Earth Defense Force 2025: A Guilty Pleasure Review

Since this is my first Guilty Pleasure review, let’s make one thing clear before we begin: I don’t feel guilty for liking these games. I don’t feel guilty for most of the things that I do. When I call a game a “guilty pleasure”, it’s because I can’t critically praise it for the things it gets wrong, but I love it for the things it gets right. Games like this are like puppies born with no feet: obviously flawed, but you love them anyway.

So without further ado:

Earth Defense Force 2025

Overview

Earth Defense Force 2025 is one of those baffling, cheap-looking abominations of the Orient that you see sometimes on Youtube and wish, “Man, too bad that’s never getting a port.” Only this time, someone was crazy enough to actually do it.

You get four classes: the standard marine Ranger, the jetpack waifu Wing Diver, the useless support unit Air Raider, and the glacially slow tin-can Fencer. With them you go out slaughter armies of giant ants, giant spiders, giant bees, giant robots, giant UFOs, and giant-er versions of all those giant things. It’s what one of my old roommates once called the Starship Troopers of games.

Why It’s Bad

Kindergarten-Level Plot

Technically this game is a sequel (the first game was called Earth Defense Force 2017), but don’t worry about skipping the first one: getting lost in the plot is only a concern for series that have one. Wikipedia was able to generously sum up the story of both games in five sentences. I’ll do it in two:

Alien invaders drop giant insects and robots on Earth, and you have to go kill them all. In the sequel, you do it again.

What’s more, they seem serious about it. They honestly seem to be trying to tell this harrowing, heroic saga about mankind’s desperate struggle against vastly superior alien threat. It falls flat on it’s face of course, much like the aforementioned footless puppy. And they stretch it out over 85 missions.

Broken Animations and AI

If you hit a giant robot with something hard, it will bend backwards like a drunken limbo dancer, often in the wrong direction. If they send a swarm of UFOs at you, they’ll bounce off streets and buildings while charging you because they’re too dumb to do proper strafing runs. If you’re fighting in mountains and there’s a huge insect army coming at you, there will always be several of them that spawn in and charge in the opposite direction, and you’ll have to go looking for them to finish the level. Insects will get caught in alleyways. Your soldier AI partners will run into walls. The only thing dumber than the plot is just about everything that moves.

Garbage Graphics and Performance

It’s like a PS2 game but shinier: the models are basic, the textures are cheap, and the only clear benefit of the hardware is it’s ability to fit more crap on the screen. Every explosion slows the game down. Enemy spawns make the game stutter. And this game wishes it could get a constant 30 fps. The fact that this game never crashed while I was playing it is a miracle worth calling the Vatican for.

Why It’s Good

Laughably Bad Voice Acting

If you think this should have gone in the “why it’s bad” section, then you’ve never heard the trooper dialogue in this game. It’s not often I call something “laughably bad” and mean it literally: the NPC chatter is randomized, with often hilariously bizarre results. Here’s some examples:

“Why do you fight in the EDF?”/”For some reason!” “The one who kills the most giant insects buys me dinner!” /”YES SIR!” “I heard you’re getting married.”/”NO WAY!”

Everybody else either sounds stilted and half-assed or cartoonishly melodramatic. We got a crappy Japanese B-movie game, and with it we got crappy Japanese B-movie dubs. It’s terrible. But it’s also perfect.

TONS of Replay Value

Like I said before, there are 85 missions. There are also 5 difficulty levels, and each level harder gives a better chance of dropping awesome guns. You start off with pea-shooters and find weapons that can destroy entire city blocks. The excitement finding a sweet new gun, or cannon, or giant quake hammer and the power trip that comes with trying it out is just…sublime.

You Kill LOTS of GIANT BUGS

See, above all, this is a game that knows what fun is. Fun is running down the street as the Ranger with a 16-barreled rocket launcher and annihilating everything in front of you. Fun is using the Air Raider to call down an air raid on a column of insects and watching their body parts fly up on pillars of fire. Fun is flying around as the Wing Diver and raining unholy laser-death down on the chitinous hordes. And finally (my personal favorite), fun is dual-wielding 30mm cannons with the Fencer and taking down battle cruisers single-handedly, then switching to a riot shield and minigun to mow down waves of the skittering fiends like grass.

It’s mindless violence, and that’s favorite kind of violence. Intentionally or not this game has it’s priorities straight, and for that this game will always have a place in my heart.

And best of all? It’s got local co-op. Praise be.