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.
