Earth Defense Force / Chikyū Bōeigun by Sandlot MEGATHREAD

[Sima Tuna]

The only switch EDF I played was EDF 3 and I don't remember any performance issues in that game. Really enjoyed the experience and I think those older EDF games are a great match with the handheld Switch. I hope they'll eventually localize the games (the localizations are always a treat from a comedic/production value perspective,) but who knows at this point. Sandlot so far seem to be sticking to their "only World Brothers localized on Switch" approach. Which sucks. WB doesn't appeal to me personally. I could see younger kids getting into it.

The interface is not hard to figure out, as you've said. So any existing EDF fan should have no difficulty playing the japanese versions. It's just a shame we miss out on the amazing English voice work by playing the japanese versions.

I'm going to assume that EDF 2 has perfect or near-perfect performance on Switch, given it's being upgraded to a system much more powerful than either ps2 or ps vita.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Yeah, EDF2 and 3's Switch versions are perfect, run buttery smooth for the most part. I've not played the PS Vita versions so I don't know what's changed from there, but from the PS2 and XB360 versions, it's largely the added classes and the online play that are the draw. There's a few new gimmick weapons like the Ranger gets some in 3 that add a backpack and if you use them in one or both weapon slots your speed is greatly reduced but they're very powerful, giving you the ability to play sniper very well in an online game. Speed reduction is the same whether you have them in one or both slots, and swapping weapons to a normal weapon does NOT take away the speed reduction.

The missions are largely the same aside from a couple added missions, and use the original enemy counts, with online having the same scaling as in EDF 2025: enemies have around 2.5x health and damage online depending on number of players in a room, and there is no friendly fire damage reduction like there is in EDF 4.1 and onward. This means that explosive weapons are quite dangerous to use and the stronger ones will generally one-shot you early on.

Something that wasn't present in the original is revival; you can heal online allies now, something we first got in EDF 2025/EDF4. You couldn't even revive allies when playing splitscreen when playing the first three games originally, which was unfortunate since if a friend died early you either made them wait or restarted.

The main reason EDF 4.1 NS is rather slow is because that rerelease was made for consoles much newer and powerful than the XB360 was, so they greatly upped the NPC ally and enemy count in several maps, to the point where there's just way too much going on for the Switch to handle at a smooth framerate. Many maps do still run at a reasonable speed on the Switch version, but be prepared for some hilarious, PS2-era slowdown when trying out Brute Force or something on the NS version.

Interestingly, I've noted a few differences from the PC version:

a) The Fencer glitch where you can use a jump booster against a sloped surface and will fly up until you reach the top is still here and not patched out.

b) You can revive dead players even when your health is extremely low and flashing red. I'm not sure what happens if you revive someone at 1 HP exactly, but I've had barely any HP left on the meter and was still able to revive, seen other people do lots of revivals while at critical HP as well. EDIT: The Switch version requires 2 health or more to revive players. If you're at 1 remaining, you can't heal players. Other than that, being at critical health does not prevent you from reviving players. PC version and I think 2025 require you to have enough health to revive, and won't allow you to revive if your health is flashing red (20% or 25% remaining? whatever the threshold is for critical health, if your health is flashing red you couldn't revive).

WB doesn't appeal to me personally. I could see younger kids getting into it.

I never got into it either, I hate the look of voxel art for 3D games. Never had any interest in Minecraft either for similar reasons. It's like a deliberate low-poly 3D look but one that looks aesthetically worse than early 3D games we had on MS-DOS, N64, and PS1.

[Sima Tuna]

Yeah, EDF2 and 3's Switch versions are perfect, run buttery smooth for the most part. I've not played the PS Vita versions so I don't know what's changed from there, but from the PS2 and XB360 versions, it's largely the added classes and the online play that are the draw. There's a few new gimmick weapons like the Ranger gets some in 3 that add a backpack and if you use them in one or both weapon slots your speed is greatly reduced but they're very powerful, giving you the ability to play sniper very well in an online game. Speed reduction is the same whether you have them in one or both slots, and swapping weapons to a normal weapon does NOT take away the speed reduction.

