Blooper: At various points, M4's M4A1 is badly drawn, including one particularly infamous shot where the magazine seems to be attached to the barrel and the foregrip to the suppressor.
Actually inverted in the case of IDW, whose seiyuu later lent her voice to San Diego, the equally-infamous Cute, but Cacophonic light cruiser in Azur Lane. Incidentally, both San Diego and IDW have a construction time of 1:10:00. The many similarities between them have not gone unnoticed by the playerbases.
In the "A Midsummer's Night Fantasy" login screen, Welrod is seen singing. Her voice actress, Asami Imai, is a talented singer, with her most famous role being Chihaya Kisaragi of The Idolmaster franchise.
Twice over in the case of AK-74M: first, for having Jenya Davidyuk as her seiyuu; and second, for her character design looking similar to Klara (coincidentally Jenya's debut VA role, to boot.)
Ascended Fanfic: Girls' Frontline: Glitch Land started life as a fan-made game.
SPAS-12's name (Sabrina) and her riot shield is canonized in her summer cafe story, along with hints of her past before joining G&K. See Word of Saint Paul below for more details.
In stories where Griffin and Sangvis Ferri T-Dolls are working together, G36 and Agent are often portrayed as being rivals due to sharing similar attire and personalities. Marrying a Protocol Assimilated Agent will have her suggest (jokingly, she claims) that you get rid of "The Other Head Maid". And just to avoid any confusion, G36 is the only Griffin T-Doll who wears a maid outfit as part of her normal attire.
Content Leak: M16's 5★ Coalition artwork was discovered in a Chinese test version of the game available to the public before the developers swiftly removed the files.
Character sprites for Valkyria Chronicles and its twosequels can still be found in the game's files, even though the collaboration is no longer planned.
All of the Sangvis Ferri bosses have fully voiced interaction dialogue like every other G&K T-Doll, implying an eventual Heel–Face Turn for them in the future. Said dialogue started becoming un-dummied with the release of the Protocol Control Center, starting with Scarecrow and Executioner becoming playable.
Many T-Dolls, chiefly SMGs like UMP40, initially had what seem to be grenade skills of some sort, before they were altered and given new abilities. Their chibi sprites still have throwing animations as a holdover.
AS Val originally had a grenade-launching ability similar to several other ARs, though it was removed. The grenade-firing animations could still be found in her game files.
IDW was designed with a grenade skill that was cut sometime during development, as her character files still have throwing animations.
Agent Vector has sprites and animations for a Sticky Bomb skill, but neither of them are actually used except during her victory animation. The skill ended up going to Agent 416 instead.
A curious and unfortunate case. KGP-9 game files were found as early as Operation Singularity, however it was discovered by dataminers that KGP-9's artist plagiarized the artwork of Poharan from Blade & Soul to create her visual appearance, having traced said character's official render◊ down to the pose and rose eyepatch. As such, in an unprecedented move, the developers scrubbed her from the game's files just prior to release, making her the only T-Doll on this page to not make the cut, at least for the time being.
Flip-Flop of God: The creators of the game can't seem to get the lore right as they say contradicting information:
In a Q&A with fans, the creators claim T-Dolls don't breathe yet some T-Dolls wear gas masks during the game's story, and some of them have breathing problems when inhaling smoke or gas.
This game lifts a number of gameplay mechanics straight from KanColle. Gacha rolls can be influenced by the number of materials used, players can boost stat gains from affection by marrying them for a small price per T-Doll, and both games have "fairies" as attack drones.
The Chinese version's reveal livestream for the Gunslinger Girl collab had MICA's CEO, Yu Zhong, reveal that a lot of the manga's lore was his initial inspiration for the plot of Girls' Frontline; namely, the political thriller aspects of the story and the mostly Robot Girl cast.
God Never Said That: The seemingly "official" side-story collection, "T-Doll Maintenance Manual", is anything but official, rather being a collection of plagiarized fanfiction from Chinese players. Worse is that it can be neither acknowledged in its entirety (since the vast majority of the material is plagiarized fanfiction), nor completely ignored (since, to appear more official, it included some artwork and statements from actual artists for the game, some of which has since been acknowledged in-game).
Market-Based Title: Dolls' Frontline (ドールズフロントライン) for the Japanese version due to trademark and publisher dispute, detailed on What Could Have Been below.
Many players speculated that Five-SeveN was simply the human form of FAL's ferret because of her clothing and accessories. This was acknowledge for April Fools' of 2017, where Five-SeveN's combat chibi was replaced with FAL's ferret, now human-sized, holding her gun.
