Game Thoughts: EDF 5 (Patreon)

Some thoughts about Earth Defense Force 5, on which I spend three pages talking about a game where you shoot giant ants:

EDF5 felt like it's not only a missed opportunity to improve the series, but really a huge step back from what we've seen before. EDF 4.1 is what got me to love the series. Iron Rain made smart updates on unlocking weapons and upgrading armor. Even World Brothers, while disappointing, added the great squad system. Almost every change or addition that EDF 5 makes is for the worse.

My biggest gripe off the bat, what did they do to my squad? I am Wing Diver for life, but they hurt my ladies bad. Wing Divers feel so much slower walking and flying but their whole gimmick is trading defense for maneuverability. They've added a boost/dash but it still isn't as fast as you want and it barely travels any distance, so you really have to hammer it when moving around the map. A lot of the Wing Diver weapons are now charge weapons. So instead of pulling the trigger and firing, you hold the trigger to charge a meter and when you let go, then you fire. For example, the equivalent of an assault rifle (with a typo in their name so obvious I can't decide if it's intentional) has you charge the weapon and however long you charge it is how long it fires. So if you charge for 5 seconds of fire and kill the enemies in the first 2 seconds, you're just going to stand there with a gun that's firing on its own for 3 more seconds. Wing Divers are now the "friendly fire oh god why can't I stop shooting people" class. I used to only have problems when using high explosives, thanks the AI teammates' love of running directly in front of you while you're firing. For the vast vast majority of the game, I stuck with a laser weapon because that's one of their few "press the button and immediately fire" weapons that isn't short ranged. But the laser's gimmick is that it gets weaker as you spend ammo, so you have to constantly reload to keep it at full strength. Whiiich for a Wing Diver means you're constantly draining your battery pack so you can't spend much time in the air. EDF5 made a class of pretty ladies with jetpacks and laser weapons not fun to play. Any one of those three things is fantastic and EDF5 managed to make them bad! I made it through the whole story campaign and I still don't have a semi-decent sniper rifle. I spent the game with my long range weapon as a rocket launcher that starts off too weak and doesn't have great accuracy. At the end of the game, my rocket launcher is still had better range than the "long range" laser weapons. There's a new weapon upgrade system where collecting multiple versions of the same weapon can improve its stats. That's neat in theory, but it's still worse than Iron Rain because you still wind up with dozens of guns you'll never use, variations on the same weapon that you have no reason to go back to, and if the base weapon type isn't fun to use because it's a charge weapon, it doesn't matter how much it gets upgraded, it's still a bad weapon. I frequently found myself in a place where I'd finally get a new weapon I liked, but its stats would be worse than one I've upgraded. This just leads to a lot of inventory management time of checking the menu after each mission to see if you've finally upgraded your higher level weapon to be stronger than your lower level one, because naturally the game doesn't have an easy way to compare the stats of two weapons.

As much as I'll grumble about the changes to the Wing Divers, it's the changes to the enemies that sap the game of enjoyment. Several enemy types in the game now run away from you as you're fighting them. Couple that with the Wing Divers' slower speeds, and you feel like you're spending a lot of the game chasing after enemies that move faster than you or hang way out of your range. The flow of battle completely changes for the worse.

The back end of the game adds sniper enemies and drones that have long distance shots that turn your entire screen purple/red so you can't see where they are, they're probably out of your range, and you're wondering why backing away and dodging aren't getting you out of their fire and it turns out it's because your character is stuck on a foot-high curb she can't step over.

There's a bigger emphasis on "tall" enemies this time around, but instead of being slow like the kaiju or Hectors, they're very mobile. That makes for a neat change and some cool moments where a giant alien is using an entire building as cover and shooting at tiny little you. However, their dead bodies still become the same obstructions that the "smaller" Ravager bugs do. There are interesting gameplay choices in fighting the Ravagers where you can use bullets and not worry about splash damage but dead bodies will pile up and form walls and shields versus using explosives and being able to clear out dead enemies at the risk of getting caught in your own explosions. With the tall enemies, their dead bodies are just always a hassle. They block you from fighting other enemies but don't get pushed back as easily by explosions, they block paths, they block the camera, they fall on top of item boxes and are so big you can't grab the item under them, and sometimes the physics just go wonky and the body springs on top of you and pins you down until enough time passes for the corpse to vanish. The tall enemies have just ridiculous amounts of armor in the final stages, so not only are they screen-filling obstructions that never have to reload, have fantastic range and firing speed, and have shots that block your vision, they're also bullet sponges on top of it.