So, the Vita version had the added classes. That was the first version that brought over Air Raider to EDF2. I don't know if the switch version of EDF2 added any other classes but the 3 were what you had in the Vita Version. The Vita version did not run at anything close to a locked framerate though. It's pretty rough in places. As is typical for the older EDF titles, lmao. I don't think poor performance really hurts EDF games that much, considering it increases the hilarity when being swarmed by armies of bugs. But I'd rather have smoother gameplay, all the same.

EDF 3 added Wing Diver in the Vita version and that carries over to the Switch port. Switch port, AFAIK, is just the vita version with dramatically improved performance. It uses the vita visuals rather than xbox 360, but I think somebody (maybe even you) already said this in the thread.

I've played around with backpacks in EDF 3 switch and they seem not worth it at all for solo play. I guess it depends on the weapon, but Ranger already struggles with mobility against waves. The best defense is usually overwhelming offense in those cases, but the standard machine guns, shotguns, rockets and grenades can handle waves without sacrificing precious movement. I'm sure backpacks are better in online play.

I checked and the vita version of EDF 2 had online play, so it would seem both ports are just the Vita versions running at much higher performance. No problems with that. EDF has always pushed the current-gen hardware of the day. Retrofitting these games to systems with higher specs only makes sense.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I've played around with backpacks in EDF 3 switch and they seem not worth it at all for solo play. I guess it depends on the weapon, but Ranger already struggles with mobility against waves.

The only one of the backpack weapons I've seen that arguably are the cannons that are effectively rapid fire piercing guns. They work like the Fencer's NC101 line of cannons without the massive recoil, or are functionally rapid fire Stringers that you lose all mobility to use. Not handy for item collecting but damn capable of mowing down crowds. I think they're called Titania Cannon? They have real potential against swarms like red ants.

The rocket and missile launchers output a hilarious amount of explosives but they're difficult and not entirely practical to use even online as it's very easy to miss shots.

I haven't properly tried the new guns that apply status effects on enemies; being able to easily hit allies sucks, but they might have some real uses in online? Not sure yet.

edit:

My favorite EDF game is probably 4.1, because I'm not the hugest fan of Wing Diver's charge weapon change in EDF 5. That modification somewhat limits the weapons I feel comfortable taking into missions.

I've been playing a lot of EDF5 lately, originally was maining Fencer exclusively along with dabbling in Air Raider, whose new tools such as reloading air strikes and easy to use air strike markers are very handy. I've been trying Ranger and Wing Diver more. I have to agree with your complaints about Wing Diver, it feels like a lot of the weapons with the charge up mechanic are quite cumbersome, and it's unfortunate because they're generally weapons I would have liked to experiment with more as I usually used a Thunder Bow / Rapier combo. I also dislike the weapons that arbitrarily weaken as the battery gets past a certain point, meaning you're encouraged to reload early unless you miss that you're suddenly firing a much weaker beam at a certain point. It feels like they saddled her with some overly complicated weapon mechanics to slow her down relative to the other classes? Ranger and Air Raider already got significant buffs though, I'm not sure Wing Diver needed to have weapons altered at the cost of usability and fun... I'd rather have user friendly weapons and her old-school flight, rather than the cumbersome and complex weapon mechanics with the crazy mobility to even her up with super dashing Fencer setups (shield Fencer is still amazing and nigh-unkillable with the right accessories).

I'm looking forward to EDF6. My fear is my old computer will struggle to run it, hopefully it's not much more demanding than 5!


edit:

I've played a ton of EDF 5 lately. The last few fights aren't too bad, the last mission is pretty fun though it honestly felt a lot easier than some of the final missions in previous games because of how it's structured:

Spoiler

Fencer with a shield and spear or spine driver can stonewall it, with the only challenge being dealing with summons. You don't even need a fancy 0 damage setup using a Barricade System either, your best Deflect Cell and a Dash Cell allows you to chase it down and tear pepsiman apart while blocking any hits you fail to dodge. The challenge almost entirely comes from the summoned waves; if you're near pepsiman when he calls them in they can surround you and rip you up, so you need to quickly get to some cover or deal with them before you're torn up. Much tougher with other classes I think, because they don't have the Fencer's sheer durability and sustainability.

