvis Ferri units (including bosses) by defeating them in combat simulations. The text and UI imply that Sangvis Ferri units won't be the only enemies that can be captured.]]
  • Deflector Shields:
    • Several SMGs are capable of directly generating personal shields to block off all damage for the duration of the effect, rendering them effectively invulnerable while covered. Several Sangvis Ferri bosses also generate such a shield prior to using certain attacks. As of the White Faction's introduction however, the personal shield for the SMG dolls in question have been nerfed to function like those found on White Faction units.
    • The Shield Fairy generates shields for your units at the front column, which can also be used to mitigate the initial cooldown for Shield-type SMGs, extending the overall duration of damage absorption.
    • As a SG, S.A.T.8 is also capable of doing this, although her shield works like a modified version of the Shield Fairy effects, in that it protects every unit at the front row instead of just SMGs, with a 35HP cover to buy them enough time to fire off their own skills before they start taking damage. S.A.T.8's shield also inherits her Armor value, which gives it incredible durability.
    • Agent has the ability to grant herself a shield that lasts until it is depleted from incoming damage. Taking out any of her clones will grant your entire squad this type of shield as well.
    • Several of the White Faction's units also come with personal shields, which is presented as a middle ground between the limited-durability shields that S.A.T.8 and Agent can cast on themselves, and the full-on invincibility-granting "Force Shield" that SMG dolls and other SF bosses have. They differ from the former two in that the shield reduces incoming damage based on the percentage of it remaining, which also applies to the shield itself note , and require Fire Support Teams to defeat said shieldingnote .
  • Denser and Wackier: The teased anime adaptation eschews the game's serious and grim theme of warfare and loss, and goes full-on comedy, with Super-Deformed characters in more light-hearted scenarios instead of, you know, in a war. If anything, it's closer in essence to the 4-koma illustrated by MADCORE instead.
    • Speaking of MADCORE, it would seem that his depiction of the Commander is "canon" in the anime.
    • If Healing Chapter wasn't wacky enough, Madness Chapter somehow manages to be this to Healing Chapter. Adapting the already oddball 4koma series by AC130 and MADCORE might have something to do with that.
  • Developer's Foresight: A past event's lootbox rewards was a four-piece set of wall decorations — yellow neon signs bearing the Anti-Rain team's logo. They change colors based on each member's current status in the storyline. AR-15's part of the sign turns off after witnessing her "death". After the start of Operation Singularity, M4A1 and AR-15's parts are now washed out and bordering on white, signifying their newfound allegiance to Task Force DEFY (whose other three members have silver hair), while M16's part is red, signifying her Face–Heel Turn to Sangvis Ferri. SOPMOD II's part remains yellow as she still works for Griffin & Kryuger.
  • Disc-One Nuke:
    • It is possible for new players to build 4 Stars or even 5 Stars T-Dolls right from the beginning if they have the T-Doll crafting contracts, luck and materials to build them. However, 4 and 5 stars T-Dolls are both rare and cost a lot of cores to Dummy Link, meaning that they can easily become Too Awesome to Use for newer players simply due to this.
    • Sten Mk.II, being a 3 Star T-Doll available right at Chapter 1, serves as one for new players. Not only is she incredibly easy to raise, if you use Replacement Core during the Dummy Link tutorial instead of feeding the free Sten given, you can keep the free Sten and put her into another squad you have, providing you enough firepower to carry on until the end of chapter 2. However, as soon as you manage to build enough 4 Stars T-Dolls or above to form a squad of them, the Stens will become virtually useless.
  • Do Androids Dream?: One recurring theme through the story is just how human T-Dolls are. Despite supposedly being nothing more than machines, they are able to feel emotions, form relationships, and develop distinct personalities beyond their factory specifications. More literally, several dolls do dream when they undergo repairs, despite the insistence of other dolls that it's impossible.
  • Do Not Run with a Gun: T-Dolls have to stay still before they can attack. Fortunately, this also applies to your enemies, which makes skills that slow down or knock back enemies more useful.
  • Draw Aggro: This is what the Taunt Fairy does, by deploying a target dummy in front of the player's echelon that enemies will invariably attack first. It's less useful against enemies who can strike a large area at once, though, since the lanes or tiles adjacent to the dummy would still be hit.
  • Dub Name Change: Zig-zagged. For reasons that are highly likely to be licensing issues, the both the English and Japanese versions change the names of certain T-Dolls but leaves others untouched. That said, the game hasn't been consistent on these between pre-release images, beta tests, and the official release - for instance, FNC was known as "FCB" in pre-release images, then come the beta and she was now "FFC", before an update a few months after release renamed her again to "FF FNC". As well, since voiced lines go undubbed, any of them that mention a gun by name are unaltered (For example, lines that namedrop the manufacturer "Beretta" have their text altered to remove the mention, but you'll still hear it in the voiced line.). Information on the recruitment screens is unchanged as well (e.g. FAMAS' recruitment screen specifically referring to the FAMAS F1 and G2, even when the English version tried to drop the vowels from her name and call her "FMS"), and any personal effects which reference their names or manufacturers or what have you are inconsistently removed from CGs (such as FAL losing the FN emblem on her jacket, but FAMAS again keeping her own name written on the heart-shaped pendant attached to her bayonet).
    • Some firearm manufacturer names have been spoofed in the English and Japanese release to skirt around trademark laws, being replaced with abbreviations of their home countries' namesnote , or in the case of FN Herstal, rendered into a confusing "FF". These are mostly absent otherwise.
    • On the Chinese version, the Type 100 is renamed to "樱", or Sakura (the flower), presumably due to fears that Imperial Japanese elements would not sit well with the Chinese government.
    • Japanese weapons that use the [(Type) (Year)] naming scheme are differentiated on the English server from Chinese weapons also using the same naming scheme by turning "Type" into "Shiki" in order to avoid name conflicts (eg. Norinco Type 64 sub-machine gun and Howa Type 64 battle rifle). One such example that was actually made consistent across CN, JP, and EN: Nambu Type 100's unique equipment, a new stock, has "100 SHIKI ONLY" slapped on its icon in all versions.
  • Dump Stat: Evasion is this for RFs, MGs, SGs, as well as some ARs.
    • In the case of RFs and MGs, it is because they are backline units that weren't designed to tank, therefore their Evasion is usually abysmal and cannot be improved to any meaningful degree.
    • SGs don't need Evasion because they are meant to be shot at as much as possible, while dampening the damage from those hits with Armor.
    • Most ARs are there to deal damage and buff SMGs (or in rare cases, themselves) who serve as their Meat Shield, and as such aren't meant to be tanks. The one AR that can equip armor plates also has very mediocre health, which makes her a poor dodge tank even with exoskeletons.
     E - G 
  • Early-Bird Cameo:
    • The EN and JP versions of Operation Rabbit Hunt include tooltips and hints about one-way paths, due to the main story chapter where they first actually appear (Chapter 7) not being available in those servers at the time of the event.
    • The EN and JP versions of Operation Deep Dive's EX map uses certain rules from Operation Isomer's EX map.
    • The VA-11 HALL-A crossover those same servers will see players encounter KCCO and Paradeus earlier than expected, since it is an Alternate History where SF was defeated way earlier, though to compensate, they would be weaker than the CN, KR and TW versions. The game also censors the faction's name when their turn comes up to avoid spoilers (although their logos are still mostly intact). It also introduces Operation Isomer's control consoles and gates early for these versions.
  • Easter Egg: For the Taiwanese version, in which the character art is censored, creating a T-Doll with a specific amount of resources,note  grants a patch which unlocks the uncensored character art. Originally, all versions used to have it, but it was disabled or removed after a while due to legislation issues, notably Digital Sky and BiliBili started it, then Korean Version followed suit.note 
    • Later on, the English version also has a similar method for getting uncensored art as the Taiwanese version, though the code is different this time.note 
  • Easy Level Trick: During the Bounty Feast event, players can obtain fragmentation grenades from supply drops, which can be used to weaken enemy forces by about 1/20th of their total health. There is no upper limit to the amount you can use on a single enemy, making it entirely possible to weaken them to the point an under-leveled echelon can destroy even the toughest enemies (or obliterate the enemy outright by throwing twenty grenades at them). Even more damningly, the first mission for the collab nets you about five grenades a piece just from picking up a supply drop you will need to crossover to complete the mission. This means that it's entirely possible to finish the entire even using only a few under-leveled echelons and tons of grenades.
  • Easy Logistics: You don't have to care about what kind of ammunition your echelons use, even if one of them shoots 20x80 mm autocannon rounds and the other shoots a WWI vintage rifle that loads one-off experimental rounds. As long your ammunition stockpile is high enough, you're A-OK. Either IOP manufactures all ammunition your T-Dolls use, or Kalina is just that good.
  • Electronic Telepathy: A mysterious voice contacts M4A1 at several points, offering the coordinates of SOP II and RO in exchange of her meeting Elisa during the Singularity event. M4 thought it was Elisa, but it's heavily implied that the voice is OGAS, as when M4 finally meets up with Elisa, she is unaware of the deal.
    • On a wider level, dolls can use Zener connections to communicate with each other non-verbally. They still carry radio transmitters as backup comms device.
  • Enemy Exchange Program: Protocol Assimilation allows the Commander to capture and employ enemy units in "Coalition" echelons. You are presented with a battlefield containing 100 enemy units, including two ringleaders, which rotates after a set period. Only three of them are available for capture at a given time. A standard capture consumes one EMP charge (which regenerates very slowly) and have a chance of failing, depending on the rarity of the desired unit. An alternate way of capture is through contracting Svarog Heavy Industries using special tickets, where they load up a Tu-95 to carpet bomb the entire battlefield with EMP. Captures done this way are guaranteed to succeed and can be done in batches up to ten, but getting the tickets is not easy (unless you pay for it). Currently, the system can only support Sangvis units, though it is implied that units from other factions will be obtainable in the future.
  • Fantastic Nuke: During the third chapter of Singularity, Angelica orders several vials of collapse fluid from Weltkins to be rigged with remotely-detonated TNT. The resulting blast not only wipes out almost all military units in the area, it also fills the battlefield with fatal amounts of radiation.
  • Fantastic Racism: A-Dolls and T-Dolls are hated by some humans especially the terrorist Human Rights Group, who bomb Griffin Supply lines in certain Random Node flavor texts.
  • Fission Mailed: You cannot win against the turned M16 in the first map of Operation Singularity, as the fight is heavily scripted and rigged so that the boss is astronomically-powerful. The mission ends in success after said battle failed and the enemy captured the Command node, however.
  • Foregone Conclusion:
    • If you're even remotely familiar with the plot of Codename: Bakery Girl, you would know that both G&K and Sangvis Ferri have petered out 30 years into the future, and the ELID contamination has spread worldwide, presenting the stage for a second Cold War, from which the New Soviet Union never recovered, while the surviving nations basically cannibalized each other for the technology to stay ahead. Kryuger is still around to some capacity, but many of the characters you know in Girls' Frontline are either dead or missing.