When TMP was released, her description was glitched and she repeated "commander commander commander..." in Simplified Chinese script, even on servers that defaulted to other languages, leading to fans speculating that she might be a Yandere. The developers themselves were aware of the glitch, and as a result, they reposted a fanart from Twitter, with a comment:
TMP: Commander, what do you want me to say?
Some of the tutorial comics on the website or which display while you're updating the game poke fun at the sheer ubiquity of IDW.
One, discussing production of T-Dolls, has IDW result from the production, to which one character claims that IDW is always produced because everybody loves cats. Another talks about the amount of space the game requires, and depicts downloading the game as a faucet with "DATA" stamped on it, pouring out an endless stream of tiny IDWs. This is taken a step further with Carcano M91/38's T-Doll production line:
Another comic has Persica complain about the impossibility of obtaining IDW through Heavy Production, which is primarily intended for shotguns.
Persica:(while petting IDW) Note that you can't get our cute cat through the Heavy Production. (What?! Cats are so adorable, though...)
No Budget: Apparently the case for the Healing Chapter anime, which went out of its way to apologize for this fact in episode 8. Madness Chapter looks like it was produced on even less of a budget.
No Dub for You: The game only has a Japanese dub, even in its home country of China, despite having a "Chinese CV" listing in the T-Doll Index. This particular field never saw any use, given the lack of Chinese voice actors in the game, and it was silently removed when an update reworked the Index completely. The "Healing Chapter" and "Madness Chapter" animated shorts were the first time some members of the cast finally got Chinese actresses.
Speaking of the animated shorts, this trope was turned on its head for the longest time, as it took several months for a Japanese dub of the adaptation to come out.
AC130, the artist of the official 4koma, was one fan artist among many until MICA Team got wind of it, although some changes were made from the original (namely, M1918 BAR exclaiming"poi" at the end of a sentence just because she and Yuudachi both have hair flaps). The artist even has their own T-Doll, GSh-18, appropriately awarded when buying 5 volumes of the 4koma.
Yakob Labo is another fan-artist who specializes in Russian firearms. Thanks to popular demand, his Original Character, AK-74M, became an official character.
Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Kar98k, NTW-90, and StG-44 had their voiced lines scrubbed from the Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean versions of the game after Ai Kayano made comments on Twitter in February 2021 relating to a trip to the Yasukuni area, infamous for its shrine which reveres those who fought for Japan, including participants of the Nanking Massacre and Unit 731. Antis spun it into a visit to said shrine and before long there was an outrage.
Schedule Slip: The DJMAX Respect collaboration event "Glory Day", at least for the English and Japanese servers. When the event made its debut in April 2018, these servers were missing two gameplay mechanics the event utilized, Fairies and yellow KCCO-controlled nodes (one event Fairy has a different buff when situated on such a node). The event coincided with DJMAX Respect's release of their Girls Frontline DLC, but the developers didn't want to jump the gun with an Early-Bird Cameo with either issue, unlike the later VA-11 HALL-A event. Operation Singularity, which started more than a year later on November 2019, finally introduced the KCCO (and their yellow nodes) as a faction, setting the stage for the crossover. The collab may have also been delayed due to licensing issues, since the event makes liberal use of the series' music, for obvious reasons. Thanks to all of these roadbumps, it took until April 2020 for any inkling of an English version to show up, and by then DJMAX had already re-released Respect as Respect V (ironically not renewing their Girls Frontline DLC).
Troubled Production: Note that most of the following information is sourced from second-hand accounts, as almost all of them happened in Chinese social media, so take it with a grain of salt.
The first CN beta testing phase experienced an unplanned downtime due to server overload. Reportedly, this was the catalyst that severed the partnership between Yuzhong (head of MICA Team) and Yao Meng (head of the now-defunct Array Networks, now holds a position in Yostar), with both sides slinging accusations of incompetence at each other over social media. This has sparked a very bitter rivalry between them and some fans.
The botched Japanese release schedule, which is detailed under What Could Have Been below.
The global release was hampered due to the sketchy practices of the ad agency Mica hired for Western audiences, using stills from other games (such as NieR: Automata) and stolen artwork (including the infamous "Agent 47 holding WA2000" one), leading viewers to see the game as yet another softcore hentai game or full of stolen assets. Word of mouth and a surge in fanart over Western imageboards worked, but Mica has since then been very wary about advertising Girls' Frontline to Western players, with ads only starting to ramp up two years after the English release, and primarily through the medium of ads appearing while playing other mobile games.