There's a big focus on enemy teleporters that spawn new enemies during the stage, but they're the same color and size on your radar. Call them out more, especially if they're hiding on the other side of the map, behind a mountain, or behind a large building. There are a few underground missions where you run through caves that are mini-mazes and have to find teleporters and those stages are such a slog. You're running around watching more and more enemy blips appear on the radar but they're under you and you can't find the damn path to the next level of the cave.

Mechs are ungodly slow in this game to the point that they're just useless. One of your first introductions to vehicles is a mission where you get inside a tank to fight drones, and the tank is so useless that I almost immediately jumped back out and started fighting on foot again. There are multiple big story moments where you get a mech and you're supposed to feel big and powerful as you turn the tide of battle... but the mech is so slow that the stage is just you holding forward as it sloooowly lumbers ahead. There's one mission where the big finale is your character jumps in a mech and by the time I got close to the enemy, all my allies were shooting it so it was jumping backwards faster than my mech could walk. I never got to fight the enemy because some tanks on the edge of the map kept knocking it back and finally killed it before I could throw a single punch. That was my big moment. I... walked.

So on top of these bad changes and additions, they had to have cleaned up the issues that have regularly plagued the series, right? Riiight? Nah, of course not. The camera still gets stuck inside enemy corpses, blocked by trees, or you find yourself in situations where your character would have line of sight on an enemy but you the player can't see it because something is above your character blocking the camera. Your characters still get stuck on small objects and ledges. Jumping is still unresponsive. Item boxes still get wedged in buildings or fall through the ground. You still have to manually collect item boxes to get weapons or armor upgrades so the end of almost every stage is a tedious slog to slowly fly around the map dashing into boxes.

The dialogue is still the same bonkers "everybody is having their own nonsensical conversation" EDF junk you love from the series. You meet some giant aliens that look like frogs and the entire EDF can't stop saying that they look JUST. LIKE. humans. At one point, some guy starts saying that the Frogs look like water would hurt them. No, my man, it's the complete opposite. You meet some humanoid grays and the entire EDF can't stop saying that they look NOTHING. LIKE. humans. That dude that says that the wasp aliens are "bird-like". If you are unfamiliar with EDF, just... no. That man is very wrong. It's literally just a scaled up wasp that fires stingers at you.

If you have self-esteem issues, EDF is still the series for you because just so much of the chatter is people telling you how awesome you are. Your squad members just always seem so thrilled every time you kill any enemy. From mission 1, every soldier thinks you're the best for being about to kill a giant ant and in mission 100 after you're killed thousands of them, everybody is still super jazzed when you laser another giant ant. The game is constantly telling you that you're special, important, and that you matter.

As nuts as the dialogue is, the story is really boring up until the very very end. It isn't until you get around 70 missions into the game that you get an actual interesting piece of lore about why the invaders are sending legions easily explodable grunts to the Earth. And around missions 90-100, they finally reveal what the invaders' plans are, but even with those two neat lore moments, nothing changes. Iron Rain's story went places and man do I love it, but EDF5 is just a lot of nothing. The closest EDF5 gets to any commentary is a few jokes about the soldiers' pay and the EDF's desperate attempts to get people to enlist. The bad guys are called the "Colonists" this time, but I don't remember anybody ever actually talking about colonialism in the game. Iron Rain showed that EDF can be really goofy but still have something to say, but EDF5 squanders all the story set-up. There's pretty regular background story chatter about how the world economy has crumbled and pretty much the majority of the human race is dead now, but the game never really does anything with that. Explore that a bit! Everybody's reaction is basically "even if we win, society is doomed, so we might as well shoot a bunch of aliens before we die".

Up until the final boss, and then it gets hilarious. EDF is out here putting JPRG final bosses to shame. But for the 100+ missions before that, pretty boring.

I beat EDF 4 and Iron Rain and World Brothers each four times across the different difficulties, but there aren't ANY stand-out missions in 5 and several missions I never want to play again, so I beat it once and have little desire to ever pick it up again. What a disappointment compared to the previous games.

EDF 6 seems like will be coming out any day now, but if they carry over everything from EDF 5, man, I think I just don't care about it anymore. I'm going to have to hear about a lot of improvements and changes to get me to consider coming back after how disappointing this game was.