Much of the difficulty in EDF5 I found comes from learning to handle Cosmonauts; their armor is a serious problem, and the ones with blinding laser beams are incredibly nasty, similar to Deroys in EDF4 but it's much harder to hit the laser arm and shut it down quickly. They also seem to have far more range than Deroy lasers had. Deroys are still tough in EDF5 but feel more manageable.

Pill bugs make an unwelcome return from EDF2. They don't explode in your face when killed fortunately, but getting repeatedly knocked down by them is quite obnoxious and if they group on you a weapon with AOE or piercing properties is critical. Rangers can tear up a lot of enemies well with assault rifles, but the rolling bugs seems to benefit more from shotgun use if they crowd you. Thankfully the mirror shields from EDF2 haven't made a return!

Air Raiders have some massive buffs in the form of reload time airstrikes that don't require kills to reload. Their markers stick to enemies too, making them wildly effective against the humanoid bipedal enemies, and having three weapon slots gives you more freedom to carry a buff or a healing post without compromising as much on your damage output. Air raider minigun strikes may well be the top tier way of safely dealing with Cosmonauts honestly, it's just so good at stunlocking and killing them quick.

EDF 2025 / 4.1 is still my fave. I prefer the Fencer design there, and while there's a lot of nice quality of life things in EDF5 (pickup radius, Ranger sprinting, accessories to customize your stats and tweak your movement options, improved voice chat controls so you don't always have an open mic), there's a lot of things I'd rather EDF5 not do:

• Wing Divers are clunky and awful to use, at least at first when making the transition from EDF2, 3 Switch, and 4. The charge up mechanic that affects most weaponry is awkward and unnecessarily complex to learn to deal with, and you have to plan on reloading when the meter's half empty for a lot of them. One of their best forms of weaponry now, the Dragoon Lance, is essentially a retooled Blasthole Spear from a Fencer that hits for massive damage at around 80m distance piercing everything in a straight line. Basically all of their best tools from EDF4 were hit with nerfs or changes in how they function, so you effectively have to completely relearn the class, and the general feel is it requires a lot more skill to manage and use, making them less of an easy to use but frail attacker, and more of a highly mobile but very technical attacker. Still, they're quite fun to fight humanoid enemies with, it's more intense than Hector fights were before.

Rangers also have this problem to a lesser extent, with a lot of rebalancing to their weapons and name changes meaning you have to figure out what's worthwhile, but Rangers are mechanically much easier to use. Generally, rocket launchers are slower and don't feel quite as hard hitting, with several requiring upgrades to be usable, assault rifles hit much harder relative to other weapons now, even if you're not using the ones you need to mash the trigger to fire, shotguns feel fairly iffy due to steep damage dropoff unless you're in a crowd control situation where the piercing property at lose range is super helpful, and so on.

• Weapon upgrading sucks; I replayed early missions who knows how many to max out a Blasthole Spear (level 0) and I could only get it to rank 8 before I gave up. You will never be able to max out a weapon of your choice; the drops are so rare and fickle to upgrade any given weapon that which ones get maxed seems to be purely RNG. It's really awful, especially given there are many weapons that have drastic upgrades that triple ammo capacity or double rate of fire (Blast Twin Spears, Light Mortars, NCS10# cannons, many of the Ranger's rocket launchers, and so on). Vehicles also sometimes get drastically reduced summon costs at higher levels. It's hard to know if a weapon is truly useful or not without going back and trying it once it's at a high level as there's many that completely change how they feel after hitting a certain upgrade. The only class of weapon that's never had anything like this are shields; they all seem to get minor max durability buffs, and perform more or less the same at low level as at high level.

Worse, having a weapon drop in a mission is no guarantee you'll upgrade the weapon. You have to get lucky enough both to get a weapon drop and for it to be ranked higher than your current weapon to upgrade. Upgrading weapons wouldn't have been so bad if collecting duplicates simply upgrades you. I cannot see myself ever attempting to get max/star rank on all weapons because it'd take an absurd amount of time.

