Retro spotlight: Earth Defense Force 2017
EDF! EDF!
This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Enjoyment or non-enjoyment of Earth Defense Force games is a real sticking point for me. I absolutely understand people who want the best graphics, a moving and powerful story that fully uses the technology at its disposal, and all of the other little modern amenities we’ve come to expect from the games of today. I enjoy those things quite a bit myself! You know what else I love, though? Running around shooting comically powerful sniper rifles at alien ants the size of buildings, and occasionally destroying actual buildings in the process. If that just doesn’t do anything for you, well, games that are not that are out there in full force these days: just let me have this one.
Earth Defense Force 2017 isn’t the first EDF game in the long-running series, but it is the first to have released outside of Japan. It’s the third entry in the franchise, and despite being a budget release for the Xbox 360 that looked like someone developed a game for the Playstation 2 and then upscaled it to 720p, it was a hit in Japan: in 2009, three years after it first released, Earth Defense Force 3 was the region’s best-selling Games on Demand title. It remains highly playable now, even if it’s pretty basic in comparison to the more modern Earth Defense Force titles, and because the Xbox 360 title is backwards-compatible with the Series X, you can play it with upscaled graphical fidelity as well as a rock-solid frame rate — even when there are more alien bugs and ships and laser beams than you can physically handle on screen.
The first Earth Defense Force title was developed by Sandlot for the Playstation 2 in Japan, as part of D3 Publisher’s Simple series of budget games (Sandlot’s EDF has no relation to the 1991 arcade and SNES shoot-em-up of the same name.) It was developed by a dozen people at its busiest, and took all of four months to create — those Simple games were meant to be rushed out the door as quickly as possible, and Sandlot certainly delivered there. This one also received a release in PAL territories, but nothing in North America. The same goes for its 2005 sequel, Global Defense Force, though that did eventually make its way to the region on the Playstation Vita a decade later. Global Defense Force is actually a bigger game than EDF 2017, as there are two wildly different playable characters to choose from — one a footsoldier, the other capable of flying via jetpack, and there are twice as many weapons since the two classes utilize more standard and energy-based weapons, respectively.
That’s not to say that Earth Defense Force 2017 is missing anything, though: unless you knew Global Defense Force was larger — which anyone besides an importer would be unaware of, especially at the time — you wouldn’t necessarily miss what’s missing. As is, you still have 53 levels and 150 weapons to collect, as well as five different difficulties to complete in order to have actually mastered and completed the game. More on all of that in a bit.
The reason the game didn’t release in North America is entirely due to Sony, and that comes from Sandlot’s own people. In a deep dive interview with Polygon, series producer Nobuyuki Okajima explained:
“They didn’t want cheap games, or games with bad graphics, or games with unstable framerates, and so on,” Okajima says. Even in the PAL releases, D3P was forced to remove Japanese dialogue due to platform restrictions, a situation that Okajima described as “almost unacceptable.”
Now, I love Earth Defense Force 2017 and will defend it on a number of levels, but it was cheap, and the graphics were not any good, and the framerate certainly wasn’t stable. Since Sony’s North American arm wouldn’t budge on the idea of releasing this highly successful series there — the first two EDF games sold a combined nearly half-million units in Japan, a country that had 22 million Playstation 2 systems by the time of Global Defense Force’s release, and all of this despite being attached to a budget series of games that weren’t known for their quality — D3 decided it was time to remove the Simple series label, and develop the next entry from the ground up for the Xbox 360 and a worldwide release:
The Xbox brand’s struggles in Japan are well-documented, but back then D3P saw it as the best chance to make a go of Earth Defense Force in the West.
“It’s actually a simple story — we couldn’t sell this game internationally on PlayStation, so that’s why we decided to develop it exclusively for the Xbox 360,” Okajima says. “Back then, Microsoft used to tell everyone that they weren’t going to give up on making the Xbox a success in Japan, so many companies including us hoped that the sales would increase and help our sales of Earth Defense Force overall.”
