Despite this not being the first one I’ve reviewed, I’m always kind of impressed when I hear a gacha phone game got an anime, especially once it’s been out a bit rather than as a launch or pre-launch outing like Takt Op Destiny. Perhaps I shouldn’t be – I know that an anime outing can be more of an advert than a culmination, and I know that even a phone gacha game can be used as a storytelling medium, potentially creating something at least decent to work off. But games in general are a source that has struggled to find success in adaption and phone games are a particularly troubled subset. So when I see there’s an anime of Girls’ Frontline (also called Dolls’ Frontline), I both feel some appreciation for the fact that something with such an inauspicious beginning managed to go the distance, and deeply worried that the final product is going to hurt.
Unlike Azur Lane, I haven’t played GFL, so I’ve gone into this completely blind as a new viewer, arguably the kind of person that the show wants to attract and be appealing and memorable to. Why? Because I’m a glutton for punishment and people like it when I review something I should have dreaded watching. Is it really all that bad, though? Let’s take a look.
The show gets its backstory out very quickly, with a narration telling us that the titular Girls are T-Dolls, humanoid robots (“visually indistinguishable from humans”, they say) that were built to fight World War III, after which a group of them rebelled against whatever was left of humanity, leading the Dolls to fight against each other once again. Why they all look like cute girls, I have no idea. At least Azur Lane had an excuse, if a paper-thin one
We’re then thrown into a mission with the main character squad, consisting of the young and uncertain leader, M4, her big sister M16, the exuberant SOPII, and the reserved AR15. Yes they are all named after guns. We also get to see a number of other Dolls, and except for the leads and the villain called Agent (of whom there are also multiple copies), most of them seem to be actually fairly robotic in mind, not understanding things that they haven’t been programmed to accept, like a group of abandoned dolls (multiple copies of each of three models) still thinking they’re undertaking their mission and blindly obeying the orders they’re given, or the hordes of faceless enemies (called Sangvis) marching forward like gun-wielding zombies.
Completing the McGuffin Recovery proves to be hard, and the team splits up to throw off pursuit, with M4 in particular starting to talk about finding them a commander they can trust (which is out of nowhere since they seem to be operating in the field just fine, with central at home that can order them around just fine). Naturally, this cuts to the arrival of a new commander, named Gentiane, at the squad’s home base. I’d guess this lady is standing in for the “Player character” role, which is at least an interesting choice.
Gentiane plays into the “unusually caring” trope as she is assigned a mission just after arrival, and chooses to interview the dolls rather than just picking which ones she’ll use based on their technical specifications, much to the surprise of the logistics officer, Kalina. This leads her to form a squad of new secondary characters and take them on a mission, where we see that the Commander seems to stay on base as a long-range handler and that a T-doll can apparently maintain several fighting-capable dummies in her own image. I’m not sure how this is supposed to be better than regular mass production, but that’s neither here nor there. The bigger issue is that the mission doesn’t add to much else. True, we do need to get introduced to the facts of combat in this world and Gentiane’s particular style (which is very technical and, due to that whole caring thing, averse to losses even with the dolls having mind backups), but we could have done that with something that would carry plot, rather than a literal test for Gentiane.
We then launch into an actual mission, hunting an elite enemy known as Scarecrow. Gentaine does her thing and brings Scarecrow down, which reveals that the Sangvis have some pretty advanced knowledge and their dolls seem to believe themselves to be evolved, in such a way that they think in a more human manner. Scarecrow even calls out the humans for hiding safe in their bases before traumatizing our nice new commander like a really bad imitation of 86. Scarecrow’s loose lips also reveal that the Sangvis are hunting M4 still, and presumably closing in on her.
This continues into the next episode, which is supposed to be a cat-and-mouse game between M4, the Sangvis Executioner hunting her, and Gentiane and her team trying to rescue her. However, both the storytelling and action are pretty choppy, so it ends up doing the bare minimum to tell us what happens, show a little gunfire, and set up that the next thing to do will, of course, be to rescue the rest of the main characters (or the dolls who should be main characters because they’re all over the intro and so on, but that’s beside the point).