It's not as bad as the grind on Insect Armageddon where you have to grind at the same level on the same 15 missions for awful lengths of time to level up, but it's not as good as earlier games where once you get a new weapon, you can learn instantly how it feels and if it's useful.

• I don't like upgrades being split amongst all classes. For people who like to jump between classes regularly it's fine I guess, but if I'm playing as one class, I want all my drops to benefit that specific class. Armor and weapon gain rates are slower in EDF5 for this reason as while your drops are weighted to be more for the class you're playing, a lot of your armor and weapon upgrades go to alternate classes. Feels like levelling up is slower than EDF4, but I could be mistaken. Having a collection radius for items does kinda counterbalance this I guess.

Having upgrades be collected for all classes also means that if you're playing offline, when you switch classes you can end up already having collected wildly more powerful than appropriate weapons, so you either use overpowered stuff or resist the temptation and only stick to stuff you can find in the current difficulty range.

• Vehicles rarely start ready to summon. This isn't as big a deal for the Ranger where they act as a bonus, and since the Air Raider is much more capable of general combat thanks to time reloaded airstrikes and an extra weapon slot it's not a tremendous issue for them, but you still can't rely on getting a vehicle out at the start of a missions. Some missions require scoring a ton of kills, clearing most of the map before you can get a vehicle on the field.

[Lander]

Nice writeup, Roo - that touches on a few parts I felt were kind of lacking with 5, even though it's a fine rendition on the whole. Interesting to hear that certain parts are from the earlier games, I just assumed that everything added from 4.1 -> 5 was new.

The climax of 5 was definitely very different - 4.1 outlived its initial end for me and my co-op buddies, but 5 petered out pretty fast after we'd beaten the last boss. Oddly similar to Spelunky / Spelunky 2 in that sense - the collective drive to see more just sort of fell off after the main body of sequel.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I haven't tried the DLC yet but it's possible there's encounters there that spice things up nicely. The DLC in EDF4 is pretty fun, throwing some crazy combinations of enemies you don't see in the normal game, so I imagine EDF5's is also interesting.

EDF5 is still a great game; street battles in cities ducking behind buildings while dealing with the humanoid enemies is quite thrilling. But it feels like its pacing is a bit lacking. The walking battleship you face several times and then finally destroy in a climactic battle is an impressive and epic battle... but then and nothing else quite hits that same feeling for a long time until the ending. The Archelus fights don't hit the same note for me, and there's a lot of them where he just shows up without doing much. I think he shows up more than the Erginus in EDF4 does too, where the first one's a surprise, the second one is a straight boss fight, and the last one surprises you with a giant mech to ROCK EM SOCK EM ROBOTS with it. Archelus is more dangerous due to the explosives, but it's functionally an upgraded Erginus. There's nothing really unique and scary after that. You get thrown more boss tier ants, spiders, and queens, but there's no crazy one-off fights after Archelus until the end.

In EDF1, you only have 25 missions, but it still progresses through showing off what it has with liberal use of boss battles including a godzilla with firebreath that's generally much more dangerous than an Erginus was, red versions of UFOs, then a dual godzilla fight, a couple boss ant encounters, and then a mechanized godzilla with a drill tail that deploys missiles and grenades everywhere before the actual mothership fight proper (which isn't terribly hard since it literally can be hit anywhere for full damage).

EDF2 ups the enemy count to crazy proportions and regularly puts unique, one-off enemy types in between more standard horde missions. You've got a rehash of EDF1 including a mothership fight, you've got a fight against the precursor to hornets, the flying bees, and eventually a nest battle, multiple godzilla fights, a couple unique fights against giant centipedes that have never been seen in an EDF game since, a unique boss tier of pillbugs in a tunnel fight that's incredibly scary, and then a final fight against literally the biggest godzilla enemy ever encountered in the game. It's about 2.5 to 3 times the height of an Erginus, and causes absolutely ridiculous damage with its firebreath. It can outpace you by walking backwards, meaning you either have to hop on a bike and repeatedly outrun and shoot it, or manage to get in close and hope you can stunlock it with your best DPS weapon without suddenly eating thousands of damage in flames. And that's before a proper fight against the giant city-sized mothership that literally has like 400 cannons on it, similar in scope to the damn Earth Eater in 4!