    • Girls Frontline 2: Exilium, makes some of the above even more foregone. G&K's dissolution happens some time between the 10 year Time Skip between the first and second games, with the Commander having moved on to bounty hunting.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • In Chapter 7, M4A1 mentions that she's getting tired of M/45's cinnamon rolls. Coincidentally, a cinnamon roll is slang for a nice person who goes through emotional turmoil. Fittingly, this is the chapter where AR-15 dies and M4A1 starts going through her Heroic BSoD.
    • Episode 6 of Healing Chapter has a shot of some actual gameplay in the middle of a Dream Sequence that's pretty weird even for the context of the episode, with the AR Team getting overrun by an SF unit. It's actually a pretty subtle spoiler for the fates of the AR Team members as of the Singularity event (which already happened in the Chinese version a few months prior, making this a Continuity Nod for them). M16, SOPMOD II and RO635 get wiped out (the first one defects to SF while the other two are MIA and presumed dead), AR-15 retreats from battle (she's shown to be very much alive despite the events of Chapter 7), and M4 recklessly charges into the SF unit after they're all gone (reflecting her newfound desire for revenge after learning of what happened to RO and SOP II).
  • Fragile Speedster: Handguns (HG) typically have high evasion, but low firepower and health and are even more reliant on RNG for their survival compared to SMG. They buff adjacent T-Dolls of any type, and often have unique or powerful skills that are capable of providing Status Buff to their team or Status Effects to their enemies. They also consume the least amount of resources.
  • Freemium Timer: Building new T-Dolls or putting them through training requires a period where they're locked away by a timer, which varies according to either the new Doll's rarity or the skill level that's being upgraded. They can be skipped with some currency, but since the game is meant to be played slowly, waiting a day for one of your many, many T-Dolls fully max her skill shouldn't affect anyone except the most impatient.
  • Friendly Fireproof:
    • Really the only way to make your own units not horribly maim each other in parallel formations where you can have machineguns and anti-tank cannons blasting out from behind you.
    • Goes one step beyond with the Airstrike Fairy, whose bombs are dropped almost directly on top of the outermost column on outwards. It's probably a good thing that those bombs do nothing to your own T-Dolls.
    • The one notable aversion to this is the Rocket Fairy, whose rocket turret can accidentally target T-Dolls if they're between the turret and its target.
  • Game-Breaking Bug:
    • On devices that run Girls Frontline poorly, game stuttering will sometimes cause the player's echelons to do things on the battle map that are impossible, like moving two spaces in one Action Point. When such ocurrences happen, the game automatically forces the player to log out and back in again to resolve the issue.
    • The DJMAX event's rhythm minigames are basically impossible to play thanks to two factors; the slightest hiccup in game performance causes the notes to desync for the rest of the song and lower framerates make the timing window for hitting the notes stricter than usual. Thankfully, there aren't any rewards or hidden achievements associated with playing the minigame.
  • Girls with Guns: You command an entire army of them!
  • Ghost City: Tallinn, the former capital of Estonia, has been deserted for such a long time that many of its buildings were Reclaimed by Nature. All that remains are ELID zombies made from refugees lured in by Paradeus and autonomous defense systems. There's also the fact that the city is essentially a dumping ground for failed Paradeus units and Williams' experiences with Collapse Fluid. The Commander and AR Team has no choice but go through it to reach Paldiski, which is said to be in a similar state.
  • Glass Cannon: Rifles (RF) are slow firing, but deliver powerful shots with high critical chance giving their class the highest sustained DPS in game. They however have very low health and evasion, thus are best kept in the back lines, picking off enemies with precision fire. Rifles decrease the skill cooldown for nearby handguns.
    • Fire Support Teams are also this. Their destructive potential is unmatched by other T-Doll types, but they are instantly knocked out the moment an enemy steps into their position. They are also only deployable on special Heavy Helipads and cost staggering amounts of resources to maintain.
  • Godzilla Threshold: Fire Support Teams. Developed by IOP using data collected from Architect and in partnership with Wave Tech, they are intended to counter the escalating threat of enemies faced by G&K. Weltkins noted that they are expensive, dangerous, and outright illegal, something that an investor like him should have no interest in.
  • Gone Horribly Wrong: A special strain of epiphyllium flowers was created to absorb Collapse radiation in the soil, which they did... Only to expel all of it when they bloom, turning the area into a death zone. The Paradeus rejects in Tallinn use them to kill and turn into ELID infectees the refugees they lure into the city, as well as to commit mass suicide.
  • Greater-Scope Villain:
    • The KCCO is revealed to be one of these in Deep Dive by having caused the SF insurrection in the first place, and they fully assume the role of villain at the end of Chapter 10 and the Singularity event.
    • Continuum Turbulence introduces the a mysterious faction with Masonic imagery and fully biological "dolls" with power armor as their foot soldiers, the White Faction/Paradeus. Shattered Connexion confirms that Dr. William, the Big Bad of Bakery Girl, is the head of this organization and also that he is behind several key events in the game's backstory.
  • Great Off Screen War: There aren't much details in the lore about World War III, but a number of characters (most notably Berezovich Kryuger) and events are influenced by things that happened during the war.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • In limited events where you earn and redeem points by fulling a achievement, there's a achievement which requires you to complete levels a set amount of times, and sometimes, a specific level by guessing the source of the dialogues from the corresponding level's cutscenes. However, Auto Battle does not count as completing a level unless the achievement specifies doing so. In other words, you have to manually complete your levels over and over again until you meet the requirement.
    • For daily missions, there're two daily achievements that reward you two T-Doll production contracts and two Equipment production contracts by producing 3 T-Dolls and 3 equipment, respectively. However, in order to activate this daily mission, you have to complete the previous one that rewards you 1 contract by producing 1 T-Doll or 1 equipment. In other words, you have to produce 4 T-Dolls or 4 equipment in order to receive all 3 daily contracts per each category, meaning you'll also have to do at least one logistics support mission or an unrelated challenge that grants you a production or equipment contract to break even.
    • Marked one-time resupply nodes introduced in Operation: Arctic Warfare are usable mid-turn, even when captured by the enemy, on top of replenishing ammo and ration passively post-turn like a normal helipad. The former is never alluded to or mentioned by the game in detail, which could lead (and has) to players wasting precious turns and moves trying to capture and/or just sitting on such nodes due to being misled by common sense.
    • Normally, manually retreating an echelon without good reason would be a bad idea, due to the resource loss and rank penalty. Not with map E3-4 of Operation Deep Dive, however, where the intended strategy is for the boss-clearing echelon to manually retreat via Gaia's helipad to make room for the other hostage-carrying team. This is worthy of mention, since the stage doesn't automatically end after the boss is defeated, and the center node she sits on is a dead end that wouldn't allow friendly echelons to swap places for hostage extraction.
    • On a surface level, the HOC chips mechanic looks fairly straightforward; just figure out a way to slot your chips such that they fill out the whole motherboard. However, the specifics of which chips to slot in, such as which shapes have "bad" stat distributions or the fact that 6-block chips almost always have the best stats, are generally left an arcane mystery unless players go out of their way to find guides on the topic (e.g. this one).
    • The Protocol Assimilation update introduced Coalitions, a new type of Echelon that have so many new game mechanics (both in and out of combat) that fan-written guides for them are several pages in length (e.g. matsuda.tips or GamePress).
  • Gun Accessories: You can equip your T-Dolls with optics, suppressors, laser sights, etc. to improve their stats.

     H - M 
  • Hand Cannon: Some of the pistols are quite large. There's the Contender, a break-action pistol that uses rifle rounds, the Grizzly MKV which is a M1911 derivative that can use .45 Magnum rounds and the Mark V can use .50 AE rounds (the same as the Desert Eagle), and the absolutely humongous Thunder .50 BMG pistol, which is a breechloader that uses anti-material rifle rounds.
  • Hidden Elf Village: Hollow City, also known as Project Beacon, a Relic site transformed into a city/doomsday shelter large enough for 10 million people to live in it, chosen among the wealthiest and brightest of humankind. Nobody knows what happened to it as they cut off all outside communications almost 20 years ago and not many people are eager to find out.
  • Hold the Line:
    • Defense Drills are a type of Combat Simulation that involves eliminating ten waves of increasingly harder enemies for Recalibration Tickets, with a checkpoint and new enemy composition at the end of every set of waves. If any of the player's fielded echelons has to retreat, the drill is aborted prematurely.
    • Theater System events are a more fleshed-out version of Defense Drills. Players can now continue until all of their fielded echelons are wiped, and the use of Fairies and HOCs are enabled. If the run involves a boss unit, everything the player has fielded is used against the boss simultaneously and automatically in a "Full-Scale Attack", with the player's final score being determined on how fast the boss is destroyed. The event has a rotating list of advantaged T-Dolls and boss-specific weaknesses, so exploiting these is encouraged.
    • The Polarized Light event is a protracted example, with Griffin spending the entire event fending off KCCO forces trying to access the Pike Node. Against all odds, KCCO breaks before Griffin does.
  • Holiday Mode: On Halloween, certain types of Sangvis Ferri Mooks don costumes to celebrate the occassion (e.g. Rippers getting Jack-O'-Lantern helmets, Dragoons turning into witches with flying brooms, and Jaegers getting a teal outline and hitodama lights). Ditto on Summer (Recce Centers and Pathfinders become tiki huts and watermelons, Dactyls crabs and Hydras hermit crabs).
  • Hollywood Hacking: Certain stages represent dolls hacking or otherwise engaging in electronic warfare. Other than the digital-themed background, there is literally nothing else that separate these stages from battles that take place in the "real" world.
  • How We Got Here:
    • The very first map of Operation Singularity shows M4A1 boarding a train and racing to stop M16A1 from leaving with Elisa on said train. You'll then fight your way through 3 event maps of the event to find out just how things came to be, culminating in said spoiler-ed event, only this time you're using using your squads to distract SOCOM mechs and ensure that a certain T-doll is actually able to perform that spoiler-ed action.
    • Chapter 0's story shows how the AR team ended up in a Hopeless Boss Fight against Scarecrow in the very first cutscene of the game.
  • Hufflepuff House: Despite being important lore-wise, the United States (bar the Daybreak Unit and Martha, two of America's representatives) is the only nation to be completely absent in the main game.
  • Humans Are the Real Monsters: In addition to the anti-Doll prejudice mentioned in Fantastic Racism, the sickening abuse of them and the spread of Collapse Fluid and the outbreak of World War III being humanity's fault, the game's greatest enemy is none other than politicians represented by Mr. Griffin Lyons, who engineered the events of the story to further increase their power, and people like William, who are willing to work with them out of selfish motives.