Numerous instances of drama involving artists, ranging from fans being dicks note DYJ left the art community and social networks after fans accused him of hogging the alternate skin spots for Springfield and WA2000; he later came back to draw Team DEFY, but lays very low on social media, unfortunate circumstances note NIXOO being ran over by a car and still managing to finish HK416's anniversary dress while in the hospital and the untimely passing of both reisun [artist for StG-940] and DomotoLain [Type 92], old rivalries heating up note Rei [artist for Lee-Enfield] quitting upon learning Nishihara [artist for Contender] was hired, due to Pixiv-related squabbles, plagiarism note SKY, the artist of Micro Uzi, ARX160 and KS-23, being on the receiving end of a plagiarism case unrelated to Girls' Frontline, which is a popular narrative for his dismissal, inflated egosnote Kishiyo leaving in a huff after learning that Type 95's VA wouldn't be the one he wanted and being told to deal with it by Mica's higher-ups, with some accusations of Same Face Syndrome by Suisai that aren't helped by how similar Kishiyo's later designs for Azur Lane, particularly Choukai, are to his design for this game's Type 95, artists being overall awful people note Horimori [artist for PPK] convincing a fan to let her stay at his place for a while, trashing the place before disappearing; Horimori claims however that said fan sweet-talked her into moving in before bumping into his girlfriend to outright slander note Suisai claiming that Yuzhong hired his incompetent cousin as middle management and bought himself a Ferrari with company money, while the rest of the employees only got Starbucks gift cards due to said cousin running the company into the ground, which is refuted by other MICA Team staff. Some of these resulted in certain illustrators refusing to work, or being barred from working, on Girls' Frontline again.
Suisai is a very infamous figure in the whole gacha industry for these and other incidents, with suspicions he used his founding artist position to his advantage (considering a number of his creations had their own subplot going, making his own sameface problems rather clear), and as already mentioned above, it's possible that he might have had a hand in the Kishiyo incident. Even his departure was troublesome, as upon finding out that MICA was going to restructure to be more of a proper company, he Rage Quit, leaving some spiteful posts, which in turn caused another MICA developer to spill some private details on the development of the Bakery Girl remake (becoming more like X Com Enemy Unknown), this in turn would spark Yuzhong to fire both and some other behind the scenes stuff.
The whole debacle involving Deadpapillo, a writer Mica contracted to write the 2016 Halloween event script as well as paid fanfiction. Deadpapillo was let go after negative player feedback about said script and went low until Anime Expo 2018 in Los Angeles, where he gave an interview to Gamepress while posing as a Mica representative. Mica quickly warned Gamepress that he faked his credentials and started digging only to find out his many other shenanigans, including using his false position at Mica to sexually harass female players, sexist comments on social media, plagiarizing other fanfiction and promoting a very controversial hentai doujin about Kar98k and Negev in Auschwitz, causing them to promptly cut him off for good and issue an official communication about the situation, leading Gamepress to also apologize for not double-checking their sources.
MICA Team originally had more ambitious plans for the ending of the Polarized Light event, but the COVID-19 outbreak set back a lot of their efforts, resulting in what's detailed in What Could Have Been below.
The official reason for the lack of costumes on recurring story characters (AR Team and 404, minus AR-15's Literary Girl outfit) was that the developers didn't want to give them anything new unless it was something related to a significant story event. With the release of both groups' 4th anniversary dresses◊ and the Rabbit Wonderlandset of costumes◊, it's been revealed that every single one was illustrated by a different artist (two in M4A1's case), so one can only assume some internal squabbling was the real reason for their lack of costumes. This is support by news that their then-current artist Infukun had quit MICA at some point (albeit unlike most examples above, Infunkun's departure was smooth and left him in good terms with Mica).
During the game's early days, circa early-mid 2016, there were plans to expand into the Japanese market with a server for that country, and not only was partial voice acting in Japanese added (for all versions), but a timed-exclusive T-doll for that version, based on the Nambu Type 100 submachine gun, was drawn up for it. Shortly afterward, MICA had a falling out with the company that would've hosted the Japanese version (YoStar, who would later host the Japanese and English versions of Azur Lane), and would not consider starting a Japanese server again until early 2018, with a beta for it officially starting on June 29th the same year, including having the Type 100 be the face of that version. However, the "English" title for the Japanese version was retitled as Dolls' Frontline (ドールズフロントライン) as YoStar still held the rights to the Japanese use of the name "Girls' Frontline". Furthermore, to avoid confusion, the "Shoujo Senzen!" soundbite does not play in the splash screen for the Japanese version.
NTW-20's artist, RAN, noted some regret at not making her a black girl after only learning the gun in question came from South Africa after designing the character.
A pre-alpha trailer of the game reveals how different the gameplay was before it was officially released with M4A1 even having a different voice actor then.
