Earth Defense Force 6 Review | Monoxide Poisoning™

Hey, hey, people, Sseth here...

I did my part, we all did our part, but it wasn't enough.

It's been three years since we killed God, and we're still no closer to reclaiming our world.

The aliens may be gone, but the monsters they've left behind have made life all but impossible.

The world is ruled by monsters.

At this point, maybe we are the invaders, and they are the EDF now.

Wait, wha- What?

WHAT "The Earth Defense Force 6 begins now."

This game has finally been released outside of the theocratic dictatorship known as Japan, where the personal computer is a heretical relic, and releasing a good PC port is considered apostasy.

Luckily, the developers aren't getting excommunicated, as this game, which is about 80% EDF 5 by volume, somehow has a worse PC port.

And despite not being an epic exclusive, this game uses epic online services for its multiplayer.

Ah, yes, let me just sign in with my LEGO account.

You can't turn this off, and every time you get an achievement, it locks your controls and you die.

We are so back, back to the past, because that's where we're going.

Now, you'd think the phrase "EDF plus time travel" would be a good tone indicator for this experience, but you'd be wrong.

Watching this game unfold is like giving a 20 to your local tweaker.

After the gas station dickpills and two hits of bang energy kick in, it's impossible to predict his next move, and yet, it's strangely captivating to watch him wrestle an officer while urinating with a full erection.

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Hey gang, do you wanna know why we're dealing with this invasion?

Because someone, *you specifically*, forgot to install ExpressVPN™.

That's right, Earth Defense Force is a metaphor for what happens when you browse the net without a VPN.

Like ants to a picnic, your unsecured connection attracts all manner of unsavory characters, from your ISP to scummy data brokers and government glowies.

Who knows what they want, or what they'll do when they get it?

If you're lucky, they'll just sell off your data to the highest bidder, and turn your life into a living hell of targeted advertising.

If you're unlucky, they'll establish a detailed record of every illicit detail of your personal life, and use it against you to ruin your life.

That's right, you'll be forced to resort to making TikTok slop content just to get by.

Thankfully, ExpressVPN™ stops all this and more by routing all of your internet traffic through a secure encrypted tunnel, allowing you to browse the internet anonymously, securely, and privately.

Use it to stay safe anywhere, even on unsecured public Wi-Fi.

Ugh, now that's what I call a picnic.

Personally, I use ExpressVPN™ to protect myself from my own landlord.

At the moment, I have him fooled.

He thinks I can barely make rent, but as the owner of my Wi-Fi network, he can see everything I do.

If he sees what I purchase online, he'll jack up my rent.

But with ExpressVPN™, Wi-Fi owners can't see what you're up to on their network, making total privacy just one click away.

Now, I can go about my normal business, and occasionally turn it off to Google things like "What to do if very poor?"

"How to make money for rent?"

and "Is it healthy to eat cement?"

Just to throw him off the trail.

ExpressVPN™ has consistently rated the #1 VPN by CNET™, The Verge™, and tons of other tech reviewers.

And unlike me, they actually have a reputation.

Find out how you can get three months of ExpressVPN™ for free by scanning the QR code on-screen, Clicking the link in the description box below, or by going to expressvpn™.com/SSeth.

Earth Defense Force 6 innovates on the EDF format of reusing 90% of the last game by having you time travel back to literal copy-pasted EDF 5 missions.

The entire intro is a highlight reel of brain rot from a previous title.

And since my mind has blocked out all EDF-related memories as a trauma response, it still hits just as hard.

From the premise you'd think we'd bring back some kind of superweapon or strategy.

But remember, this is a universe where everyone eats glue, including the aliens.

What we've brought back is far more valuable.

Advice.

Advice, such as shoot the glowing weak point.

In the original timeline, this took the EDF months to figure out.

Your guidance helps a little, but the aliens are sending new enemies back in time as well.

We're playing a game of quantum chess, but every player is retarded.

So, what's new? Not much.

Welcome to EDF.

You get one new mechanic, and quality-of-life features which should have been there from the start, like these new damage numbers.

So now, I can see I'm doing exactly one damage.

The Ranger can now turn while sprinting.

This took years of programming.

Everyone gets a new backpack weapon slot, so now you can actually use all the stupid shit that would have otherwise cost you an entire slot.

Backpack weapons also reload passively, so now you don't have to hold it out for a real-life minute to reload your turrets.

This entire series is built on breaking you down, to the point where I'm giving praise each time something gets marginally better.

Wing Diver gets an infinite durability, spammable shield that blocks everything.

Its intended purpose is to survive attacks and get some breathing room.

Its actual purpose is to grief your teammates.

Playing Air Raider causes a unique form of brain damage, where all of your dopamine pathways remap to prioritize big bomb at the cost of self-preservation.

EDF 5 tried to fix this by adding more limpet guns and a third weapon slot.

EDF 6 has given up completely.