M4 returns to base vowing to find her comrades at the end of Episode 3, and that’s as good a time as any to talk about the general traits of the show.
The animation is a very mixed bag. The characters look alright, but they rarely move well and the fighting ends up being kind of stiff and unnatural. It’s got a lot of the “constant gunfire” syndrome where everybody has bottomless magazines, which wouldn’t be worth noting if they didn’t talk about things like conserving ammo, and while every once in a while somebody will do something fairly cool, about as often there are motions that just plain fail.
The storytelling, meanwhile, is a little unfortunately like chess notation. Character goes here, pawn captures knight, next move prepared. This is a really unfortunate gutterball – the setup with Gentiane was primed to explore the dolls as characters, but they don’t really do it all that much. There’s a scene where she’s trying to figure out what M4 is like via M4’s records, and it just devolves into what sounds like reading off her wiki entry where someone tried to describe her personality. The time we spent playing around with the tutorial and Scarecrow probably could have been used to let us see it for ourselves, maybe having Gentiane give a shorter summation of what she’s noticed when we’ve had more than enough interactions to notice it for ourselves.
And, in three episodes, the stakes have been established somewhere between poorly and not at all. At one point, big boss lady tells Gentiane that the fate of all humanity lies on finding M4 before Sangvis does, but we have no concept of why that’s the case. Sangvis seems to be a fairly contained regional thing, able to be handled by the main character PMC group, Griffin, rather than being a global crisis. M4 was tasked with recovering, and contained within her, a file for a scientist who worked on creating T-dolls, but we don’t have much of a clue what the file contains or why it would be important. So was “fail and humanity goes extinct” a deadpan joke from Big Boss, or does she know something of dramatically more import about this whole situation. For that matter, what are the Sangvis dolls? Why are they a mass of personality-devoid useless drones with laser rifles and eccentric elites? What do their opponents at least believe to be their motive and threat level? A little intel would go a long way.
And for that matter, why girls with guns? What’s with the replication? Why do some dolls, despite still being robots with theoretically replaceable parts have noticeable scars like M16’s eyepatch or M4’s non-coated metal hand? Why is a literal Terminator, as that’s what these girls basically are, afraid of spiders? Somehow, in actually playing with the fact that these girls are machines who normally think differently than humans (M4 has a “command module” that explains her better ability for independent action and deep thinking) they opened up a ton of if not plot holes than what would be called Fridge Logic or Icebox Scenes.
The etymology of the former term is the latter, and the etymology of the latter comes from Alfred Hitchcock describing scenes that “Hit you after you’ve gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the ice box”. Basically, the idea describes the situation where you might not notice something wrong in the moment, but almost certainly will when considering the scenario at length. This isn’t as bad as an outright plot hole, the kind that you notice in the moment, but when it is either highly critical or fairly constant, it starts to really drag a work down. And there are a lot of Icebox elements in Girls’ Frontline. I don’t need much, just some paper-thin excuse, but I needed it early to accept the foundation as one for dramatic storytelling.
But really, the issue that’s most flagrant here in the start is the lack of well-defined emotional stakes. They make it clear that most if not all dolls can restore from their backup and still be themselves, which means that once M4’s squad touches base we presumably don’t have to worry about any of them in any meaningful sense. Gentiane, as much as she seems hurt when dolls under her command die or are injured (again, with no lasting consequences to either), is never going to be in any real danger unless she breaks out of her handler role. Sangvis has unclear motives and an unclear scope of operation, so they’re more weird than anything else, and we aren’t particularly invested in stopping them. And, of course, nobody bothered to explain what the MacGuffin was in any way that sells its importance before we got it back. Between that and the fact that the military action in this military action show is mediocre at best, it should be pretty easy for a casual viewer to write off Girls’ Frontline after the baseline three episodes.