The bet paid off. Earth Defense Force 2017 sold more than 200,000 copies between North America and Europe, as well as 130,000 more in Japan. While that latter figure represented a decline in sales for D3P’s domestic market, Okajima says the performance was amazing given the active install base of just 200,000 consoles at the time — more than three in five Japanese Xbox 360 owners bought the game.
Think about some of the highest attach rates you can for non pack-in titles. Three copies of Earth Defense Force 2017 for every five Xbox 360 systems in Japan? Those are Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U numbers right there, and that’s with it shifting from its budget price of 2,000 yen to a higher one. Not up to a $60 price, no — EDF 2017 still released at budget prices by North American standards — but still more than before. And it didn’t slow sales down one bit.
Why so much love for Earth Defense Force in Japan? Simple (heh): because it rules. Here’s the basic premise and gameplay for EDF 2017. You are Storm 1, an unnamed unit of the Earth Defense Force, which is a military made up of people from countries all over the world in response to a potential extraterrestrial threat. When said threat arrives in the form of UFOs dropping whatever B-movie monster and robot they can across major metropolitan areas around the globe, the EDF is sent in to start taking down these new foes. You’ll start small, with engagements against a few dozen giant ants that spew acid at you if you let them go unbothered long enough, but you’ll work your way up to hopping spiders that trap and damage you in webs, red ants that bite hard, and fighter-sized spaceships that arrive in overwhelming numbers. You’ll eventually take down the UFOs that drop these things in the first place, as well as bipedal mechs with massive laser cannons for arms, even larger bugs that birth the many forces you take down in each bug-centric stage, and also kaiju.
Outside of a luchador who helps you fight Dracula through time travel, you’ve got about every B-movie convention you can shoved in here. (And the lack of that last bit is a little bit of a surprise, considering Sandlot formed out of some of the developers who used to work on Fire Pro Wrestling in the 90s.) As was explained in the Polygon interview, part of the reason for all the B-movie stuff and the focus on insects is because it already existed out there in the world: less time was needed to conceptualize for the series when it had a very short development window and small budget. Earth Defense Force games have grown since those early days because they can afford to, both in terms of time and money, but those severe restrictions did help them create something all their own that’s now two decades deep: Earth Defense Force 6 released in Japan in 2022, and will eventually hit shelves in North America, too.
Back to 2017 (the game), though. To go with the B-movie visual aesthetics, the voice acting is purposely a bit hammed up, between breathless reporters and an EDF military leader doing the kind of deep, authoritative voice that I basically always think is Cam Clarke even when it’s just someone doing their “Cam Clarke in a JRPG” voice. It’s all cheesy — especially all the oorah or hooah rah rah soldier chatter — but there’s a difference between an intentional cheesy read and one that just kind of comes off that way because there’s a disconnect between the performance and what’s on screen. EDF 2017 feels of a piece: the cheesiness in the voice acting is needed and bolsters the whole deal, given what it is you’re doing while you’re hearing it. The music, too, adds the appropriate level of drama and tension when needed. It’s all a little over the top, but this is a game about one guy saving the world by killing giant alien bugs and mechs, so, yeah. Duh.
There aren’t any different character types here, just the standard footsoldier who can equip two weapons at once. There are vehicles to choose from sometimes — a tank, helicopter, hoverbike, and your own bipedal mech to pilot that looks a lot like Ripley attached guns to the Power Loader — but they tend to be tough to control due to being the only realistic-ish thing in the game. Turning is tough and slow, as is firing accurately, and by the time you get to playing on Hard, you’ve got more health than they do. Still, as just a damage sponge that can wipe out a small army of foes if you do it right before it inevitably explodes, vehicles can be useful in the right hands. The helicopter is a personal favorite, if you can keep the thing in the air while firing and away from spider webs.
For more conventional weaponry, there are standard rifles and such, as well as rocket and missile launchers, sniper rifles, shotguns, and more experimental weapons developed during the war utilizing recovered technology. You’ll want to find a balance in loadout that compliments your play style as well as general needs: I tend to use a shotgun and either a sniper rifle or a rocket launcher, and the shotgun spread changes depending on which of those I pick. If I have a sniper rifle, which will take out one target at a time, then I might need a wider spread on the shotgun in case a whole mob of ants arrives in front of me. If I have a rocket launcher for long-distance engagements (or very precarious closer ones), then a narrower shotgun spread makes more sense, since I already have my crowd control. The weapons start out not all that powerful, but by the time you’ve made your way through a bit of the Hard mode, you should have a sniper rifle that can take out a UFO with a single well-placed shot to its glowing insides. Assuming you can live long enough to get the shot off, anyway.
