Girls' Frontline 2: Exilium Had Interactive Main Screen Characters in CBT — Then Gutted It All to a Static Wallpaper at Launch

A gacha game spent years building top-tier 3D character models, recorded full affection voice lines, and even had interactive character features on the main screen during early beta — then axed all of it for launch, leaving players staring at a lifeless static wallpaper. This isn't satire. This is Girls' Frontline 2: Exilium.

A player recently surfaced comparison evidence on NGA: during the game's first closed beta test (CBT), the main interface featured character interactions, and affection voice lines had already been fully recorded — with character 95's reportedly being the sweetest of the bunch. Come official launch, every trace of this was gone. The main screen became nothing more than a wallpaper showcase. To add insult to injury, while the interactive voice lines were shelved, the event storyline featured 95 calling "Mr. Reymond" (雷蒙先生) over fifty times — which absolutely set the community on fire.

One commenter nailed the situation with biting sarcasm: "The devs think interactions don't matter; the players think the game doesn't matter. A match made in heaven."

Players have converged on a core theory: Girls' Frontline 2 underwent a massive strategic pivot during mid-to-late development, attempting to shift from a "waifu collector" (媚宅) direction toward a more mainstream-friendly approach to broaden its audience. The evidence trail: character profiles now focus on each unit's own life story rather than their relationship with the player; the main storyline sidelines the Commander (the player character) and turns him into a clown; meanwhile, the devs push character-to-character pairings (CP shipping). But Sunborn's catastrophic project management meant this overhaul was nowhere near complete when they rushed the game through testing and into launch — topped off by what players call "unhinged girlboss writing" (小仙女文案) that poured gasoline on the fire.

One player dissected the dev team's priorities: "The producer probably thought story voice lines and level-up/breakthrough animations mattered more than main-screen interactions and personal voice lines. But other games — even ones with inferior models — properly implement all the interactions, affection voice lines, and character voice collections. What a waste of incredible 3D models."

Another player dug into the specifics: the character growth screen in the live version technically has some touch interactions (one head tap, two weapon taps, one leg tap, one special item tap per character), but there's no voice, no dialogue — "at most a few sound effects." If you're not paying close attention, you'd mistake them for idle animations. The verdict? "Did they implement it? Well yes, but actually no." (做了吗？如做。)

What's more, between the fourth closed beta and launch — barely a month — the friends list feature was removed, resolution was downgraded, model edge artifacts became unfixable, jagged edges were everywhere, and the game would stutter on phones during extended number-crunching sessions. As one player quipped: "By the first major update, all that'll be left of this game is its app icon."

It's worth noting that during the fourth CBT when the "Mrs. Reymond" controversy first erupted, some players tried to convince others to stay — "but the voice lines are still there!" Back then, many insisted Reymond was scrapped content. At launch, the truth became painfully clear: "It turns out the voice lines were the scrapped content all along." As for the former employee Chuiyan (垂烟) who keeps getting brought up — the original poster claims he was fired back in the day, and now players are asking: who really should have gotten the axe?

The community's current sentiment toward Exilium can be summed up in one line: five years of development, and somehow they went backwards. A gacha game with arguably the best 3D character modeling on the market, yet it turned in a blank sheet on the single most critical feature — actually interacting with your characters. Truly a masterpiece of modern gaming industrial art.