Recently beat my 5th run of Gotcha Force, going straight onto my 6th when I noticed something interesting. I was basically soft-locked out of the first level due to it ending in a loss as soon as the first level had begun:

(Ignore the texture changes. I have done zero modding and simply used Dolphin's built-in texture editing which I had used for 3 runs in a row now)

A few interesting points: -My GF energy was at 0 as seen with no green bar at the start of the fight -One of the Beta Death Borg units had a massive red shadow over it in the fight preview screen, unlike the others whereas usually, they all have a small shadow -Kou has a victory pose despite losing and saying a losing line -Closing the stats do not make you go back to the board. You are stuck until the timer that automatically brings you back finishes. -You do not win the fight

This softlocked my game as I could not beat the first mission.

Attempted fixes: -I tried not saving and restarting my emulator, which did not fix it. It was a true overwritten softlock. -I tried editing my forces before going in to only have G red/Neo-G red and also no forces, this made no difference -I tried beating a Special level from a previous run (including the tutorial level) and then going back, making no difference -I beat the Galactic emperor on Special mode, did not fix the issue

One thing I kept noticing was one of the Death Borg Beta's having a larger red shadow in the fight preview than the others. I checked, it's not supposed to have this. I thought it would have been the shadow used for the galactic emperor, but that uses a small one. I had beaten the galactic emperor and had gone straight onto run 6 so I thought that may have been it. Although, I noticed I have the same shadow but in green for my forces. The big red one looked like something you would use in Versus.

The Solution: -Boot versus, 1v1 with a CPU, Default settings, and picked any force, I set them to a custom force which was nothing but Death Force for fun. I went on the exact same level as the one the tutorial is in (Little Hill) and beat them. After going back into my save, it was fixed.

Although this does not have any benefit for speedrunning, I'm quite curious as to what could have caused this. I simply beat the normal levels, beat back the cyber dragon, and then beat the galactic emperor. I beat half the game in one sitting without touching other parts of the game I went straight back to playthrough 6 on "Continue". I can't tell if this is an emulator glitch or not, as it persisted after reloading the emulator and with and without saving. The only fix was to play a Versus match first. If I could reactivate this bug and make it so the enemy has 0 GF energy, that would be game-breaking for speedrunners