  • Implacable Man: Both your T-Doll's and the enemies can do this. Gameplay wise, if one of your squads are knockout you can simply return back to base (pausing the mission) repair the squad's members and then return back to the mission to redeploy them again. It's an effective way in case the enemy boss is harder to kill.
  • Inside a Computer System:
    • The world of the Glory Day event is a cyberspace construct called Pocket City, in which many of the DJMAX franchise's one-off music video characters are AIs trying to eke out an existence under the tyrannical thumb of El Fail. While battle maps and backgrounds recycle the generic red or blue Tron Lines scenery from past events, this event's story cutscenes have their own unique pieces of artwork, with the latter two in particular being recreations of the Game Graveyard shown in Glory Day's music video.
    • The entire Gunslinger Girl collaboration takes place inside of one. It was built by Jean so that the cyborgs may live the happy life they never got. Each of the girls have their own "Vita" — spaces inside the virtual world which they may reshape as they see fit. Unfortunately, 50 years of neglect has degraded the simulation bit by bit.
    • The Bounty Feast event takes place within an in-universe copy of The Division that Dier is screwing around with via mods.
  • Instant-Win Condition: It doesn't matter if your last echelon is down to one doll and the enemy is literally swarming around your HQ. As long the enemy base is captured, you win the map.
  • Interface Spoiler:
    • There were already tabs for digi-mind upgrading and the side ops to get materials for it from the beginning, despite neither being available for almost two years.
    • Heavy Construction for both T-Dolls and Equipment were part of the crafting interface long before those were released to the public. As such, Fairy-related functionalities were not accessible at the time despite being spoiled rotten by the Formations interface, the Research tab, and loading screen tips.
    • Various Dormitory facilities like the Courtyard are not yet implemented, despite being alluded to by the loading screen tips.
    • Event exclusive T-Dolls and Fairies from overseas versions that haven't yet been added to the English version are simply skipped over in the Index page, which causes index numbers to jump around randomly. This is especially notable with Anna Graem, whose index number in the Special Fairy tab is 7 despite being the only visible entry (the DJMAX fairies are 1 through 6).
    • One of the expedition logs involves the player's expedition unit being forced to retreat from a strong enemy. Some of these enemies are from the White Faction, Paradeus.
    • Some of the Continuum Turbulence event's achievements casually spoil the White Faction's real name in their descriptions.
    • The September 2020 client update included new and revised daily and weekly missions. Some of these missions' descriptions mention Coalitions which are Echelons comprised solely of captured Sangvis Ferri units despite not having been included with said update. An easily-missable button with no functionality at the bottom of the Combat Simulation tab also bears their logo, spoiling the update further. Lastly, all of the Coalition-related materials are in the Item section of the Armory menu, already having fully translated names and Flavor Text.
    • In place of a weapon category, Coalition units get an icon of whatever enemy faction they come from. At the time of release, only Sangvis Ferri units were available, with the implication that other categories would come later down the line. This eventually became the case when Nyto Obelisk was made available for capture as a Coalition unit in early February 2021.
  • An Interior Designer Is You: You're able to customize the Dormitory with obtainable furniture. Doing so increase the dorm's comfort rating, which in turn increases the affection rating of your T-Dolls and the amount of batteries the dorm generates.
  • Inventory Management Puzzle:
    • Managing the T-Doll and equipment inventories at their default sizes (100 and 200, respectively) can feel like this at times for players who own 10 echelons. One might ask themselves what Dolls and attachments are worth throwing away to stave off being forced to the Retirement or Enhancement screens for another battle.
    • Chips, the Heavy Ordnance Corps version of equipment, are a more literal example. Each chip has a different puzzle piece-like shape, size and color based on its rarity and each HOC's circuit has limited space to work with. Rotating chips may be required to maximize the use of the circuit board's space, although doing so costs Recalibration Tickets. If all of the chips on the circuit board are of the same color, the HOC gets a stat bonus on top of whatever's already installed.
  • I Shall Taunt You: This is the function and purpose of the Taunt Fairy, as it sets up one of the Training Dummies at the front of the echelon that will constantly Draw Aggro until either it is destroyed, or the battle is won. The Fairy's CG even shows a Joshikousei pointing at the dummy in a provoking manner as if telling the enemy: "Hey, Notice This!".
  • Iyashikei: The anime PV features elements of this. The end of the PV outright calls it the "Healing Chapter".
  • Jack of All Stats: Assault Rifles (AR) have balanced stats all around, though they are still excellent damage dealers. Assault Rifles strengthens SMGs in front of them, except for M4A1 and Ribeyrolles 1918, who buff other ARs instead.
  • Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Although Sangvis Ferri possess advanced energy weapon technology, that doesn't stop them from getting their assess handed to them by slug-throwing G&K dolls. Zigzagged by White Faction's units. Rodeleros' beam lance can deal heavy damage to an unprepared echelon, but they're still less of a threat than Uhlans and Dopplesoldners, both of which utilize hard-hitting explosive weapons, which, in turn, are eclipsed by their laser-shooting Nytos.
  • Large and in Charge: A map's boss is more often than not the biggest unit on the field, either through sheer body size or the scale of their weapons.
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: Liberally abused by 404 Squad. Every time they come into contact with other dolls, they edit her memories afterwards to remove any traces of their involvement.
  • Late-Arrival Spoiler:
    • Operation Rabbit Hunt contains spoilers for Operation Arctic Warfare/Hypothermia for the English and Japanese versions, as these two versions did not get their run at the latter event until months afterward. As for the third-party characters, it's casually spoiled that Noel is Mu-12 and Elphelt has an alternate costume reflecting her Face–Heel Turn post-Xrd SIGN.
    • 2019's April Fools joke had RO635 turn into a Dinergate for the day (among other things), spoiling both a plot element in the Continuum Turbulence event and also in chapter 11, neither of which were released at the time in the English server. This happened again on 2020, still technically spoiling the event for newer players as CT wasn't added into the game as a permanent campaign by then.
    • Chapter 2-1 of Operation Cube+ wastes no time in telling the player that there are spoilers ahead. Right from the very first line of dialogue, this happens:
      【System Prompt】 Spoiler alert - Please only proceed with the following battle after completing Episode 7 and Operation Hypothermia or reading their combat records. Commanders who have not completed Episode 7 are recommended to exit by pressing "skip". If you keep tapping, you will be considered to have acknowledged the recommendation.
    • The VA-11 HALL-A event, like Operation Rabbit Hunt, spoils events that hadn't been translated for the English version yet. Namely, the appearance of the Paradeus faction standing in for VA-11 HALL-A's White Knights, and Nyto Obelisk (in cutscenes) and Nyto Mercurows (in battle) standing in for Anna Graem. Thankfully, the faction's name is rendered a jumbled mess when their turn comes up in-game to avoid spoilers. It also casually drops a few details about some of the guest characters that are only revealed by following their routes in the original game, like the reason why Alma has cybernetic arms (to avoid Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, which would be a career ender for a hacker like her) and Dorothy's relationship to Anna Graem (they're sisters by adoption).
    • The 2020 April Fools title screen art casually spoils M16A1's Face–Heel Turn and an Operation Isomer boss, Beak.
    • M4A1's and AR-15's MOD stories spoil the AR Team's status by the start of the Singularity event, with the two of them having joined Angelia's DEFY squad and SOPMOD II and RO635 presumed missing. Their index entries also change to match, swapping the G&K logo in the background for DEFY's. Meanwhile, UMP45's MOD story spoils a battle near the end of the same event, which caused her to lose An Arm and a Leg. Some flashbacks in said MOD story also spoil events that happened in Operation: Cube, particular where UMP40 is concerned.
    • SOPMOD II's MOD story, her MOD III outfit, and her 4th Anniversary party dress all spoil RO635's brief stint as a Dinergate after the end of the Continuum Turbulence event.
    • Both M500 and M950A's MOD stories spoil the events of Polarized Light. The latter even shows the Commander's train being struck by coastal guns.
    • The Bounty Feast event spoiled UMP9's MOD III appearance before it was available on the English server. The username she goes by in The Division, Reina, is also a spoiler for her MOD cafe storyline.
  • Level-Locked Loot: Hitting certain level milestones on a T-Doll unlocks more equipment slots for them as well as allowing the use of 3★ and 4★ equipment.
  • Level-Up at Intimacy 5: T-Dolls gain small increases to their damage, accuracy, and evasion at 90 and 140 affection.
  • Level-Up Fill-Up: Sort of - upgrading a T-Doll with a Dummy Link or Neural Upgrade restores their health, ammunition and rations, all for free.
  • Limited Wardrobe: Zig-zagged. While Kalina and some T-Dolls do have extra outfits earnable from events or the gacha, they will wear whatever clothing they're having on during all hours of the day, wherever they go. Even at the Oath ceremony, where they don't change into wedding dresses for the occasion, unless you've managed to get those specific costumes and gift them to your Dolls beforehand.
  • Luck-Based Mission: There are quite a few maps where success or failure hinge upon enemy movement and, in the case of resource/ambush nodes, the placement of enemy squads, especially on night maps, where you have limited vision, or when going for S-ranks, which require victory with more than a certain number of kills and within a short number of turns.
    • Tracking down and defeating Ouroboros in Operation Cube. The first layer of difficulty comes in the fact that the entire op consist solely of night maps. The second is that while her starting placement is fixed, her path-finding is random, and you have to attempt to track her movements based on unoccupied nodes being taken on SF's turns even when you can't see the units on them. The third is that like regular non-event night maps, there's a turn limit in which to find and defeat her or you fail the mission.
    • The hidden mission for the first map in Operation Singularity. It is notable in that out of all the missions on that map, it is the only night op. The objective is simple: Capture the enemy HQ at the south end of the map, taking as many turns as you need. The luck part comes in with the achievement for the map, named "Perfect Stealth". This achievement can effectively only be obtained with a great amount of luck, as it requires you to finish the mission with zero encounters, and the only viable path for this is south, through chance-based possible encounter nodes.
    • Certain maps of Operation Deep Dive can be infuriating to clear, due to the presence of the red Goliath Plus units. These are basically souped-up versions of the regular Goliath, only with truly ludicrous amounts of health, and one explosion is enough to wipe out even the strongest echelon out there. To put it into perspective: A fully-geared MG/SG echelon with Fairy support typically clock in at about 30,000 and change CE during night maps, while a Goliath Plus node can rank somewhere among the low 100,000s. It speaks volumes when even fully-kitted MG/SG echelons could do little more than slightly dinging them before they blow themselves up. And to make things worse, these typically come in pairs, and have a very nasty tendency to intercept the hostage rescuing team en route to a helipad, resulting in an instant mission failure.
  • Meat-Sack Robot: T-Dolls are of the Terminator type; fully-robotic beings covered in soft, skin-like substance. This is most visible with the Ripper killed by M16 in chapter 4, and UMP45's damaged CG in Continuum Turbulence.
