I Can't Believe Earth Defense Force Is A Real Game

thegamer.com:

I’ve got some friends who love the Earth Defense Force series, but I’ve always turned my nose up at it. Every trailer I’ve seen has made them look like the worst bargain bin PS2 game your grandma accidentally bought for you in 2002, and in fact, that’s kind of what the series started out as. In the early 2000s, Japanese company D3 Publisher would contract any studio it could to make generic versions of popular games and release them as budget titles. These low-budget, unrelated games were released in a series called Simple, and very few of them ever made it outside of Japan. Simple 2000 series Vol. 31 AKA Monster Attack, released in 2003, was the original Earth Defense Force, and the naming conventions didn’t get much better from there. It was followed by Global Defense Force, Earth Defense Force 2017 (in 2006), Earth Defense Force 2025, Earth Defense Force 4.1: The Shadow of New Despair, and finally Earth Defense Force 5. And I thought Battlefield’s titles were all over the place.

Call me a snob, but I never paid much attention to the Earth Defense Force games, which dropped the budget price as soon as they made their way to the west with Earth Defense Force 2017, AKA EDF 3. At the behest of my strange friends, who have been nothing but enthusiastic about the series for years, I picked up EDF 5 during the most recent Steam Sale. I can now confirm two things: EDF is as bizarre, low budget, and janky as it looks, and also, it’s kind of great.

When you launch EDF 5 you’ll immediately be confronted with a menu that assaults your eyes and throws your mind back to an era of gaming long before anyone understood the importance of aesthetic UI. I wish I could give it the credit of being designed purely for the sake of utility,