Earth Defense Force 2017 is not a game where you just start things off on a harder difficulty because you want a challenge or are familiar with the series. You start on Easy, because of how the collection mechanics work. Enemies leave various drops — health recovery items, of course, but also armor upgrades that give you an additional maximum health point, and weapons. If you don’t pick up an armor upgrade or weapon, it won’t be added to your inventory, so you’ll want to try to grab them as you go or leave one bug or ship or whatever alive at the end while you go around cleaning up. If you fail your mission, any upgrades you picked up are tossed out: you have to complete the mission in order for the upgrades to count.
The tougher the difficulty, the more powerful the weapons you’ll acquire, but you won’t survive long enough to actually collect anything if your health is too low. So, it makes sense to start on Easy, familiarize yourself with the game’s mechanics, destruction physics, mission requirements, etc., unlock all of the levels, while also starting to build up your max health. Complete the 53 levels on Easy, then move to Normal, then Hard, then Hardest, then the level that proves Hardest was a lie, Inferno. You don’t have to complete an entire difficulty to open up a new one, either: if you want to bounce between Normal and Easy at first in order to get some more powerful weapons for Easy, then do it. You can also do the same for Hard and Normal, and Hardest and Hard, but it’s a lot more difficult to pull off the higher up you go.
You can also play in split-screen co-op, which can make things much easier to manage, since your computer-controlled squad mates are never long for this world. On Hardest, you’ll sometimes be told to meet up with other scout teams to give you more firepower for the coming waves of bugs, ships, whatever, and the members of them might very well be dead before you can even get there. EDF 2017 isn’t spouting Great Man Theory or anything, but it becomes clear in a hurry that you’re the only soldier who seems to be able to avoid stepping into an unexpected and fatal acid bath 30 seconds into a large-scale engagement.
The game shifts between hectic and slow. Some of this is because the sheer volume of enemies coming at you at once means everything is chaos, but as you wipe out ants and spiders and ships and robots, the chaos calms, and you’re left with stragglers. And as said before, you might not want to kill every single enemy before you go around collecting upgrades — this also applies to refilling your health while you can, since it’s possible you might think you’re at the end of a level, but you’re actually just at the end of a wave. You’ll want to be ready for that wave, if that’s the case, because there aren’t any checkpoints.
That the level length shifts between longer and shorter without any real consistency helps keep you on your toes in this way: just assume every stage is long until proven otherwise, and breathe a sigh of relief when instead you get a chance to save and check out your new weapons and health total. Sometimes, you have a few dozen bugs to kill and that’s a wrap. Other times, you wipe out the bugs, then a ship shows up and drops giant robots or other, smaller ships, or even more bugs, or holes erupt from the ground and allow new bugs on the map that way, or you just end up surrounded by three incoming waves from multiple directions oh no which do I start with which one will I regret leaving alive in full force when they converge on me? There are hints as to level length in the level descriptions, but surprises like that can happen.
If you want the more full-featured EDF games that have multiple classes, online play, even more levels, and better graphics and performance? Those are out there, now, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next of them. For all its possible negatives, though, Earth Defense Force 2017 is still just so much fun to play. It’s a capital V and G Video Game, for sure, a three-dimensional rendition of the kind of arcade-based run-and-gun chaos you could play in the 80s and 90s, only now with destructible level physics. It’s a gem, one that review scores are basically meaningless for, because you’re either in on what the game is trying to do or you’re not.
You can grab it on Xbox Marketplace for all of $15 these days, and it’s backwards-compatible on both the Xbox One and Series S|X, where its performance is significantly better on the latter due to the upscaling systems and frame rate boosts in place on those consoles. It’s worth the $15, easy, and you might even find its your gateway to going all-in on the newer releases.
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