  • Mecha-Mooks: The entirety of Sangvis Ferri forces are technically this, but the game actually makes a distinction between mechanical (Dinergates, Scouts, Prowlers) and humanoid (Rippers, Vespids, Jaegers) units, at least for the purpose of quests. Played straight with KCCO, whose units are much less human-like than Sangvis Ferri's.
  • MegaCorp: I.O.P. Manufacturing Company, your main supplier of T-Dolls. Other than manufacturing, they also handle T-Doll retirement and issue them to the civilian market. They also own 16Lab, a research company that develops Etching technology and its derivative applications.
  • Mêlée à Trois: Polarized Light sees practically every faction in the game engaged in a four way battle for control of the sub pen that houses The Stars and Pikes. It ends up turning into an Enemy Mine situation when G&K decide to hack into deactivated Paradeus units and assist Sangvis Ferri, because KCCO cannot be allowed to take control of the Stars and Pikes.
  • Mighty Glacier: Machine Guns (MG). They can put out incredible amount of burst firepower and take some beating, but also require reloading once in a while and are also tied with Shotguns for the two classes with the slowest movement speed in the game. MGs increase the stats of SGs in the front rows. They are also massive resource hogs.
  • Mildly Military: Most of the T-Dolls and (if the player chooses to do so, the Commander and Kalina) don't follow a proper military dress code and some of them have attitude problems that would be unacceptable in any military force. This is justified since Griffin & Kryuger is a private military company so their T-Dolls have laxer rules on what they can wear and behave.
  • Military Moe: Girls with Guns (who are guns) fight a Robot War, and it's possible for the player to romance them in between battles.
  • Mini-Game: Springfield's cafe contains one called "Luffberry Chess". Despite its name, it's actually a dice-based board game with light Card Battle Game elements.
  • Misidentified Weapons: Several T-Dolls either equip the wrong weapon for their namesake, or feature ones that are not of any real specific model. More information can be found on their character category pages.
    • M1928 Thompson's SMG is a mishmash of parts from several different models, all meshed into one; it has the extended barrel of the M1927 Auto Ordnance, the M1928's drum mag and foregrip setup, and the triangular rear sight ears and side-mounted charging handle of the M1A1.
    • The SMG carried by MAC-10 is in fact a Cobray M11/9, a variant of the 9mm MAC-11 instead of the real deal, as evident by its receiver dimensions (the portion behind the grip being as long as the portion ahead) and the wider, flattened charging handle.
    • RO635's SMG better fits the description of the newer R0991 instead due to its flat-top receiver. In her MOD 3 she keeps the name despite upgrading to a completely different weapon, the Noveske Space Invader.
    • The trope's namesake herself is hit with this as well. AK-47's assault rifle seems to be a mishmash of parts from both the real AK-47 and the upgraded AKM, as it has the ribbed top cover and stamped receiver of the latter, while the muzzle is flat and the stock is sloped downwards like the former.
    • SAA is actually equipped with a Ruger Blackhawk, a very similar but still different revolver, as told apart by the number of screws in the frame, the design of the trigger, and the sights.
    • A minor case with the The Division crossover version of HK416, who is actually equipped with the similar Patriot Ordnance P416. It's minor because she's identified as just Agent 416 rather than Agent HK416.
    • SCAR-H actually uses the FN SSR, a version with a longer barrel and an extended receiver meant for use as a precision rifle. It also comes with a fixed stock as standard, though her victory animation still shows her folding it.
  • Moe Anthropomorphism: Zig-Zagged. The game is noted to have used some Insistent Terminology in Chinese adverts to not imply it as a game about anthropomorphized weapons, but somewhere along the lines of "just" Girls with Guns. Most character designs are still mixed with moe anthropomorphism aspects (being personification of various firearms), but there are more than a handful of exceptions where the connection is flimsy. For those that are true anthropomorphisms, this is also justified, as historical and combat data of a weapon are used to determine the ideal physical shape, personality, and even mannerisms to best wield their specified weapon.
  • Mood Whiplash: On one hand, the story, from the introduction alone, depicts a dark, gritty, and serious tone, with each chapter showing things going From Bad to Worse. And then we have the in-game features like the dorm, where T-Dolls are depicted in chibi, and the tone is generally cutesy.
  • Mook Horror Show: One scene in Chapter 2 of Polarized Light has the AR Team and a KCCO Commando squad racing for the command center of Paldiski coastal guns. M4A1 singlehandedly slaughters her way through the commandos, eliminating each member with deadly precision while dodging or outright shrugging off return fire. The only time she is slowed down is when the Squad Leader doused her in gasoline and then set her aflame with a flashbang. Even then she emerges from the inferno without sustaining major injuries. Ultimately subverted, as the Squad Leader, despite being seriously wounded and afflicted by early ELID symptoms, reaches the control center before M4 does, and uses his last ounce of strength to pull the lever as M4 fills his dying body with more bullets.
  • Mordor: Black Zones, where the highest concentration of Collapse Radiation can be found, are this. The Collapse Particles are so thick they clump together and block the sun, becoming visible to naked eye. The land is a cracked, barren wasteland, covered with a mud-like substance. Giant spires of green crystals and black spikes (presumably also made of Collapse Particles) burst out of the landscape. Absolutely nothing can live there for long, not even Dolls; in fact, Black Zones are known to induce hallucinations on them. Naturally, Paradeus sets up their headquarters in one.
  • Moveset Clone: Downplayed with the Gunslinger Girl collaboration characters. They have the exact same stats as the T-Doll counterpart to their respective weapons, just with different skills and tile buffs to suit their new rarity.
  • Multinational Team: Since the T-Dolls identify themselves as the same nationality as their guns nation of origin (or in Tac-50's case, the country heavily associated with her gun), and G&K itself is of British and (New Soviet) Russian origin, this makes the PMC fit the bill perfectly. The majority of the G&K T-Dolls are essentially American (Anti-Rain), German (404 Squad), Russian (Task Force DEFY) as well as British, French, Franco-Belgian, Swiss, Austrian, Italian, Israeli, Chinese, Japanese and South Korean. Other nations represented include South Africa, Serbia, Sweden, Spain, Hungary, Taiwan, Poland, Australia, Bulgaria, Finland, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Canada, India, Croatia, Singapore, Ukraine, New Zealand, Chile, Iraq, Slovenia, Portugal, Mexico, Slovakia, Argentina, Iran, and Turkey.
  • Multiple Endings: Continuum Turbulence features a branching storyline with several (often depressing) endings. You're still forced to pick the correct ending to proceed, but each path feature different rewards as an incentive to explore them all. Justified, as the whole Framing Device involves the Nytos interrogating the Commander about the events after Singularity. You're buying time for a rescue team by feeding them false stories.
  • Mythology Gag: Common in collab events.
    • In the DJ Max collaboration, places in Pocket City are named after past games and titles.
    • The The Division collaboration version of HK416, Agent 416, uses a Patriot Ordnance P416 instead of her usual weapon, befitting Ubisoft games of the time almost universally featuring the P416.
     N - R 
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: During the North Island Incident, the security team assigned to the site attempt to contain the breach by detonating explosives over the Collapse fluid storage tanks. Unfortunately, the explosion vaporizes the entirety of the tanks' contents into the atmosphere, eventually resulting in global contamination.
  • Nerf: When Operation Continuum Turbulence debuted the White Faction for the CN/TW/KR servers, the "Force Shield" skill for certain SMG dolls was nerfed to function like the shields found on most of the White Faction units. The Jupiter Cannon was given an "Armor Break" stat for its gun, making it a direct counter to the former tactic of using a Force Shield-equipped doll to tank the cannon shots as the Jupiter could now defeat the shielding.
  • New Game Plus: In a rare move for a free-to-play game, event re-runs retain the player's progress and obtained rewards while going into the new version of the event, such as Chapter 1 of Operation Cube+ remaining cleared if the entirety of Operation Cube was cleared beforehand. This also applies to events that become a permanent fixture of the main campaign, like Operation Arctic Warfare.
  • Non-Indicative Name: Luffberry Chess can more accurately be described as either Girls Frontline-flavored 100% Orange Juice! or a derivative of Aeroplane Chess and other cross-and-circle games like it. The connection to actual chess is tangential at best.
  • Noodle Incident: According to the The Division collab, Team AK-47 (AK-47, SKS and A-91) got so drunk one time they stole a car and did "things" that ended up with the cops dragging them back to base, costing the Commander a good chunk of the monthly budget in fines and caused all on-base alcohol to be rationed and watered down unit further notice.
  • No Ontological Inertia:
    • Killing SF Jaguar units will automatically cause their fired mortar shells to vanish and deal no damage whatsoever to your echelon.
    • Retreating any grenade-throwing T-Doll will either cause their grenade to stop existing, or cause the effects of the grenade to do likewise.
  • No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The Anti Rain unitsnote , who were noted to have their memory chips uniquely developed by 16LAB. As such, the game makes a huge deal out of players refraining from using them as fodder, or dismantling them for cores, since it would be impossible to get another if they do. That is, until the Recovery mechanic came out which rendered this a moot point, where you could regain unleveled copies of them by shelling out several cores to retrieve them from the Index.
  • Not Drawn to Scale:
    • Kar98k looks like a adult girl in her artworks, and her rifle is mostly correctly scaled in her chibi art and official art, but her character artwork has a peculiar quirk - the 1100mm-long rifle looks almost as tall as her. This caused plenty of jokes in the fanbase about Kar98k actually being just a little over 1.1m tall.
    • Similarly, P7 looks like a child wearing a nun vest, but her handgun is drawn too small in her character art, with estimates putting her over 2.10 meters tall.
    • Mk23 carries one of the most infamously-large automatic handguns ever made, yet with many of her outfits it's drawn to much smaller proportions, almost looking like a pocket pistol.
  • Not the Intended Use: Operation Isomer introduces security gates that can be opened/closed on command from various consoles on maps that have them, and are designed to allow/deny passage through the nodes they occupy. When you're introduced to the gates for the first time, you're also told that if the gate is commanded to close while any echelon is standing on their node, they take damage to the tune of 25% of their current health. However, this also applies to any enemy unit caught in the gate. Enterprising players see this as a way to mostly, or completely trivialize certain enemies (eg. Nytos, Manticores, Doppelsoldners, etc.) by luring said unit to a gate and then reducing every member in that unit to 1 HP via repeatedly slamming the gate closed on them.
  • Obvious Rule Patch:
    • One of the buildings introduced in Operation Continuum Turbulence is an Air Defense Turret, which locks down all helipads within its area of effect and prevents the deployment or extraction of echelons/hostages from said affected helipads, in order to counter the tactic of using the Parachute Fairy's "Helipad Liberation" ability to bypass whole portions of the map. Some maps in Chapter 3 of said event are hostage rescue missions, with the only available extraction points affected by the AD Turret, preventing the player from simply paradopping the hostage-carrying echelon onto said helipads and finishing the mission without first taking the turret down.
