Earth Defense Force 6 interview with producer Nobuyuki Okajima at NYCC 2023

gematsu.com:

At New York Comic-Con 2023 last weekend, Gematsu sat down with Earth Defense Force 6 producer Nobuyuki Okajima to discuss the newly announced global release of the latest entry in the alien invasion third-person shooter series.

During our discussion, Okajima discussed why it takes so long to release an Earth Defense Force game in the west as opposed to D3 Publisher‘s other titles, downloadable content, when to introduce new classes to the series, and more.

Get the full interview below.

Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain was the first game in the Earth Defense Force series with a simultaneous worldwide release. And recently, D3 Publisher has been doing simultaneous worldwide releases for games like SAMURAI MAIDEN, Ed-0: Zombie Uprising, and even Custom Mech Wars, which is launching in December. Given that it’s your flagship franchise, why is there such a delay between the western and Japanese releases for the mainline Earth Defense Force games?

Nobuyuki Okajima, Producer: “For the titles that you mentioned, like SAMURAI MAIDEN and Ed-0: Zombie Uprising, their localization is strictly text. In that aspect alone, localization is much easier to do. Regarding Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain, another title you mentioned, we had plans to release it worldwide from the get-go. That’s why we were able to release it at the same time. For the mainline Earth Defense Force series—Earth Defense Force 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6—development takes a long time. Usually what happens is we develop the game, and then the development staff shift over to working on the downloadable content. After everything is completely done, the whole package is ready to be localized, and that’s when we start to localize it. So due to that process, it takes a little