Earth Defense Force 6 melted my brain and you all need to know why. To make sense out of the senseless, I’ve put together my thoughts in this list. Here are the most insane moments from EDF6.
#1 Inferno Weapons
We’re skipping straight to the good stuff. If you’ve never played an EDF game before, you’re probably getting a better idea thanks to all the footage that’s running right now. EDF is the king of the chaotic arcade shooters, dropping you into an alien invasion where the odds are infinitely stacked against you. You’ll be fighting swarms of literal hundreds of aliens – from giant ants to UFOs to things we can barely describe – you’ll be sprinting around, fighting it all, and watching as entire cities crumble. The joy of EDF is the chaos, and the best way to spread chaos is with the Inferno weapons.
There are five difficulty levels in EDF, and after beating the main story you’ll gain access to the unbelievably Inferno difficulty. The enemies are whirlwinds of destruction that will chew you up and spit you out in milliseconds if you’re not prepared. These missions are incredibly hard, but they also give the best possible rewards. You’ll get your hands on guns that fire volleys of thirty grenades in a single shot, you’ll get miniguns with a thousand clip magazines or shotguns that cover your entire screen with a single shot. The Inferno weapons are truly mesmerizing, wiping out entire blocks of cities or destroying hordes of aliens with ease. Figuring out tricks to get Inferno weapons early is a right-of-passage for EDF fans for good reason. We just want to watch stuff make really big booms.
#2 The Giant Ring
Here’s the biggest twist for fans of the EDF series. EDF6 is a direct sequel to EDF5 – which sounds very reasonable. Isn’t that how numbered sequels usually work? But no. EDF sequels are always disconnected, each set in a completely new alternate universe where similar but not identical aliens invade Earth and slowly destroy it with their seemingly endless armies of bugs, robots and whatever other weird things the developers can think of. EDF6 is set after the events of the previous game, with the aliens defeated by humanity teetering on the brink. 90% of humanity has been wiped out and the few remaining survivors continue to fight the aliens still left on Earth.
That’s all mind-blowing by itself for us longtime fans, but a bigger twist comes later when a new alien invasion arrives over the post-apocalyptic remains of Earth. Instead of giant bugs, the aliens arrive with biomechanical androids that attack in swarms. The machine soldiers are a totally new (and wonderfully goofy) threat, but the real threat is the giant ring that appears in the sky. The giant gold ring is a mothership that summons armies of aliens to planet Earth for a new invasion, but it doesn’t last long. After shooting an exposed panel, the world goes weird and your veteran soldier is teleported back into the past. This is a time travel game.
And suddenly EDF5 is completely recontextualized. We’ll be replaying through the entire events of EDF5 from a new perspective, sometimes replaying levels from the previous game with subtle changes to the timeline. This is a second chance at changing the future, but the aliens are bringing their worst for another round. It might seem like a rehash at first, but the game is only just getting started. We’re going to spoil the heck out of this game in the next entries, going through major events in order from beginning to end, because I have no idea how to explain some of this. But I’m going to try anyway.
#3 They Look Just Like Humans
EDF games are full of moments that defy explanation. Maybe it’s the translation, the bizarre story, or maybe the developers are messing with me personally – but there are so many moments that defy all logic, where characters say stuff that flies in the face of any objective reality. One of the moments appears early in the game and is a repeat from EDF5. If you’ve played those games, you already know what I’m talking about. It’s the Frog Soldiers.
Early in the game, you’ll fight walking frogs armed with alien guns. The soldiers and your commander immediately explain that the frogs look “just like humans” – that they’re humanoid, and never once say they look exactly like giant frogs. They keep repeating it too! And even worse, later in the game, you’ll fight even gray aliens that look even more like humans than the frogs – but instead of acknowledging that, the soldiers say they aren’t even humanoid. That they look like monsters. While I can’t confirm anything, I do remember reading that the translators purposefully changed the story to make it sillier and more confusing, which is the only explanation for any of this. Frogs look exactly like humans, according to the characters in EDF6.
#4 The Kruul
The machine men are the major new addition to EDF6, big goofy robot enemies that bounce around and attack in huge swarms. They come in multiple variants, including carrying giant grenades or flipping around in the sky like trapeze artists, but they’re always ridiculous. Just look at these things. But the aliens become much more dangerous, introducing new threats every cycle, and the Kruul are the first sign that EDF6 isn’t playing games anymore. These are some of the most unique enemies in any video game we’ve ever played.
