When of i think of when the series officially, globally managed to “hit it big”, Earth Defense Force 3 is when it actually happened, after word of mouth did its thing and helped reach the audience for a more arcadey and un-serious gaming experience, almost a pure one, if you want.
Sorry, Earth Defense Force 2017, as it better known, which is a fitting title for another reason besides keeping in tone with the 50/60’s style of sci-fi cheese, and the obvious hiding of this being the third entry of the series (the main one, anyway) to make the new potential audience of the previously Playstation centric IP not feel like they were missing out.
The reason being curiously a story one, as with EDF 2017 will start what would become a recurring approach to the plot, as in this does not follow up from the events of EDF 2, nothing from that game is ever mention, because EDF 2017 it’s a remake of the first EDF, which was set in the…. back then still not that far away year of 2017.
It wouldn’t really matter much, if this time they didn’t take advantage of a better performing consoles and more budget to fully flesh out the bonkers story outside of a couple of text crawls at the beginning and end.. but they did, though it’s a shame most of the story juicer bits aren’t in the mission descriptions, like the radio chatter is as often the carrier of some of the utterly insane and insanely stupid dialogues delivered in a sempiternal so bad it’s good old fashioned style voice acting, and oddly there’s no option for subtitles, so there’s always the chance you might miss some hilarious bit because the sounds of destruction and enemy death cries might drown out the dialogues. “classic” EDF clunkery.
but they manage to still make your player character go from a no name dude to what would become known as the legend of Storm 1, as the lone rank-n-file EDF soldier that managed to repel the alien invasion (almost) all by himself, the inamovible rock standing against the hurricane, as the fellow soldiers talking via radio start hearing and discussing of the incredible feats you do.
Gameplay wise, is it really surprising than not much has changed, it’s EDF on a HD console and so it looks and runs better than before, even with some slowdown and it still being a budget release, i mean, the pick up item drop are still just flat images rotating to adjust to the player’s camera, it’s that obvious and telling of its budget game release, but it adds to the charm, in a kitschy way.
I do wish they improved or fixed some of the old fashioned design choices, like you having to manually get every armor piece to have it counted at the mission report, or the weapons box drops not often resulting in lots of duplicates that have no use use or function whatsoevers, but i feels it’s pointless – at least in retrospective – to lament this when it took until EDF5 for Sandlot to find a way around the enforced item sweep and the weapon crates’ drops often being pretty much a gacha experience minus the gacha downsides.
Some of the minor additions are cute though, like the ability to basically “collect” roaming other EDF soldiers that will de facto follow you and support you to by shooting at the enemies too, you can lose them but thankfully there’s no penalties for getting other EDF soldier killed (or accidentally offing them yourself by friendly fire), or having the occasional running civilians offed, because this would have been an easy source of unwanted and unneeded frustation if they made a complete squad managing system just to frustrate you over losing teammates or causing damage.
Which you do on a costant basis, i’m sorry citizens but your houses and skyscrapers are in the way of my rocket launcher blasting some flying alien wasp or a giant bug nest, acceptable losses, etc.
Instead this way the “squad system” helps in making presentation better and making you feel like you’re a part of an army even though you’ll basically solo the alien invasion, as the plot is aware that this lone grunt unit is canonically doing most of the work themselves.
there are more and new vehicles, and now they are more useful (especially the new ones like the battle exoskeleton with gatling guns, rockets and in some version flamethrowers), which is nice, as is the expected handful of new enemies alongside new weapons to play with.
Plus there are more missions, so just beating the game on Normal will take something like 15 hours, then you’ll replay the stages on the harder difficulties to farm armor points and increase the HP bar’s length, and find new and more powerful weapon drops that are mandatory to eventually tackle Hardest and finally the batshit lunacy that is Inferno difficulties. The usual.
Yes, this is bullshit even for this series, and it was fixed in the EDF2017 Portable re-release port for PS Vita, but that release physical only in Japan and digital everywhere else.
Another issue that can actually be forgiven but was and still is kinda odd, especially back then when everything “had” to start having online multiplayer, and especially for a series that benefits greatly of more people sharing the utter insanity and chaotic gameplay of EDF… there’s no online multiplayer, or any online feature or DLC content.
Yeah, so old fashion and early on the 360’s life the DLC rot hadn’t yet take off, meaning you actually get a complete game on the disc off the box, which is a since long gone concept.
This one though can actually be chalked up to being an early budget relase for the X360, and you can still play it co-op split screen offline, as well as engage in the 2 players versus mode, here called Battle Mode, and from the sequel (EDF 4 AKA EDF 2024) onward all EDF titles would include online multiplayer co-op and all classes from previous numbered entries.
And to be honest, unless you are an EDF fan that started by playing the more recent ones and want to play the old entries in the series for curiosity (and fun), there’s very little reason to play EDF 3/2017 today (even in its expanded Vita port, since it just adds back stuff that was previously expected in the base package), as the later entries are simply better, have more features and new classes (opposed to the mcbasic Infantry/Ranger soldier dude available here as the only option), on top of being easier to find and play on modern consoles and PC.
I’d say it’s even better than EDF 2… it there weren’t some caveats, the main one being fairly big, as in, there are no classes, so hope you love the basic EDF soldier class, because that the only one available there, i guess, EDF 2017 uses the excuse of being a remake to have the Infantry/Ranger as the one and ONLY class you can play as, so let alone the Air Raider, there’s not even the Pale Wing that was introduced by the base release of EDF 2.
But it still has it’s place in the series history, in that it did help a lot in giving the series more exposure on something that wasn’t a PS console, and overall made the planet wide mission actually available globally, so once again, let’s us chant:
E D F! E D F! E D F! E D F! E D F!
EDF! EDF! EDF! EDF! EDF!
E D F! E D F! E D F! E D F! E D F!
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