The first official artbook revealed a Sangvis Ferri boss named "Beak" who rode a motorcycle and was going to appear in the game much earlier, before finally appearing in the Operation Isomer event.
A 4th Heavy Ordnance Corps team, AT4, was also going to appear in the Continuum Turbulence event. It was later added to the game as part of the time-limited Theatre game mode.
The 3* SMG KGP-9 was scrubbed from the game due to her design being almost a one-to-one trace of Poharan from Blade & Soul. Because of this, the developers have purged nearly everything related to her from the game's files, despite some of them being datamined as far back as Operation Singularity.
Suisai, the illustrator responsible for FAL and Five-Seven, posted this image◊ around the game's first anniversary. The short-haired girl has since made it into the game as Ballista, but with Suisai's untimely (and rather hostile) departure from MICA in early 2019, the maroon-haired girl - possibly meant to be FN SCAR, who has been hinted to be another member of the FN team but never actually appeared - will never see the light of day, with the responsibility for both SCAR-L and SCAR-H going instead to LIN+.◊
AR Team was originally slated to be composed of six T-Dolls. The sixth member, Mk 18 Mod 0, was envisioned as SOP II's sister, but she was eventually axed after it was decided to make AR Team a five-man squad. Her design was eventually reused (with some alterations) in Arknights as W. Even before that, Lowlight Kirineko had illustrated her and SOP II together as a gift for a fan. Notice that she is already labelled as "W" in the sketch.
Polarized Light was originally supposed to end on a Final Boss to end all final bosses, Elisa. Fan translated developer comments described her having skills that would've made her extremely hard, like anti-gravity tiles that prevent some of the player's T-Dolls from doing anything, effectively removing them from combat temporarily. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your take of the event bosses of late and Elisa's aforementioned kit), because of the worldwide COVID-19 outbreak, MICA Team had to scale down both the boss's battle and story arc quite a bit, rehashing the concept as a bog-standard boss in Chapter 13. She seems to have had some of her intended final boss skills restored in time for the English release of the event, though since you use M4 to fight her, it's a relatively even, but absolutely grueling, battle.
Word of God: According to Miharu, the artist for the official manga, Gentiane was born in North Africa before moving to Ukraine when she was six.
Word of Saint Paul: Though their canonicity is debatable, some of the game's illustrators shed more light on the of the T-Dolls they designed. Most of the following information came from the respective artists' weibo.
SPAS-12 once wore a very different outfit, which prominently displays an altered version of the G.I.S. emblem. When asked if this was an old draft, her illustrator replied that "it's what she was before she became SPAS-12". The illustration also gives her the full name of "Sabrina Franchi", which is at least partly canonized through her summer outfit's Cafe story, where the Commander calls her Sabrina.
SAT8 worked many different jobs as an A-Doll, from peddling cookies in the streets to a personal baby sitter. She was already experienced in human interaction once G&K recruits her.
Thunder was an obsolete doll with no proper job to speak of. Though she was born with vivid emotions (to the point that she can be considered more "human" than other dolls), her experiences with the "dark side of human world" led her to adopt her current aloof personality. She is also an avid First-Person Shooter player in her spare time.
G36 suffers from hyperopia. Her mean-looking face is just her squinting to focus on nearby objects. The glasses she wears in her Petit Waitress outfit were given by the Commander. She also likes to sing when she is alone. The VA-11 HALL-A event would go on to canonize 36's eyesight problems.
Negev is actually shy and adopted a yandere persona after finding out that it's easier to communicate while acting like that. The blood on her clothes is actually ketchup, her hair's original color is like Galil's and her clothing is inspired by her late senpai, Jericho.
The three T-Dolls that comprise the AGS-30 HOC are named Alina, Galina and Sonya, respectively, though only via artist concepts. The individual Dolls themselves are not named in-game.
KSVK's Children's Day skin depicts her 8 years prior to the game. She was originally created for a foster home to simulate adoption of orphans. After the foster home was destroyed by a terrorist attack, she was adopted by a police officer (all but stated to be DP-12), but later left in order to pursue vengeance against the terrorists. She lost her memories in the process. IOP then retrieved her and sent her to Griffin.
DP-12's real name is Helena. She joined G&K after being tipped by an acquaintance that her child is with them. Though she is no longer a policewoman, she still wears her badge so that her "daughter" may recognize her.
where the magazine seems to be attached to the barrel and the foregrip to the suppressor.
Kar98k and Negev in Auschwitz, causing them to promptly cut him off for good and issue an official communication about the situation, leading Gamepress to also apologize for not double-checking their sources.