    • In response to the gate abuse detailed in Not the Intended Use, Operation Shattered Connexion makes most of the gate-controlling consoles found within its various missions single-use only to prevent such antics. Chapter 12 of the main story doubles down on this by not only making most of the consoles single-use only, some of them have been sabotaged and will blow up on use.
  • Once More, with Clarity: One of the secret logs in Deep Dive portrays UMP45 escaping the aftermath of the Butterfly Incident, only to be stopped by a mysterious assailant. Polarized Light retells the same scene, except this time M16 is revealed to be the one who attacked UMP45.
  • One-Hit Polykill: Bizarrely, for a game revolving around real-life guns, this is mostly averted. Bullets in general don't pass on through to hit things behind their target, even when they're "evaded" (side note: there are no dodging animations in this game). The handful of times where this is played straight is with the rifle class, where some T-Dolls wielding firearms on the larger side of the scale come with a skill that overpenetrates anyone between said T-Doll and their target.
  • One-Steve Limit: Averted and justified. T-Dolls that share the same name are usually based off guns that are variants of each other (such as M4A1 and M4 SOPMOD II), but then you have Type 97 Assault Rifle and Type 97 Shotgun. Good luck keeping track of M1895, the handgun, M1897, the shotgun, M1911, the other handgun, and M1918, the machine gun. This is why so many of them have nicknames.
  • Open Secret: Officially there is no such thing as Squad 404 at Griffin and its members are rogue T-Dolls not affiliated with the company in any way. Unofficially, they do exist and are the company's black ops team. To ensure the Squad's existence is kept a secret, 404 memory wipes any T-Doll that works with them. Despite this, it turns out some T-Dolls like AKS-74U are aware of the Squad's existence and what they do, with Groza herself being aware who they are since she noticed she participated in some secret redacted missions that she herself has no memories of. Heck, they even know G11 and are even friends with her since the former comes to rest at Griffin every time the squad comes there to resupply. When Griffin gets betrayed and framed by KCCO and forced to work with the Russian Federal Security Bureau, Squad 404's existence is no longer a secret after they help evacuate their Griffin allies during the three way battle between Sangvis Ferri, KCCO and Paradeus.
  • Ornamental Weapon: Some T-Dolls, notably ones based WWII-era German and Soviet guns, either carry a sword or some type of blade on their person, or have a bayonet of some sort affixed to their weapon. With the exception of CZ-75 (who throws her axe at enemies as her skill) and Hanyang Type 88's Mod 2 and 3 guises (who uses her rifle's bayonet on any enemies that enter the tile next to her while her skill is active) however, none of the other melee weapon-equipped T-Dolls will actually use them.
    • Averted in the manga, where T-Dolls use secondary weapons when required. Ingram for instance favors using her combat knife to assassinate enemies.
  • Painting the Medium: The Bounty Feast event's UI Art Shift into something akin to The Division's UI is more than just for flavor - the plot takes place within an in-universe running copy of the game.
  • Permanently Missable Content:
    • This is usually the case with event-exclusive T-Dolls, especially those of Crossover runs. While some event-only map-drop T-Dolls have been added to the production pools, those that are given as milestone rewards like Five-Seven and M1887, or crossover-exclusive ones, haven't.
    • Certain skins belonging to SV-98, UMP45 and SPAS-12 can only be unlocked by redeeming codes bundled with official merchandise. UMP45's "Winter Journey" skin is probably the worst, since the code can only be obtained with purchases of a replica of said jacket, of which only 5,000 were ever made.
  • Play Every Day: As one might expect from a free-to-play game, there are plenty of game mechanics that encourage players to do this:
    • The tried-and-true daily login bonus, which rewards resources of various kinds and is one of the few recurring ways to obtain Gems, which come at the end of the week. The login bonus for the penultimate day of the month also rewards a pair of Quick Training Contracts, which are extremely hard to obtain in other events.
    • Daily and Weekly Quests also reward resources and is one of the few recurring sources of Tokens, used to roll for random pieces of dorm furniture.
    • Facilities that produce items for the player (e.g. dorms and their batteries, Forward Basecamp loot, and Intel Room Data Samples) usually have a Cap on their production that'll top out in one or two days with max upgrades if the player forgets to check on them.
    • Many time-limited events are structured such that attaining every single event reward will be hard to do if the player misses one or two days of progress.
  • Playing Games at Work: Implied by the Flavor Text of the fully upgraded Data Room and Forward Basecamp computers, which note "a decrease in productivity" from both Kalina and the Commander, respectively. Kalina is threatened with her Internet service being cut, while the Commander manages to get away with it.
  • Polyamory: As is the case with many other card-collecting games that incorporate a marriage mechanic, or Oath in this case, one can "marry" more than one T-Doll and nobody will bat an eye about it, not even the "wives" themselves. In fact, a player with mountains of cash to burn could potentially Marry Them All if they so choose.
  • Post-Cyberpunk: The lore has shades of this. Civilization is still in shambles from the damage caused by World War III and ELID Epidemic, with governments barely able to protect their territories due to lack of manpower. The player character is part of a paramilitary unit trying to restore order into this chaotic world, and they're doing a pretty good job at it. The MegaCorp that supplies them comes off as genuinely helpful rather than obstructive. Life in the cities is implied to be good, with dolls being employed for physical labor. The main conflict is Robot War where soldiers from both sides ponder about their identity and purpose in life. If Chapter 9 is an indicator, it would get worse around 30 years later.
    • Later story materials veers into traditional Cyberpunk territory. While Green Zones are perfectly habitable safe havens, many are forced to live in the far more dangerous Yellow or even Red Zones, where living conditions are miserable, crime is rampant, and the threat of ELID looms beyond city walls. Dolls don't fare any better, as they are frequently exploited and abused by less scrupulous humans. To top it all off, there are religious cults that worship ELID as some sort of "holy disease".
  • Post-Soviet Reunion: Bolshevik groups resurged within the Russian Federation infiltrated by 2030, infiltrated various major institutions, including the Federal Security Service, the Navy and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and exploited domestic disasters to discredit the federal government and secure enough support to a widely popular revolution, ushering in the Neo-Soviet Union by 2032 and reincorporating several of the former Soviet republics, with Ukraine descending into a civil war that split it between a pro-Soviet east that controlled the capital Kyiv and a pro-EU west. Later, it intervened in a German Civil War when East Germany seceded as the German Democratic Republic and asked the the Neo-Soviet Union to intervene, leading to World War III erupting when the European Union and United States got involved. The Neo-Soviet Union eventually joined the Union of Rossartrism Nations Coalition.
  • Power Equals Rarity: Zig-zagged. Certain 3-star or even 2-star T-Dolls can vastly outperform dolls of higher rarity, usually by having good stats paired with a skill that scales well with those numbers. Conversely, some 5-stars T-Dolls have great stats that are held back by subpar skills and/or terrible tile buffs, to the point where more common dolls regularly outperform them in their supposed niches.
  • Power-Up Food:
    • Various dessert items are used to quickly raise T-Doll Affection, which in turn enhances their stats after certain Affection milestones, thus making these deserts indirectly this trope.
    • The VA-11 HALL-A event had limited-time consumables called Discount Beer and Wulong Tea, which were improved versions of Combat Reports and Affection-boosting deserts, respectively.
    • The Forward Basecamp plays this straighter as every consumable is some form of food or drink. Meat buns reduce expedition times, fast food increases the likelihood of random mid-expedition drops, and slices of cake increase the amount of expedition currency gained at the end of a run. There's also consumables that increase the odds of a specific region getting explored — cups of coffee for the city, a box of steaming hot oden for the snowfield, edible honey combs for the forest, and ice cream for the wasteland.
  • Powered Armor: Downplayed. The exoskeletons available to your dolls are unarmored and purely meant to assist movement. Played straight with M16's Special Battle Armor, which enhances her evasion and gives her extra protection.
  • Precision F-Strike: One happens near the end of Chapter 4 Night Battle. One of RO635's subordinates, STEN Mk.II, shows reluctance to disobey an order given by a human scientist (a known criminal, at that) to destroy the classified documents they've been seeking for the whole chapter, right before passing out from blood loss due to SF-inflicted injuries. This is even after learning that RO635 has authorization as a commanding officer. The otherwise calm and collected RO635 only has this to say in response:
  • Precursors: The backstory mentions an ancient alien civilization who left behind ruins filled with mysterious artifacts. Little else is known about them.
  • Prestige Class:
    • The Neural Upgrade/Digimind Upgrade system. Granted, there's no choice between multiple classes, but the system otherwise fits this trope. A small selection of T-Dolls have the ability to upgrade to MOD 1 at the cost of Memory Fragments and Dummy Cores, raising their level cap to 110, their rarity up by at least one star (e.g. a 4★ becomes a 5★), as well as their base stats by a small amount, including any stat boosts granted by their new affection cap. At level 110, the MOD 2 upgrade additionally gives the T-Doll a second skill (either a passive or one simultaneously activated with their first skill). Lastly, reaching level 115 enables the MOD 3 upgrade, which gives that T-Doll a piece of equipment unique to (and specced for) them, along with a new appearance and new voice lines.
    • Fairies work on a different system, ranking up based on their level and enhancements. Since Fairies already have two skills from the start, ranking up fairies instead raises the chances of their passive talent activating at the start of a battle, topping off at 100% at 5★.
    • Heavy Ordnance Corps get their upgrades through yet another system. Like Fairies, they have a variable rarity that starts at 1★ and gets increased by creating Central Data. Getting enough Central Data for a particular HOC upgrades its stat caps and increases the space in its Circuit Board, allowing it to equip more chips. HOCs that are already 5★ instead get their Central Data converted to Data Patches, which are used to Iterate an HOC up to a theoretical "10★" (represented by red stars), raising its stat caps even further.
  • Private Military Contractors: Griffin & Kryuger Security Firm, the player's faction, is the second biggest PMC in the world. Sangvis Ferri used to be the largest, until their central AI pulled the rug right from under their human staff and waged war against humanity itself.
  • Product Placement: Sort of, if you don't consider it to be a Crossover in a very weird way. The design for Hanyang Type 88 is actually the same as the mascot character of the Wuhan ComiAi convention (wearing a maid dress), and it is the result of a promotional collaboration between Mica Team and the convention.
  • Ragnarök Proofing: For a city that has been abandoned for decades, Tallinn's autonomous defensive systems remain surprisingly functional. Even the powerplant that supplies energy to the city grids is still working despite having no one to maintain it. Justified, as Paradeus has vested interest in keeping the city's defenses online.
