Earth Defence Force: The Definitive Review
Everything must go
I recently made a very assertive choice to allow my kids to have an Xbox 360 next to their Wii. Now, this isn’t some patrician attempt to educate my children in every generation of gaming that came before their births, but more a concerted effort to make sure my vintage machines get proper use and that my kids get to pick and choose from my collection. Now, the fun thing about the 360 and the Wii (and the PlayStation 3, of course) is that CEX offers immense catalogues for these machines at pocket money prices. My eldest bought Little King’s Story for £1.50, something I could have afforded with the pocket money I was getting 40 years ago. And the 360 is much the same; all the good, popular titles are currently dirt cheap. I mean, imagine being able to buy 20 to 30 high-scoring 360 and Wii games for the price of one first-party Nintendo title. It’s a wonderful time to be buying pre-owned1. But I didn’t have this ulterior motive of shepherding my children into the joys of retro collecting in mind when I made that move. No. I’d actually realised they were both ready2 to play Earth Defence Force 2017.
We should all be able to remember the first time we launched a bazooka at a giant ant and saw it fly across the screen as if it were a hollow plastic toy. We saw it clumsily rebound off a building, which we then launched bazookas at and subsequently demolished, much to our surprise and delight. Earth Defence Force has an immediacy that drives instant understanding and concurrent appeal. Like, say, Hotline Miami, this immediacy allows the player to respond reflexively, instinctually and as such, the leisurely and obviously cartoonish violence has an unfiltered, non-contextual purity. Earth Defence Force’s twin thrills of blowing up both aggressor enemies and the buildings that shield them carries a transgressive quality. The ease of sending giant invertebrates flying and levelling a city defies more traditional notions that violence must involve some kind of struggle to provide reward. Here, it’s deployed with a nonchalant playfulness. The struggle is more with overconfidence, in avoiding being caught and overwhelmed.
The roots of Earth Defence Force, via its budget-game appearance in D3 Publisher’s Simple3 catalogue on the PlayStation 2, seem pretty obvious. You take the affordance of large numbers of killable NPCs from Koei’s Dynasty Warriors 2 and instead of Chinese quasi-historical folklore, you place it within the tradition of Godzilla Kaiju. Monster Attack debuts with all the series elements in place, meaning the format is mature from the off. It's so beautifully simple that sequels simply need to offer more to succeed. More ants, more spiders, more lumbering battle droids, more giant UFOs pissing out ants, spiders and lumbering battle droids. Monster Attack and its sequel, Global Defence Force sat as underdog outliers on the PlayStation 2, being brought to the west by budget labels so therefore far from prominent on shop shelves, with reviews unable to cope with hilariously bad framerates and apparently simplistic action. But of course, it’s easy to forget the musou way in which these games should be played. You run through on the easiest setting to unlock stages, gaining a foundation for grinding out the really cool stuff on harder and harder difficulties. For you see, Monster Attack was the first looter-shooter on the block.
The weapon drops are the glue that binds all that wanton destruction into an arc. Beyond the formal challenge and perfunctory narrative is an irresistible acquisitional path, and we all know how I feel about acquisitional4 paths. But when the game is about destruction, farming the tools to make that destruction easier is a kind of MSG that provides its own intellectual umami as you settle into Earth Defence Force’s gleeful grind. Each entry chucks in roadblock levels to fuck you about; infuriating subterranean tunnels5, giant robots that (initially) seem indestructible, giant flying saucers spewing overwhelming numbers of enemies, but these are mere invitations to go back and grind those more leisurely ant-slaughtering stages for better weapons. It’s not poor balancing - it’s the player’s fault for not trying hard enough!