Me, thought? I’ve got to go through the whole thing for you folks, looking for something of value to salvage.
You would think the next arc looks up, since it involves M4 wanting to rescue the rest of her squad (which should have emotional stakes), an attack on the base (which should put Gentiane in danger), and even, after picking up SOPII and making a dramatic rescue of AR15 from an enemy base, a Griffin-aligned kill team hunting for M16 even as M4 and friends try to rescue her from the Sangvis. But most of this is predicated on combat as the major hurdle (not necessarily a bad thing) and the combat in this show has some very particular faults. The low effort in the animation, leading to a lot of very static shots of muzzle flashes or generic goons being shot down certainly doesn’t help, but that’s not the biggest issue. The big issue is that, for all that they talk military stuff, Gentiane must be playing on easy mode. The generic enemies pretty much stand there and die, and the elite bosses (in addition to not being encountered all that often) mostly go down like chumps after just a little grandstanding.
There are two sides to this. One is that it’s implied that attrition should be the big killer for the Griffin forces: there’s no end to the Sangvis horde, so even if their drones are individually complete garbage, they will ultimately be able to overrun their foes with sheer numbers. This would be fine… if we ever saw it. I touched on this before, but while the thinkers of the group talk about ammunition a good deal, we never see anybody run out, not even the members of M4’s squad who have been on their own for a while (they also fire constantly, in a way that would burn through as much ammo as you could carry in a matter of seconds if it didn’t melt the gun barrel first, but that’s common of even good military fiction). There can be exceptions, but there it’s hard scripted; they didn’t run out because the fighting was long and resupply distant, they ran out because the plot needed them to.
Much better media has gone with the attrition route. 86 did it with the Legion being practically without number, and we saw the damage that the Legion was able to do. In Muv Luv material like Schwarzesmarken or Alternative, the smaller non-laser BETA (Tank class and below) aren’t individually threatening to TSFs, but we see, constantly, that they’re quite capable of overrunning TSFs and killing pilots, as well as the threat of the larger ones being constant and numerically overwhelming as well. It’s easy to see and understand that, in those situations, the protagonist faction could lose.
In any case, SOPII is recovered fairly easily. AR15 is taken prisoner by the elite Sangvis, Hunter, and held in a large base, but manages to help the team free her by slipping her bonds and hacking the goons so they fight among themselves. M16 gets a somewhat more involved arc, since she’s busy skulking around and doing side missions while people are trying to find her. This ends in a conflict with the theatrical Sangvis ringleader, Intruder, who she shows up to finish off. Throughout this, the Sangvis elites run their mouths a good deal without actually saying much of anything about what they want. There’s some implication that at least some of them may be seeking True Death. Aside from the fact I feel that there are far less convoluted ways to accomplish that, it doesn’t exactly make for solid antagonism, so what are we really supposed to be fearing?
By the next episode, it’s months after Episode 1. Agent hasn’t been seen in a while, and the weirdness of Sangvis seems to weigh on everyone. It’s also noted that some official reports don’t seem to match up to reality. The time skip here is a little disconcerting, as Gentiane goes from being green with good instincts to being only kind of a rookie, with several off-screen incidents lensing how she views things.
This leads to everyone (mostly Gentiane and a bunch of other commanders from other groups) being invited to a secret underground base, which then suddenly falls under attack. This time the Sangvis actually put up a fight, breaching the base with artillery and then sending in mildly more effective non-humanoid drones rather than just the useless goon squad. This is what the earlier base siege should have felt like, even if it does little more than make me flash to other, better “defend the base” sequences.
M4 and team, outside the base when the attack hit, are then tapped to go find and defeat the Sangvis base, since apparently that’s the only way to break the siege, and given command of all other units not pinned in the main base in order to do so. The “Find” part goes quickly, with the team locating the base trivially and even infiltrating it to be right on the heels of the Sangvis elite, Destroyer. That’s apparently enough to lift the siege, but naturally Destroyer still needs to be dealt with.