  • Rare Candy:
    • Dummy Cores. They are seldom used or earned during gameplay, but are invaluable when Dummy Linking your high-tier T-Dolls, or for heavy construction when you're gunning for rarer units like SGs or Fairies.
      • There are a multitude of ways to gain Cores, none of which are terribly efficient to maintain constant manufacturing or Linking, since they are almost always earned in single-digit quantities. Dismantling 3-star or rarer T-Dolls nets you between 1-5 cores, while linking a 5-star T-Doll costs 15 minimum.
      • An echelon composed of only Legendary or Extra-grade T-Dolls could set you back anywhere between 75 to 225 Cores just to link them once, and fully-linking them costs a whopping 525. Players who are lucky with crafting could substitute for some cores with duplicate T-Dolls, but they're your only option when leveling event-specific Dolls that you could only obtain one unit of (e.g. Elphelt, M1887, etc...).
    • To a (much) lesser extent, Enhancement Capsules. One capsule instantly raises all upgradable stats of a T-Doll by 1, making them worth more than a handful of fodders when used in Enhancement. They are also earned in very small quantities during daily missions, though Kalina usually hands them out in quite generous amounts in random daily gifts, not to mention certain events that let the player exchange points for random rewards, with the Capsules being some of the more common items. It's also very easy to stockpile absurd amounts of them if the player subsists only on fodder units to upgrade their T-Dolls' stats.
    • More traditionally are Combat Reports, which straight-up give experience to the T-Doll you give them to, helping them level up quickly without having to fight. They're not as difficult to acquire in large numbers as the other items - you create them yourself with a small cost of batteries and some spillover experience from your echelons fighting and leveling up normally - so much as they are annoying to do so, since at the beginning it takes ten hours to draft combat reports, and you need an investment of several days and several thousand batteries leveling everything in the Data Room up to eventually bring that down to a single hour.
    • Memory Fragments. They are used for one and only one purpose, and that is to perform Digi-mind upgrades for select T-Dolls.
      • Performing each MOD of a T-Doll's Digi-mind upgrade consumes vast quantities of these along with the aforementioned Dummy Cores. All upgradable T-Dolls start at 200 fragments, which increases with each MOD, with rarer Dolls costing much more to rank up (e.g. a 2-star M1911 requires 200/600/1,200 fragments to fully upgrade, vs. a 5-star HK416's 200/1,200/2,400). It's a good thing, however, that the place to farm for them is open all days of the week, to compensate for the somewhat low amounts you get per run and the exorbitant demand for these things.
      • Additionally, Digi-mind upgrading 5-star T-Dolls also require a different type of rare candy: Fire Control components. These are mainly earned through Expeditions. Barring event drops, upgrading a single 5-star T-Doll requires upwards of five consecutive months of farming Expeditions, as their drop rates are abysmally lownote . Their rarity makes the above entries seem like "normal" candies by comparison.
    • Calibration Tickets. They are your only means of "refining" your T-Dolls' equipments, so to speak, as well as changing the support skill of your Fairies. Like Memory Fragments, they are not so much dropped in tiny amounts as dropping in sizable quantities against exorbitant demands for them. Refining gear items costs large amounts of these per turn, with the price steadily rising from the first to fourth calibrations, ending up at 13 a pop, while calibrating Fairies sets the player back 60. While they could be farmed from the Defense Drill, which is open 7 days a week, it is terribly energy inefficient, as each run costs 5 points, and usually netting around 45-60 Tickets, which is about enough for three to four calibration rolls. And a typical gear item requires a lot more than that due to stats having a chance to regress in value with each attempt, moreso if said item has more than one stat the player is looking to strengthen.
  • Regional Bonus: The Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese and English servers all had timed-exclusive T-Dolls, who were introduced to the other builds after a certain "waiting" period. The mainland Chinese and Korean versions are usually the most up-to-date in terms of content, while the English server lags quite a bit behind due to being established much later, though the developers made up for this by giving them M200 as their own exclusive, which hasn't been included in any other build.
    • In an inversion, the Taiwanese version will be the only one that will not be getting the "Single Master" event (Collaboration with Honkai Gakuen 2), as their regional version for that game shuttered long before the collab was announced for the Chinese and Korean version, and thus MICA Team had no one in Taiwan to ask. Later on the collab was confirmed for the Japanese and English versions, truly cementing the Taiwanese version as the odd-version-out.
  • Remote Body: Dummy Link technology allows T-Dolls to remotely control multiple bodies at once, with the original acting as a mainframe and the dummies only able to receive and execute orders, greatly enhancing their combat effectiveness. In-game, this also serves as a sort of health gating. Note that Sangvis Ferri units will also come Dummy Linked in later maps, though they won't benefit from the health gating aspect.
  • Rescue Src: Operation Aeneas, which covers Fixed Point, ‘’Longitudinal Strain, Eclipses and Saros, and Slow Shock'', covers the Commander leading what's left of G&K, Sabgvis Ferri, and an allied Statesec force to assault Avernus in a bid to rescue Ange. In this respect, the mission ends up being All for Nothing, as an exhausted Ange allows RPK-16 to pull a Grand Theft Me on her so that William can be defeated.
  • Retraux: The two exclusive VA-11 HALL-A dorm furniture sets, "Jill's Room" and "Pixel Cafe", are noticeably low-res compared to the rest of the game, serving as a nod to the original game's pixel art style. The corresponding event also had a freely obtainable cutout stand with VA-11 HALL-A's UI on it as one of the rewards, which is just as low-res.
  • Ridiculously Human Robots: Android technology has advanced so much that they are nearly indistinguishable from regular humans. Your Tactical Dolls, for example, can eat human food, sleep (though this is sometimes referred to as "hibernation"), become inebriated through drinking liquor, and even bleed. Oh yeah, they had personalities too which makes them nearly border on Artificial Human. One exchange in the Single Master event mentions that making a T-Doll replica of someone is possible, as long as sufficient data is collected. This explains the "T-Dolls" obtainable from crossover events, but how they are able to replicate their explicitly magical abilities is another question entirely.
    • The Nytos take this even further. Several characters notes that they seem to spurt blood when shot, and Nyto Polarday is described as "blasted like a watermelon" when M82A1 shot her. And yet they are still robotic enough for UMP45 to hack them. Chapter 11 eventually revealed on why all the new faction's units nearly have this trait. Most of their humanoid units have human parts with them. Chapter 12 further confirms that the Nytos are vat-grown humans modified with cybernetics, with the aim of making their brains compatible with OGAS.
  • Robot War:
    • The whole story goes to start as Sangvis Ferri's AI went rogue against it's owner takeover the robots and androids under Sangvis Ferri and commence an all-out war against humanity.
    • World War III was the first war where military robots saw widespread use. The Soviet Union, though initially apprehensive of doll technology, was forced to pioneer their military applications due to mounting casualties and logistical problems.
  • Rock Beats Laser: Your T-Dolls, who can be armed with anything from bolt-action rifles to 19th century revolvers, will cut through scores of advanced robots and androids.
  • Romance Sidequest: Each T-Doll has their own affection meter, which can be increased through various means. Once at 100, you can choose to marry her. Married T-Dolls have 30% faster repair rate, additional voice lines, and an increased affection meter (from 100 to 150)
  • Rule of Cool: No PMC worth its salt in reality would field the absurd amount of diverse firearm types featured in the game, much less a standing army of any capacity. Due to the sheer range of different ammunition types, keeping them all consistently stocked for any meaningful amount of time would be a logistical nightmare, which was why standardized equipment, particularly a trend of every individual weapon using the same ammo, became a thing in modern warfare. And that's not getting to the literal antiques used by certain T-Dolls, cancelled prototypes, or those that have long been rendered obsolete.
     S - Z 
  • Schizo Tech: Apart from the T-Dolls themselves covering the late nineteenth century up to the present, the data room at some levels can for instance have widescreen monitors and networked printers, but store data in boxes of file folders and mission reports are drafted on typewriter.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
    • This is what the "heavy damage protection" setting in the options boils down to: outside of boss battles or combat simulations, any T-Doll who is critically damaged will automatically retreat from the current fight. This only applies to the battle in which they were damaged in, however; you have to manually tell them to retreat if the echelon enters combat again before you can repair anyone, or risk them going down for real and taking a sizable ding to affection.
    • In the lore, a faction of the United Nations built a massive apocalypse bunker in Antarctica and evacuated most of the world's most influential figures to it shortly before the start of World War III, sealing themselves inside and never being heard from since. This group of survivors would later go on to become the Antarctic Union.
    • Heavy Ordnance Corps don't have a traditional health bar, instead getting instantly defeated when an enemy occupies their node. This is portrayed on the battle screen as the HOC team abandoning their weapons and running away from the approaching enemies, with a few exceptions ineffectually attempting to fight back.
  • Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains: Played straight where Griffin & Kryuger T-Dolls tend to cover more while Sangvis Ferri humanoid units tend to cover less, except for some few examples, see Stripperiffic below.
  • Set Bonus: Appears in a few areas.
    • Some characters have special equipment sets (like Agent 416) which modify their skills if enough of them are equipped. For example, equipping specific sets of equipment to Jill Stingray lets her modify what her skill does.
    • Some characters have special Unity skills when in the same formation with one or more compatible units. For example, AK-Alfa and FI M82 have a skill which lets AK-Alfa deal more damage to enemies directly in front of her and FI M82.
    • The Commander can gain minor bonuses to various abilities (such as affection gain or increased drop rate) by buying specific sets of personal clothing and by collecting sets of Dolls (such as members of 404 and DEFY, or logistics dolls).
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story: The whole The Division collab is this. The 10 million dollars bounty promised to the winner? A hoax from MDR and RFB to lure more players into the game. How exactly Fang and Hellfire relate to 416 and Vector? They're just copies of their neural clouds Dier made and tweaked to turn them into super-powered NPCs before their data got corrupted and, thinking they were enemy NPCs, went rogue. Do RFB and MDR finally manage to win the game? By the time they manage to connect to the server again, everybody including "Dima" left. The only winner in the whole affair is Kalina, who used the money she made by livestreaming the events and taking bets from the Dolls to get G&K's accounts back in the black.
  • Shoot the Dog: One flashback in Chapter 12 shows AR-15 and M4A1 (whose body was being hijacked by her OGAS) executing unarmed civilians and KCCO personnel. They do have a logical reasoning for this: these people were already infected by ELID. By leaving them as-is, it will prolong their suffering as well as risk having their zombified selves attack them later on.
  • Shout-Out: Has its own page.
  • Shown Their Work: Belgrade, the setting for Chapter 11 and the Isomer event, uses a scaled-down but otherwise accurate map of the real Belgrade in overworld maps.
  • Situational Sword: T-Dolls with Night skills are only good for exactly that: nighttime battles. During the day, their bonuses are often poor at best, and low to the point of being nigh-useless at worst, and literally any other generalized T-Doll of their type can outperform them with ease. At night, however, the difference is literally night and day, especially if they're equipped with the correct gear.