In the context of a long-tail grinder, Earth Defence Force celebrates modern game design at the theoretical minimum, offering the most efficient interactive structure to set up that acquisitional challenge which supercedes the formal stage-by-stage gameplay arc. But there’s a deeper fundamentalist purity to its concept that plumbs further into the evolution of the videogame than perhaps you’d first notice. Consider the fundamental elements - a player avatar that shoots, invading enemies to kill in unfair numbers, scenery that is both a shield and an obstacle, which can be removed by the player. What we have in Earth Defence Force is actually Space Invaders in a three-dimensional setting. It’s worth bearing in mind that Space Invaders isn’t happening in space - you control a gun, not a vehicle, and it is firmly fixed to a two-dimensional plane. Likewise, Earth Defence Force’s default character, the lone EDF soldier, gains just the abilities to jump and roll beyond the simple navigational abilities of the Space Invaders gun, alongside a meagre upgrade of having two weapons instead of one. But with the latter game, there’s that curious reload time - this seems particularly deliberate alongside the default bazooka weapon. What could it connote more precisely than the anxiety-inducing reload timings of Space Invaders’ single shots?6
If you’re wondering what my kids made of Earth Defence Force 2017, well I can confirm that they shrieked with absolute delight for an entire hour. Beautifully, they needed little guidance on my part and off they went, in split-screen co-op, to just blow everything up7. I nearly shed a tear at this small act of torch-passing. I’ve written earlier that I’ve let my children explore freely, but sometimes you do need to push the right kind of thing in front of them. I let my eldest play Pokemon as he was getting a grasp of reading and maths, and a very light RPG is perfect for that. But my smuggling of Earth Defence Force’s wild anarchy into their gaming diet is more about subversion and opening their tastes to the cult, to the flawed-yet-magnificent fringes that’ll never appear in the media they consume. I remember the stunned entries that appeared when Earth Defence Force 2017 launched in a fallow period of the Xbox 360’s AAA cycles, where respectable critics furiously wrote of this schlocky, ludicrous game and how delightfully bonkers it was8. It’s certainly a game that stretches your credulity on first encounters - it’s almost hard to believe that such a game is real, nor that it could be such simple, pure fun. And you know what? There’s another one on the way! It was oddly coincidental, like a plate ‘o shrimp, that my thought to push Earth Defence Force 2017 onto my kids came just days before the official announcement of Earth Defence Force 6’s English-language release date of March 14th 2024. It reminded me that I’d criminally skipped the fifth entry, and that perhaps I should be popping the fourth into my PlayStation 5 for a quick spin9. And as if in a flash, bang! That’s 20 years of Earth Defence Force. Sandlot can be very proud of what they’ve built, especially given its creaky literalist take on the b-movie giant insect subgenre. It’s such an obviously satisfying cultural transposition, but also proof of the effortless cool of the deceptively simple formula that just fucking works. But it’s more complex in its auto-parody, its self-deprecation. It knows it’s a bit shit and it dances with that fact, celebrates and magnifies it, for its universal appeal grants it the latitude of audience forgiveness. It contains the essence of the cult game in the way great b-movie shlock does. Earnest is kitsch, but to be knowing, and showing it in just the right amount, is cool. When you compare Earth Defence Force to games that try very hard to be cool10, the difference is clear. Earth Defence Force isn’t trying. It just is.
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It remains to be seen what effect GAME's choice to stop selling pre-owned will have on CEX, though I suspect it means an influx to CEX's already colossal stocks of FIFA and COD, thereby unbalancing the universe and sending the price of El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron to unforeseen heights.
Switch Minecraft's greatest achievement is probably the way that it trains children in how to navigate a 3D world with twin analogue sticks. Once I saw how adept my youngest had become, I knew they were ready for the real fun and games to begin.
A wonderful venture on Namco's part, D3 Publisher seeded a whole new tier of budget labels for the US and EU markets, including amazing shit like OneChanbara's tasteless mix of sexual objectification and zombie slaughter (where you have a very necessary move to flick blood off your blade), Zombie Virus, wherein you drive an ambulance and run over zombies or Demolition Girl, which needs to be googled to be believed.
I adored Koei's musou titles for years and years, thanks to their configurable challenge and chewy, bubblegummy grind. I confronted the beast Lu Bu many times and yes, eventually opened him up like a tin of beans - even when the stage really stacked the odds against you. Such. Fun.
Sometimes, I honestly believe acquisition is the only reason I play games.
It's only just occurred to me that the ant stages in Bangai-O Spirits are possibly tributes to EDF. Holy shit! Certainly the two titles share a disdain for stable framerates and destructive largesse that has to be more than coincidental, right?
This is really only a facile similarity. Of course, Space Invaders' shot reloads when the bullet has left play, meaning you shoot faster if you hit things that are closer. I dare not think of the framerate outcome if EDF have followed that to the letter.
Things got actually violent when they discovered the vehicles in deathmatch mode.
See one K.Gillen's piece here: https://www.eurogamer.net/earth-defence-force-2017-review
EDF 4 triggered my wrist RSI, which can be no greater testament to how much grinding I put into it. I had to stop playing games on twin-analogue controllers for a month!
I'm not going to suggest anything here other than W** D** or K*** & L** and, of course, G**.