The Super Nintendo beat out the competition in most genres, but scrolling shooters was not one of them. Competing hardware featured lightning fast space shooting action while Nintendo’s slower CPU kind of struggled. Many shooters chug and feature incredible amounts of slowdown. Next to the blazing fast likes of Gaiares and Thunder Force on the Genesis this looked pretty bad. A few developers did however manage to get the best out Nintendo’s 16-bit machine, but it’s a small club. Earth Defense Force is a series I’ve heard about a few times, but always on more modern hardware. I learned of a Super Nintendo release, and wondered if it too suffers at the hands of the slow CPU. Thankfully it doesn’t, and Earth Defense Force (or E.D.F.) is a decent little game.
The plot is of course nonsensical. There’s something going on with an evil force building a secret weapon to use against Earth on the dark side of the moon, and you’re a part of the defense force tasked with defeating them and saving the planet. There’s pretty much no exposition so the weak story doesn’t matter. E.D.F is a horizontally scrolling shooter wherein you must survive incoming waves of enemies either defeating or dodging them until you reach a boss whom you must destroy. It’s a very typical set-up, and this game doesn’t re-define the genre. It does however have a few unique tricks in its book that help set it apart from the rest.
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| The backgrounds are pretty but the level design is bland. |
My favorite aspect of the game is the fact that you don’t collect different weapons. At the beginning of each stage you choose the type of firepower you want to use, and you’re stuck with that until you complete the level or use a credit to continue. There’s a staggering eight different weapon types and they’re all rated in three areas including power, rate of fire and speed. Personally I found it a little unbalanced; the grenade is absolutely terrible and I can’t imagine anyone using it. Meanwhile the homing laser is overpowered and using anything else just feels like you’re trying to artificially increase the difficulty. Still, having the options is nice and I enjoyed experimenting with the system.
You also get two ‘options’ (as they’re called in other games) and these can either combine with your ship, or go out on their own to increase the number of projectiles you’re shooting. Some weapons have other functions with these, but for the most part that’s how they work which adds further to the options at your disposal. You can also upgrade your weapon, but not in the typical way. Instead of collecting a power-up you instead fill a bar at the top of the screen by defeating enemies. When this reaches max you gain a level and your weapon becomes stronger. Furthermore this also upgrades the two assist ships giving them new effects. It’s a pretty neat system that hearkens to the role playing genre, and it’s very unique for a shooter from this era. What’s also unique is that your ship isn’t destroyed by a single hit; instead it loses a notch on its shields. When this is depleted you must use a credit to continue.
So why isn’t Earth Defense Force regarded as a classic? The developers had all of these unique ideas but unfortunately they didn’t focus on the basics. Some of the stages are downright boring. Enemy patterns are so typical and generic that they will make hardened players sleepy. The first few stages are particularly bad with the intro featuring set pieces, patterns, and obstacles that are actually less complex than the original Gradius on the 8-bit Nintendo. That’s pretty sad, and it’s not even as memorable as the aforementioned title. Another problem is the stages lack environmental hazards. Because enemies approach in waves, and the levels are sparsely populated, this means that there’s a lot of monotonous moments when you’re simply waiting for something to happen. Earth Defense Force has it’s moments of greatness, and I really do appreciate the unique features it brings to the table, but it really is a little boring to play sometimes.
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| The screen is rarely busy enough to concern even beginner players. |
It also doesn’t really push the hardware. While the action and scrolling is quite smooth I wasn’t really impressed with the graphics most of the time. It’s a very generic and ordinary looking shooter that fails to distinguish itself from the pack visually. The art style is very plain and standard for the genre with ordinary looking ships as enemies, and larger mechanical objects as boss encounters. They based a few of these off of animals but made some odd choices. Why would anyone make a ship shaped like a shrimp? I don’t really understand what they were thinking with that one. The only really interesting effect used here is mode 7. The developers incorporated it in order to make it look like you’re approaching planets and objects in the background, and even though I’ve played a million games that use it, I found it pretty impressive. This is a very clever way to make it look like you’re actually moving through space. The soundtrack fares a little better with some decent electronica style music. The first stage’s theme is particularly catchy and fits the cloud filled sky background perfectly.
I really wanted to like Earth Defense Force. It had some really neat ideas, but these were wrapped in a rather boring package that suffers from uninspired development. It seems to me that they designed the game around these novel gameplay elements and threw together the rest of the package without much thought. Although it’s a little empty and lifeless Earth Defense Force is still a decent game. It’s worth playing for any fan of the genre but everyone else will probably be bored to tears with it.