  • Sixth Ranger: The Fairies fill this role in any echelon, either as an additional buff provider and damage dealer, or as pure utility.
  • Sliding Scale Of Silliness VS Seriousness: Do not be fooled by the fact that this is a game with a cute Military Moe art style, Girl's Frontline is one of the most serious mobile games you will see in the market and one of the most serious Girls with Guns plots ever made (with only Gunslinger Girl reaching the same level), and the main story dealing with the lives lost in combat, horrifying war crimes and antagonists that range from sociopaths to just plain tragic. It's not without lighthearted moments though, with many T-Doll costumes that range from chuckle-worthy (Grizzly's Teddy bear clothes) to completely hilarious (M870's Pumpkin disguise), and plenty of funny (and cute) reactions from them in dormitory interactions (which also happen to feature the occasional snarky explanation for the pieces of furniture). The anime, meanwhile, divebombs into the silly side, the Madness Chapter in particular practically being an animated 4Koma, with random and zany moments that coupled with the Super-Deformed character designs makes it pretty clear that you are not supposed to take it seriously.
  • Small Girl, Big Gun:
    • The Russian anti-material rifle KSVK canonically becomes significantly shorter upon being upgraded to her MOD 3, with many estimates leaving her to be no taller than 4 feet(1.2 Meters.)
    • Multiple tactical dolls such as AAT-52, M200, M99, and many such other examples don't even look tall enough to reach the second tallest shelf in a supermarket, yet use unwieldy machine guns and anti-material rifles as their main armament.
  • Smashing Watermelons: In the "Far Side of the Sea" event, Five-seveN talks SPAS-12 into doing this blindfolded and with an axe, instead of simply divvying and sharing the watermelon the latter brought. Unbeknownst to them, the watermelon was placed a palm's length away from the Commander's head, as M37 and M1 Garand had previously buried them there. Needless to say, SPAS-12 came dangerously close to being an accidental Hero Killer.
  • Spell My Name With An S:
    • Some events' English names tend to be completely different than a direct translation of its Chinese name. For example Operation Cube is actually Operation Rubik's Cube (魔方行动), Operation Arctic Warfare's Chinese name translates to "Operation Hypothermia", and so on.
    • Dorothy Haze's given name gets this treatment in the Chinese and Taiwanese servers, where each server transliterates her given name with completely different hanzi: 多萝西 (CN), 桃乐丝 (TW).
  • Stone Wall: Both Submachineguns (SMG) and Shotguns (SG) fill this role, though in different ways despite both having high base health. SMGs rely on their evasion, while SGs use their thick armor to shrug off incoming damage. They synergize well with ARs and MGs, respectively. Their damage output, however, is limited with a few exceptions, and SMGs suffer from their horrible accuracy and base damage while SGs from a very low rate of fire and the reloading mechanic.
  • Story and Gameplay Segregation:
    • Certain T-Dolls dying, being decommissioned, or are otherwise rendered lost throughout the campaign does not actually remove said Doll from the player's roster.
    • In a more general sense, the campaign cutscenes give the impression that every T-Doll is unique and only one of each kind is in active duty, which goes out the window because duplicate T-Dolls can be obtained from production. Furthermore, despite the game making a huge deal out of players needing to keep the uber-unique Anti-Rain squad due to them being one-of-a-kind and cannot be regained otherwise, the Recovery mechanic released several months down the line made this heavy emphasis an utter joke. This particular segregation was addressed with the Original Generation The Division T-Dolls, who are explicitly the same as other existing T-Dolls in the roster, serving roles as SHD agents.
    • No matter what T-Dolls are actually being fielded, the only ones that show up in cutscenes are the main characters for the chapter or event as well as any T-Dolls getting their day in the limelight.
    • In all regional versions of the game, the Protocol Assimilation update - a mechanic where you capture enemy units for Griffin to use - was released shortly after the Polarized Light event, which makes some sense since the KCCO beat down both Griffin and Sangvis Ferri to the point where they have to team up against their mutual enemy. However, the lore surrounding the update has nothing to do with Polarized Light at all - in fact, it's unlocked after beating Chapter 7 alongside Heavy Ordnance Corps.
  • Stripperiffic: Sangvis Ferri humanoid units tend to bare a lot of skin. For the T-Dolls, AS Val wears bikini top (or midriff-baring tank top in the censored version) and a miniskirt.
  • Stuff Blowing Up: Some ARs and SMGs can lob explosive grenades as their skills. Certain fairies may also call in artillery support or airstrikes. On the enemy side, you have the Jaguar drones armed with mortars, and Destroyer with dual automatic grenade launchers.
  • Suicide, Not Murder: While Ange and Team Defy investigate a German orphanage with a possible connection with Paradeus, they discovered the orphanage's Headmother dead in her room. At first, everyone thinks the headmother was killed in an attempted robbery by the immigrants living nearby. However, Ange and Defy discover the headmother actually killed herself out of guilt for working with the far-right terrorist group, the German Independence Party, where sold some of her orphans to them as the latter were working with Paradeus by providing them human test subjects. Knowing she couldn't report to the local police as they were taking bribes from the GIP and was being monitored by them, the headmother killed herself before Ange's arrival, knowing that Ange, working on behalf of the German government, would learn the truth about the GIP's human trafficking. A GIP mole working as a one of the orphanage's guard tried to cover up the headmother's suicide by making it look like she was murdered by the immigrants. However, he didn't count that the headmother gave a confession letter to one of the orphans who instructed her to give the letter to Ange.
  • Super-Deformed: Characters are represented in chibi proportions in actual gameplay.
  • Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: Tactical Dolls who are retired only had their fire control core removed. This means they retain their increased strength and durability. While these traits are desirable for working in, say, a factory or mines, one would be hard pressed to explain why a waiter or a receptionist would need superhuman physical abilities.
  • Super Prototype: Regular G&K T-Dolls actually have little to no tactical ability, being only able to respond by following commands or basic training materials. Both M4A1 and RO635 are experimental units with independent command abilities. Though they still can't match a human Commander, at least M4A1 is unique enough to warrant SF attention.
  • Support Party Member: The Support Fairies are these, if their classification wasn't obvious enough. Their main use is to augment echelons with additional stats and various abilities, such as calling in off-screen airstrikes and mortar bombardments, or letting echelons deploy on neutral landing zones.
  • Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
    • Unlike G&K or Sangvis Ferri, the KCCO opts to use practical-looking robots without extraneous features such as human-like appearance or emotion emulation. The result is that their units have much higher combat effectiveness compared to PMC dolls.
    • Like modern tanks, the military's laser-shooting tanks cannot depress their main guns enough to hit targets that are too close. Unlike modern tanks, they don't seem to have a coaxial or pintle-mounted machine gun to deal with infantry closing in. 404 squad attempts to exploit these two weaknesses and it's still not enough. Turns out you do need anti-tank weapons to effectively deal with armor. UMP45 got grievously wounded for all their trouble.
    • The primary reason that G&K is able to survive encounters with KCCO that the latter is usually preoccupied dealing with other threats, such as Sangvis Ferri or Paradeus. In Polarized Light, however, with Paradeus in hiding and Sangvis Ferri effectively defeated, KCCO can focus its attention solely on Griffin. The results are not pretty, and the Commander and his forces are, essentially, the only members of Griffin to survive the initial assault.
    • Going toe-to-toe against what is essentially a Terminator with built-in aimbot is scary, even if you're a veteran trooper from one of the world's most advanced armed force, as the unlucky KCCO commandos in Polarized Light find out. The same scene also shows that proper tactics, intel, and on-the-fly thinking allow a regular human being to defeat an elite T-Doll, though this comes at the cost of the entire KCCO squad.
    • Following the events of Singularity, Griffin techs up its forces and adds in Heavy Ordnance Crews to assist their operatives, which helps them face off against Paradeus and the Isomer. When they face KCCO in Polarized Light, though, Griffin gets practically annihilated. Even though KCCO has less advanced technology than the Isomer or Paradeus, KCCO is a military force with incredible discipline and resources, while the other groups are essentially well-funded terrorists and thus lack the same level of discipline. This in turn is turned over its head with the second half of Polarized Light, as Griffin dolls do not fear death and have unshakable faith on the Commander. As a result, they lose very little morale even after 95% of their numbers are wiped out. Between this, the Commander's own tactics, and some external help, they manage to mount a surprising amount of resistance, to the point of demoralizing KCCO soldiers and forcing their commander, Yegor, to personally step into the battlefield.
  • Temporary Online Content: Nine times out of ten, T-Dolls obtainable from events are this. With exceptions of those who are granted as event milestone prizes, however, lower-rarity T-Dolls (e.g. PSG-1, ARX-160, etc...) that are limited map drops are usually added to the production pool at a later date, or could be obtained the same way during future seasons. Averted with limited time furniture resupplies, which get added to the general pool of furniture.
    • Alternative costumes for certain crossover characters are sold directly through the in-game store and can only be bought with real money. These typically remain until their related events are over, after which point no amount of cash will get you any.
  • Ten Little Murder Victims: The 2020 White Day event, rather bizarrely, has this setting, and the only real tie to the holiday in question is opening the event with a dead PK wearing a wedding dress. Lee-Enfield even lampshades this by likening their predicament to "a cheap detective novel", with Makarov comparing Lee to Sherlock Holmes. There's also a Haunted House theme throughout the event, with the various T-Dolls under Lee's command repeatedly wondering out loud if ghosts were involved in the murder, with a diary from the now-deceased mansion owner seemingly confirming this possibility. The end of the event has Lee correctly deduce that the "ghost" was actually a rogue home caretaker AI possessing one of her squad members. PK's murder was part of a convoluted plan to get literally anyone to retrieve her late master's prized hand-crafted wedding dresses out of the mansion for the world to see, all without letting itself get detected by anyone.
  • Theme Naming:
    • Aside from the obvious gun names for Griffin's T-Dolls, most of the human characters ingame are named after, or allude to flowers and plants. For instance, Helian's full name is Helianthus, which is the scientific name for sunflowers, while Kalina is a name that means sweet viburnum. Even Bereznovich Kryuger complies with this, as his full name means "Son of the cypress tree".
    • The mechanical KCCO units are named after entities and monsters from the Classical Mythology.
    • The enigmatic White Faction follows a theme of using Medieval European military units for their non-boss combatants.
  • They Call Him "Sword":
    • All T-Doll in-series are named after their weapons. While this makes sense on an individual scale, it does not when one consider the fact that no firearm is practically unique due to mass production, therefore any Doll could theoretically pick up a certain gun and use it, which complicates the narrative. To make matters even more confusing, some of the T-Doll firearms are also being actively used by other characters and factions as their own weapons, such as a shot of Kalina wielding an AKS-74U during the same event that introduced the T-Doll for said weapon, KCCO infantry and Cyclops wielding AN-94s while there's also an AN-94 T-Doll running around, or CAWS carrying a Tokarev TT-33 as a sidearm.