At the same time, it seems like AR15 has been hacked, and was (intentionally or not) leaking info like the location of the secret base and the time of the secret meeting there to the Sangvis. She’s taken in for maintenance, while everyone else goes for Destroyer. They manage to disassemble Destroyer’s remaining forces and encounter her as she tries to retreat personally, which would have been a fine win if not for a sudden comms disruption that lets her bolt. Destroyer’s superior, Dreamer, seems more than happy to leave this incarnation of Destroyer hanging, much to the latter’s horror. I guess at least one Sangvis elite doesn’t want to die. Dreamer does ultimately use some artillery blasting to end the pursuit of Destroyer and send the main team running
At the same time, AR15 breaks out of containment and goes rogue, causing the top brass to issue an order to hunt her down and recover her, dead or alive. M4 wants to go to her friend, find her, and fix her, but after a talking to from M16 steels herself to follow the mission, as abortive as that ends up being. AR15, meanwhile, is confronted by one of Dreamer’s drones, which reveals she’s been hacked for quite some time and is doing what a true doll shouldn’t be able to do, disobeying orders. AR15 doesn’t seem to go for what sounds like a recruitment offer and instead vows to hunt down Dreamer.
Meanwhile, we finally formally reveal that, yes, the main team is different, made with much more sophisticated AI (several times more, they say) but that with that came the inability to back up their personas finally (in episode 10 of 12) giving some weight to anything awful that might befall one of our leading dolls. This is something that would have been good to know much earlier, to make their struggles feel a little more serious (though with the poor choreography and animation, it still would have been an uphill fight). This after another time skip (a week this time) in which AR15 is still AWOL and the rest of the team is reintroduced fighting with no real rhyme nor reason to what and why. Apparently continuity is for suckers.
The enemy turns out to be humans in absurdly thick StarCraft Marine armor, including (as is revealed after M4 manages to disarm them) Kryuger, the owner of the Griffin PMC, who spouts cryptic nonsense before marching on with his human goons, dolls in tow, before a flashback clues us in on the fact that they’re still hunting AR15 because she might be the lynchpin of the main Sangvis plan, now said to be the release of a T-doll virus.
We keep jumping around, putting the characters in different environments and situations (presumably because if you have consistency, the terrorists win) without any real sense of direction to their motion, until the next Sangvis elite is kind enough to introduce herself. This one is Alchemist, and she seems able to jam signals and deploy the sudden plot element that is the virus. This leads to another lame battle in a gray ruin, towards the conclusion of which AR15 appears to knock out SOPII and abduct M4.
Ultimately, AR15’s deal that was part of falls through – she’d hoped to buy M4’s safety with information, but M4 doesn’t know the answer to the question the Sangvis mastermind has. This leads her to encounter SOPII and hand off the intel she gathered and directions to where M4 is hidden. She then meets briefly with M16, in which she reveals that her plan is to more or less suicide bomb the Sangvis mastermind.
AR15 then goes and does exactly that. We get a long moment when it looks like she’s not going to get to use the detonator and a lame speech about how she loved/hated M4, but ultimately she does manage to blow up the building… which matters how, precisely? Even in the during/post credits scene we see that the Sangvis mastermind’s comment about not being threatened by the bomb wasn’t just bluster, and everyone was making it to evac well before the building blew, so AR15 blowing herself up really accomplished nothing.
I suppose it at least ended the show. M4 is sad, Gentiane is sad, we don’t dwell on any of it, and the war goes on with the Sangvis even apparently having a new infected sleeper agent lined up to replace AR15.
I’m not sure this is the worst military-themed show I’ve seen, but then I’ve seen some real stinkers. To compare it to the other Chinese Gacha game to get a Japanese Anime that I’ve reviewed already… yeah, Azur Lane was not exactly a high bar, and I really did hope that Girls’ Frontline would be able to pass it. But Azur Lane at least told a story where things happened in a sensible sequence, individuals had motivations, and something was accomplished by the end. That’s why, even if it wasn’t very good, it did sort of vaguely pass. Girls Frontline does not.