EDF5 really doesn't have anything that feels quite as crazy in scale taking place in its endgame. Its mothership is actually quite tame and only attacks with its version of the genocide gun and summoning enemies the first times you see it. It's only the final battle where it pulls out more big guns against. EDF5 actually uses a lot of visual cues from EDF2, with Deroys looking basically like modernized versions of the EDF2 ones, right down to Deroys using the same body type as the larger flying drones, except with legs. EDF5 however doesn't give you a boss fight against a giant rectangular drone the size of many skyscrapers put together that immediately carpet bombs everything as it approaches you the moment it's aggroed, making it a desperate race to kill it before it arrives and repeatedly stunlocks you! EDF5 reuses stuff like 2's pill bugs and 4's dragons in the form of tadpoles, but pill bugs are easier with no boss encounter, and the same is true of the tadpoles, which function identically to dragons except with no boss variant.

EDF4 by comparison liberally spaces out the boss versions of insects, the walking fortress, the mothership, Earth Eaters, Erginus, then multiple Argo fights including that crazy beach battle, dragons, the boss dragon, and finally a few Brain fights. I also kinda miss how Hectors refuse to stop plodding towards you and can't be delayed by simply shooting off a limb. They're quite indomitable that way, haha. Its version of Deroys are also quite a bit scarier; in EDF2 Deroys took full damage everywhere, even if shot in the foot, meaning you could run up to a foot and open fire with a shotgun for very aggressive kills. They had no shootable parts you could destroy, so this was a favorable strat. In 4, it has multiple guns separately positioned on its legs and only takes damage if targetted at its central body, making it much harder to quickly kill generally.

EDF5 has no late game mechanized boss aside from the final bosses. Nothing on the scale of the Argo, the giant cybernetic gojiras in EDF1, 2, and 3, none of the unique bosses found exclusively in 2, and so on. I think EDF5 felt like it padded out its missions with a lot more "horde" type encounters. EDF5 also has one annoying mission where you're in a valley with a large spiderweb over it and a bunch of smaller webs and teleport pylons. Unlike similar missions in EDF4 (there's a few where the city's covered with layers of webs), the giant web has absolutely bonkers health to the point where your highest DPS weapons still take ages to kill it. I spent an ungodly amount of time shooting it with a gatling to no avail, and eventually tried a Fencer with Disruptors, which have crazy DPS but can't be reloaded. It took the equivalent of 3 full Disruptors, something like 160,000 damage on Normal in Online. That's... a ton. I don't remember any indicator this web was special and effectively indestructible short of taking a weapon loadout specifically to destroy it, other than noting that if you get caught in it, it damages you WAY faster than normal. The only thing that realistically will kill it quickly is an Air Raider with air strikes because of how large the web is, concentrating all the damage on it.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Anyone else looking forward to Japan being invaded by an army of giant insects and robots in 2025? I know I am!



I'm especially looking forward to revisiting it with the Air Raider. Last time I touched the XB360 version of EDF 2025 I was maining Fencer and Ranger, and wasn't aware that wireguns were crazy powerful for the Air Raider, to the extent that in the remake/release, EDF 4.1, they had their damage nerfed drastically, dealing 1/3 of the damage as before and no longer being a powerful general purpose weapon. They're only decently usable there for anti-air or as a safe means of escaping Red Ants, and far less so in Online when the enemy health scaling kicks in. Usually if you have a decent level of turret available, that's a preferable option, and if you're playing online with friends you'd be better off with air strikes to handle sudden crowds or buffs for allies.

If you're playing EDF 2025 as a solo Air Raider though, apparently wireguns were so strong there they functioned as a legitimately top tier weapon choice for close to mid-range combat, with vehicles or a Limpet Sniper handling long range situations such as drop ships. And they're quite fun to use!