    • The game seems to treat each T-Doll as one-of-a-kind from a narrative stand point, however, regardless of duplicates and/or dummies, and based on the backstory of certain T-Dolls like SPAS-12 and DP-12, they seem to have their own names as A-Dolls, but choose to identify by their firearms when assigned to active duty as T-Dolls.
    • Some event flashbacks frame this trope as being named after the first weapon that was "imprinted" onto a T-Doll, as was the case with UMP45 when she was first activated. In another flashback regarding M4's activation, she asks her creator Persica why they're named after their imprinted weapons. Persica doesn't know the exact answer herself and assumes that it's just one of Berezovitch Kryuger's weird personal quirks.
  • Three Laws-Compliant:
    • G&K T-Dolls are unable to harm human beings unless they are authorized by the Commander to do so. Averted with Sangvis Ferri dolls, whose A.I. Is a Crapshoot circumventing the robotic laws allows them to attack humans indiscriminately.
    • Some plotlines involve showing the problems with G&K T-Dolls being compliant with the Second Law of Robotics, most often the fact that loyalty to humans doesn't really work out when no humans are giving T-Dolls orders. Special T-Dolls like M4A1 were given command authority specifically to get around this issue.
  • Through His Stomach: The most efficient way to raise a T-Doll's affection is gifting them sweets in the dormitory.
  • Title Drop: Oddly enough, occurs during the VA-11 HALL-A crossover event.
    M16: Haha, I’m not actually an old soldier or anything. If you count up the time from the moment I was born into this world until now, I’d only be a teenage girl. It’s just that I’ve been on the frontline ever since I opened my eyes.
    Jill: A girls' frontline, I understand.
  • Token Enemy Minority: Certain T-Dolls are all but confirmed to be converted Sangvis Ferri units. Examples of these are the UMP40/45 duo note , and M1887note .
  • Too Dumb to Live: You'd think that after the Beilan Island Incident, other countries would put an immediate freeze on Collapse Fluid research. However, an American research company attempted to break open a recovered Collapse Fluid crystal, resulting in the destruction of Salt Lake City and the entire western half of the United States, Canada, and most of South America getting irradiated. Meanwhile in Scandinavia, an experiment in compressing Collapse Fluid went horribly wrong and resulted in an explosion, irradiating large swathes of Europe.
  • Truce Zone: Belgrade is revealed to be this during Isomer. The local government maintains absolute neutrality in the post-WWIII politics, which makes it hard for foreign influence to get a hold in the city. This makes it an ideal grounds for a peace summit between the UN and Soviet Union. This also means that Belgrade is without protection offered by either faction, which makes it easy for a malicious party to interrupt the conference.
  • 20 Minutes into the Future: The game takes place in the year 2062. Chapter 9 and a book bundled with The Art of Girls Frontline indicate that 30 years later, the events of Codename: Bakery Girl would take place.
  • Unexpected Gameplay Change:
    • The DJMAX event had "battles" where players would literally play 5-button DJMAX right on top of the game's interface. Hitting a note using the skill buttons caused the T-Doll associated with it to fire at the enemy.
    • The VA-11 HALL-A event had a minigame taking place in Springfield's bar (natch) that emulated the original game's mixology gameplay.
    • The Bounty Feast event had a bonus mission that turns the game into a cover-based shooter, much like The Division itself.
    • In a more general sense, the way certain bosses are designed (especially in events) can make players feel like they've suddenly switched to playing a Real-Time Strategy, complete with requiring a decent APM to dodge some of the more intricate attack patterns.
  • Unexpected Shmup Level: In Shattered Connexion, the final battle between M4A1 and Isomer Black or rather, Nimogen is a Bullet Hell Shoot 'em Up level. In this battle, you need to move your unit with an analog stick to dodge bullets while using your unit skills to take down the boss.
  • Universal Ammunition: The game is very weird about its implementation of this trope.
    • On one hand, all T-Dolls draw from the same ammunition pool, and use one-fifth of their supply for every battle. The only difference is their rate of consumption. This gets particularly silly with Heavy Ordnance Corps, which also draw from that ammo pool, despite their ammo types starting at "grenade launcher" and only getting larger in caliber from there.
    • On the other, there exist several T-Dolls who could equip more than one type of ammo, that are ostensibly different calibers, while using the same weapon. Contender and 6P62 come to mind, who could equip the standard ammunition types for their classes, in addition to AP rounds that are meant for high-caliber RFs and MGs.
  • Unusual Chapter Numbers: Story events are treated as "in-between" chapters in the overall campaign.
    • Arctic Warfare is listed as "Campaign Ep. 7.5".
    • Operation Cube is "Chapter 5.5", while Cube+ is "Chapter 7.75" in the Index.
    • Deep Dive is listed as "Chapter 8.5".
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The seven middle-school students who broke into the quarantined Beilan island facility for shits and giggles in 2030. In their carelessness, they inadvertently released the sealed-off ELID virus, which was ejected into the stratosphere and scattered globally when the facility was blown up to contain it.
  • Urban Warfare: Operation Isomer takes place in the streets of Belgrade, featuring a Mêlée à Trois between Belgradian troops, rebel forces, Paradeus units, and the G&K dolls caught in the crossfire. And then Sangvis Ferri ringleaders show up.
  • Useless Useful Skill: One would think that the accuracy bonus provided night-ops-only Flare Launcher skill found on certain HG T-dolls could be used to bypass night-ops 90% accuracy penalty, allowing T-dolls that can't equip IR laser sights to fight as effectively at night as they can during the day, or allow T-dolls that can equip them to use other optical/gun attachments (such as whatever attachments that would normally be used in daytime ops) instead. Unfortunately, this is not the case due to the bonus being multiplicative, and applied AFTER penalties. At best, this skill will only soften the accuracy penalty from 90% to 80%. As an result, the two T-dolls with this skill, P38 and C96, are relegated as scrap.
  • Variable Mix: Most of the campaign missions feature this, having a calmer-sounding track for the field map and a more intense one when engaging enemies. After an update, however, the system broke, and missions with more than one track only ever play the in-battle version now.
  • The Virus:
    • Eurovsky Low-Emission Infectious Disease, or more commonly known as ELID. The result of human exposure to collapse fluid. Most people die shortly after exposure, but those with some degree of resistance will find their skin siliconized and their higher brain functions eroded, until they are left as nothing more than a shambling husk. Supplemental materials mention that ELID mutates the body on the cellular level; infected cells possess an organelle that emits radiation in the same wavelength as Collapse Radiation, making each infectee a walking transmission vector.
    • The Parapluie virus, which corrupts a T-Doll's mind until their digi-mind melts down. UMP45 contracted this virus during Operation Cube and nearly succumbed to it in Deep Dive. The same happened to M16 in chapter 8, but she intentionally let the virus corrupt her in order to save M4A1. Shattered Connexion reveals that Parapluie is a method of propagation used by OGAS. Once it gains a foothold, it rewrites the doll's operating system into an OGAS program, which causes their digi-mind to overload unless they can bear the massive processing burden.
  • The Voiceless: There are a handful of T-Dolls who never received voice lines to play in-game. While this doesn't mean they are mute, as they still talk all the same where relevant, they're just silent whenever they do "speak".
  • We Will Spend Credits in the Future: The Flavor Text for Gems paints it as "the new universal currency, established in this era of chaos". Played with in that regular fiat currency still seems to be around as the description goes on to say that "in some places, it's better than money".
  • Weapon Tombstone: M4A1 makes a wooden replica of ST AR-15's weapon after the latter's apparent death.
  • Wham Episode: Pretty much every major event (and several story chapters). Listing them all would take an entire page.
    • Chapter 6 of the main campaign, in which AR-15 sacrifices herself to save M4A1
    • Deep Dive reveals that the Butterfly Incident was orchestrated by the military all along.
    • Singularity is the point where the military steps into the conflict. It also features M16A1 as a boss.
    • Continuum Turbulence introduces the white faction, who is hostile to both SF and KCCO, hinting that something much bigger is going in the background.
  • When It All Began: The latter part of Deep Dive's flashbacks takes place during the Butterfly Incident, in which Elisa was awakened and began taking over the entire Sangvis Ferri forces. Polarized Light and Chapter 13 would later revisit this scene for more plot revelations.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Played with. G&K dolls are depicted as well-treated by their human superiors. Certain random node events mention an "Android Rights Group", and unlawful conversion of civilian doll into a T-Doll is a crime punishable by prison. Not everyone shares the same view, obviously. Dolls are generally considered to be much more expendable than human life, regardless of their self-awareness. One woman in Chapter 11 goes as far to call SOPMOD II "trash" and treats her as such.
  • Whole Episode Flashback: Chapters 1 and 2 of Continuum Turbulence are essentially the Commander, under interrogation, retelling the aftermath of Singularity to one of the ring leaders of the new faction.
  • A Wizard Did It: Crossover T-Dolls usually have their presence in the Commander's base explained as the characters in question being Neural Clouds stored somewhere. The only events to not fully commit to this are the Guilty Gear/BlazBlue event (Noel doesn't get a justification for her presence on the Commander's base) and the Dropkick on My Devil event (her acquisition dialogue implies the Commander summoned her, much like Yurine did).
  • World of Action Girls: Out of all named members of Griffin & Kryuger, Mr. Kryuger himself is the sole male, and he doesn't take to the front lines anymore. Later story chapters and events have introduced more male characters who are both plot-relevant and competent in fights. However, they are still outnumbered heavily by the rest of the cast, are women with varying degrees of fighting prowess and men in non-combat roles.
  • Xtreme Kool Letterz: The Summer 2019 event, Operation Shattered Connexion, looks like an example, but it's subverted by the fact that it's using the French word for "connection", which is indeed spelled that way.
  • You Have Researched Breathing: Many T-Dolls character arts conspicuously depict them as having certain attachments or mods fitted to their weapons, though in order to actually gain their bonuses one has to manually craft or find, and then equip said Dolls with those same items.
  • You Require More Vespene Gas: Resources are divided into four: Manpower, Ammunition, Rations, and Parts. Out of these four, Parts are the hardest to obtain. Resources naturally regenerate at the rate of 3 units (1 for Parts) every three minutes, up to a cap determined by your current rank. The fastest way to get them is through Logistic Support missions, or just buying them through the shop.
  • Zombie Apocalypse:
    • A localized one in Operation Singularity. After M4A1 detonated the Collapse Fluid during the Singularity event, some flesh-and-blood military personnel are caught in the blast radius. A large number of them are infected with ELID as a result.
    • It's implied that a downplayed version of this trope is still going on in many parts of the world.

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