What happens in Girls Frontline? We deliver a MacGuffin that is never used and swiftly forgotten, fight some generic enemies and some less generic ones, all of which respawn, and get one buggy robot girl killed off for real only to be told in no uncertain terms that she’ll be replaced with another buggy android girl fairly quickly. There’s no sense of territory or battle lines, so I can’t say that the Sangvis were held back or pushed back or dealt blows. My understanding of the conflict is the same as it was in episode 1.
Who are the characters in Girls Frontline? I know a couple things about AR15 and everyone else is basically one note. Sometimes, that note doesn’t even make sense. Nobody really grows or changes or is explored. What did Gentiane go through, having to watch on a map while one of the dolls she cared about dies a final and absolute death? Presumably bad, but she just sort of frowns at the map for a couple of seconds in the one reaction shot we get.
What did I have to entertain me in Girls’ Frontline? Well, we’ve eliminated the plot and the characters, so we’re down to action and fanservice. The latter is pretty much nil. In a sense, I appreciate that. Not everything needs to go ecchi, even if the setup of “And they are all cute girls” is kind of inclined to. But it still means there’s nothing there to latch on to. And the action, more important by far, is absolutely atrocious. The Sangvis goons walk forward as walls of troop that randomly shoot laser beams and (logically, as they’re robots) never react when they die in one hit to the return fire that’s actually accurate. Even the fights with the elites are poorly handled. The elites can move around and do fighting stunts, but most of their conflicts boil down to static shots of muzzle flashes and a light-speed dodge here or there. And when there is no real stake in any of the fights in the show, because everyone involved is either someone you believe can respawn or (after the reveal) doesn’t have their outcome in any sort of question, there’s not really any drama even if the pendulum of combat swings a few times like it should.
Even the art itself isn’t good. The girls are cute when they’re supposed to be, but it’s a very generic cuteness built on models and faces with few significant traits and little detail. They’re forgettable designs, at least as displayed in the show.
I almost pity this. In some senses, it’s better than something like Star Driver that clearly had no idea what to do, but in the case of Girls’ Frontline, whenever they knew what to do they couldn’t execute that vision to any degree of competence.
If this show was going to be good, and that’s a big if, it was kind of set up to be something like a hybrid of 86 season 1 and Arpeggio of Blue Steel. You know, the scenario where we have a focal commander (Gentiane or Lena) who is safe at base all the time but has to deal with the burden and guilt of ordering others to fight and die, and the pain their own empathy causes them against the horrible realities of war. Or the scenario where we’re looking at a bunch of advanced AIs (The Dolls, particularly Sangvis elites and the main characters, or the Fog Mental Models) who are still robotic in some degree and don’t entirely understand humanity even as they experience it, letting us see something of their journey of self-discovery as something that’s neither human nor machine in its entirely. Those are the touchstones I would say are present and the goals that I would set for something with the pitch of Girls’ Frontline (again, not knowing jack about the game and how faithfully or not it was adapted or what its themes are apart from the show)
Instead, we got a bland little bit of hardtack, full of gunfire and devoid of meaning or interest. The opening animation and song is without a doubt the best part as it has an interesting style and the characters move in a dynamic way they never really get to do in the show itself. I know that’s not exactly unique and even good shows can turn their effort up to 11 to create a killer opening, but most of those shows have some meat or substance to them that means, even if the opening is darn flashy, you’re getting something else that’s of value out of the episode itself. Girls’ Frontline is so pointless that I don’t think that’s true.
For all these reasons, even if it’s not strictly the worst military show I’ve seen, Girls Frontline does earn an outright Fail. There’s less material that’s offensively bad here than in some Fails, but there is absolutely nothing redeeming it or pushing it upwards into the D range. If you play the game and you like it, more power to you, but I’d recommend absolutely anyone stay far away from this show.