The Kruul, also called Demons, are squid-like aliens with lots of tentacles that carry blasters and shields. Their shields move at light-speed to block your shots, but eventually temporarily freeze after taking too many hits. They seem invincible at first, but with a little clever shooting you can defeat the Demons quickly by literally disarming them. You can trick the Demons into blocking shots far from their body, then aim at the arms carrying the shield. Blowing off their tentacles will remove their shield – or their weapon – and force them to retreat and regenerate. This gives you time to take them down. These guys are absolutely evil enemies while also being just insanely cool. This is an enemy that could only work in EDF. And they only get worse. Later you’ll encounter Demons with two guns and two shields at the same time. And yes, when they swarm, they’ll block shots for each other. And later on, they only get exponentially bigger. This is EDF, of course they get bigger.
#5 Trapped In A Loop
We’re skipping way ahead, because the story of EDF6 really goes off the rails. After traveling back in time and getting a second chance to defeat the aliens, you do absolutely nothing with all your foreknowledge and lose the war a second time. The game skips ahead years multiple times until we’re back in the post-apocalyptic Earth yet again, where the Ring Ship appears yet again, and our heroes destroy the device and create another rift in time, giving us our third do-over and announcing that we’ve just begun Earth Defense Force 7. You’ve got to try again.
And hilariously, it isn’t even the only loop. We’re blazing through numbered titles now, and the war only gets worse thanks to the intervention of future androids and other war machines sent back in time by the aliens. Your hero does nothing to change the future each time, while another scientist character that travels in time with you also fails to change anything – instead of convincing the world, he gets sent to a mental asylum. Or simply flees when the war turns bleak. It’s going to take a lot more than just seven loops to save the Earth. We’re still just getting started here, and the aliens are only going to get worse.
#6 A Bright Future
The twists just keep on coming. Eventually your solo soldier actually makes a difference and the EDF successfully defeat the aliens before they can turn the Earth into a parking lot. After yet another big mission and time skip, we’re starting over from the beginning. At the very start of the game, you’ll begin in a post-apocalyptic bunker with a bunch of other freshly recruited soldiers. By this loop, you’re hardly a rookie, but you’ve got to play along anyway. Maybe the fancy suit of space armor gives this twist away. The future isn’t a wasteland on this cycle. The EDF is prepared for the second alien invasion this time.
Instead of getting chewed out by the Drill Sergeant, a group of elite soldiers arrive and lead you out of the bunker for a massive parade in the gleaming streets of a futuristic city. The EDF now has an entire army of super-powered tanks and giant mechs to join you in the battle ahead. After multiple loops, you’re finally making progress and winning the infinite war against the aliens. Too bad that victory doesn’t last long – after absolutely crushing the aliens’ first attack, the giant Ring Ship appears again and changes history yet again. By changing the past, they turn the future into yet another wasteland. EDF gives and EDF takes away.
#7 The Armament Barga
And here’s when EDF6 goes big. Later in the game, you’ll get to control a literal giant robot called the Barga. This is a returning mech from the previous game, letting you take on giant Kaiju monsters that are the size of Godzilla, and like the previous game, you’ll need to fight an entire horde of these things for one specific epic mission. Helicopters arrive to deliver a full squad of skyscraper-sized mechs onto the battlefield where you’ll fight an equal number of Kaiju. It only gets crazier from there, because instead of giving you a simple mech that punches things, the Advanced Weapons Lab gives you something a little bit better.
The upgraded Armament Barga has a weapon called the Copper Cannon. It takes an agonizingly long time to activate, but whenever you fire the Copper Cannon, you’re treated to a cutscene as the camera pulls back and you watch your mech unleash two giant laser beams that destroy anything in their path. You can level entire cities with one blast of the mech’s special weapon, and you have unlimited ammo. You can use these guns as many times as you want. And the funny thing is – this mission is still tricky. Even with the most powerful weapon ever, you can fail very easily if you don’t destroy the monsters fast enough.
First a swarm of Godzillas appear, then Upgraded Godzillas that roll around and shoot fireballs, and finally you’ll have to battle flying Godzillas that previously took an entire sub-series of missions to defeat just one of them. This is also one of the best farming missions in the game, because it really doesn’t get much harder when you’re using a weapon that can defeat giant monsters in a single hit.
#8 Breaking The Cycle
There’s too much we can’t talk about here. There are flying monsters that become super-powered by giant lasers, the Earth is terraformed into a red-sky wasteland multiple times, and the Ring Ship generates giant arms to fight you in future attempts to reset the timeline. You’ll have to fight psionic Krakens, Mermen invading from the ocean and swarms of little evil squids. There are so many insane details in this game, we’d be here next month if we talked about them all, but one of the best moments comes at the very end of the story.
After resetting the timeline again, defeating the Primers again, earning a gleaming future for humanity again, the aliens are on the verge of changing history and erasing all your progress. No matter what you do, the aliens can go back in time and change the course of the war with a giant fleet of future evolved teleportation ships. Victory is hopeless. The EDF can’t build their own time machine. You’ve hit a wall. You’ve got to figure out a new way to stop the alien’s strategy and finally defeat them for good.
So, how do we defeat aliens that send soldiers back in the past? By defeating everything they sent immediately in the past when it appeared, of course! New question-mark missions are added to your timeline, and you’ll have to play them to discover the exact moment in the past when the aliens launched their time-altering fleet. Once you find the right mission and destroy the fleet, you’ll effectively nullify their ability to change the past on that cycle, preventing another tragedy and giving you one last chance to defeat the Primers. With the time fleet destroyed, EDF marches to the Ring Ship and shoots it down in a massive battle. But things aren’t over yet. It’s never that easy.
And now the story really flies off the rails. We’re going into uncharted territory now. Buckle up and prepare to have your minds blown.
#9 Origin of the Primers
The big bad alien threat is called the Primers – don’t ask why, they’re just called that – in EDF6 and there’s a big unanswered question at the heart of their campaign to invade Earth. The big question everyone is asking is why. Why are the aliens invading? Why do they want to destroy humanity so much? They’ll travel back in time infinitely until they succeed. That’s an uncommon level of dedication for a bunch of dumb monsters. Usually EDF doesn’t really have a story. Sure, there are events, but we don’t get character growth and I’ll never expect plot resolution in a game like this. But we’re going to get plot resolution anyway.
Before the end, the Professor that’s joined you in decades (maybe centuries) of time travel loops reveals why he believes the Primers are targeting humanity. He reveals that the giant monsters are actually from a future Earth – which shouldn’t really be a surprise, they’re ants and spiders and frogs. Of course they’re from Earth! Okay, let’s just move on. Why are the Primers invading? It’s because of their own time travel incompetence.
Hundreds of thousands of years in the future, the Primer civilization came from Mars and took over Earth, taming the giant creatures that survived past an ecological collapse. Human civilization is long gone at this point, but the aliens use time travel to visit distant ancestors and worship them. Why are they worshiping humanity? It doesn’t matter. Don’t ask questions. We’ve got too much to talk about. One of the Primer ships crash landed in India a millenia in the past during a visit, so the Primers must wipe out all humanity now that we know of their existence. That seems like a pretty big overreaction, but there’s actually a logical explanation for all of this.
Because the Primers exist in the future, humanity can wipe them out before they even begin to exist. In the last mission during the battle against the Alien God, the Professor reveals that they’ve already launched a chemical weapon strike on Mars, wiping out any chance of the red planet ever developing life in the far future. And no, even that isn’t the end.
#10 The Chosen One
The story takes one final twist during the battle against an enormous, evolved Alien God in the final mission. The Alien God arrives from the future for one final battle against humanity, summoning aliens from every time line to attack Earth because the creature itself is a time machine. Unstuck from time, it continues to exist even after humanity changed the past and its future – technically it should be extinct. But it fights on because the timeline is so corrupted at this point, fate has intervened to put an end to the conflict once and for all.
In an unhinged speech, the Professor says that the Alien God and you, the player, Storm 1, have been selected as the ultimate representations of your species in an all-out brawl for time dominance. Yep, Time itself has a will of its own and is sick of all the nonsense. To decide which timeline is the true timeline, both contenders have to enter the ring and fight it out. Whoever wins gets to claim all of time for themselves. That’s a pretty narratively convenient way to stop the aliens for good and get a big boss fight out of the equation. The boss even evolves, becoming even more powerful as it unleashes countless monsters from all timelines and fires city-destroying psychic energy everywhere. This thing is so big it’s hard to tell how close (or far) it is off the ground. It’s the biggest enemy we’ve ever seen in a video game, and that’s just everything we love about EDF in a nutshell.