Now you have an entirely new category of drone strikes which can work underground or in a timeline where all of your artillery crews are dead.

And the fencer gets literally nothing.

He's exactly the same.

Just like 5, he goes from broke to broken, from garbage can to Gundam, that can solo the entire game.

EDF's enemy designs take from the late-Confucian philosophy of CBT Maximalism, which falls into one of the following categories.

Instant death shotgun.

Instantaneous corporeal relocation.

I can't see what the fuck is going on.

I'm having an epileptic seizure.

And the rarest category of all.

Actually good.

If they have a gimmick, EDF will make damn sure you know about it.

For example, the flying drones have a unique mechanic, the rules of which are described to you in excruciating detail.

And what is it?

When you shoot an enemy, they get mad.

One of the simplest game mechanics that anyone, no matter how much their mother drank during pregnancy, can figure out on their own.

In any other game, you would not need to drill this into the player.

But this is EDF.

I've spent the last 15 hours inhaling nitrous and holding left click.

I'm grateful for this reminder.

Because with zero explanation, a new red drone shows up.

And if you aggro more than one at a time, you're already dead.

That's supposed to be a decoy.

In EDF 5, they were useless because they had no health.

In EDF 6, they're useless because the aliens won't fucking shoot at them.

EDF's network of radio gaslighters will keep you stocked up on genuinely dogshit advice.

At one point, Android suicide bombers show up and you're told to run away, hold your ground, shoot the bombs, don't shoot the bombs, and link up with Charlie.

Charlie is the key to all this, a terrifying new enemy.

However, are we going to- Hold Shift.

Their weakness is the shift key.

Surprisingly, most of the new designs aren't terrible.

Androids shoot their hands, which is a physical projectile that can be shot out of the air.

The new drones have weak spots and dodgeable attacks.

The Kruul are actually interesting.

They can block attacks with their energy shield until it overheats.

In the game's own words, the black ones don't work.

It's genuinely fun combining different gear and strategies to get past their shields.

And then, you play a mission with the rolling pill-bugs and all that praise goes out the window.

I need to make one thing very clear.

Cheat engine is no longer optional.

I complained about the drop system in 5, but now it's worse than I could have possibly imagined.

Let me give you a quick rundown.

Enemies drop armor and weapon crates.

Armor crates permanently increase max HP by one.

Weapon crates are gacha tokens that give one spin of the end-of-mission reward wheel.

These weapons come from a genuinely schizophrenic loot table based on mission number and difficulty, with a bias towards whatever class you're playing.

Getting duplicates levels up the star statistic.

This is not a small bonus.

It brings the weapon from borderline useless to borderline griefing.

If you're operating under the reasonable assumption that difficulty options are purely a matter of taste, EDF will punish you.

If you play the entire game on normal, you'll encounter only 25% of all items. If you want a smooth progression through all of the weapons, playing missions at the developer-intended armor and weapon levels, you'll have to play the entire game, and I'm not making this up, 16 times.

Every single mission, on every single class, on normal, hard, hardest, and inferno difficulties.

Or, you can use cheat engine to multiply the drops by several thousand and play on hard, so you only miss half the drop table.

And if you're worried about cheating, diluting your experience, it won't.

Every mission has a hard limit on max health and weapon level.

This isn't just a polite suggestion.

I'm asking you to cut out 60 hours of grind, so you can find out it makes no difference, because you get one shot anyway.

I mentioned this game was insane, but it doesn't truly become clear until you shoot at the time machine again.

You know you're in for a treat when you see the words, "The Earth Defense Force 7 begins now."

This is where you realize we're not using time travel to stop ourselves from eating glue.

This is a race through time to see who can eat the most glue, us or the aliens.

And right now, they're winning, because they can send new enemies back in time, but we can only bring our memories back to our bodies in the past.

The scientist who travels back with you tries to make use of this, but each time he does, the EDF sends him to the psychiatric ward.

He's looped so many times, he's memorized the game's dialogue.

I mean, I don't actually know how many times he's looped.

He just said he lost count, but the EDF's greatest weakness is numbers, so that's not saying much.

When he gets locked up, the title of smartest man in the EDF goes to Steve, the only man who can count all the way up to ten.

Truly, our brightest mind.

I believe them, because this is a post-no child left behind universe, EDF has a very particular way of introducing new enemies.

First, you'll do a normal mission with normal dialogue.

Then, near the end, the NPCs will randomly bring up something you've never heard before, like...

You're left wondering, Is that a metaphor?

Then, you go to the next mission and...

Oh shit, they weren't kidding.

That Kruul is getting prime-toppy.

This situation is so hopeless that many in the EDF are seeking God.

Not in a religious sense, they are physically looking for God.

The possibility of his existence gives the EDF hope.

Not hope that he'll save us, but hope that we can beat him to death ourselves.

However, that's not gonna work this time, so we really need to figure out how to use this whole time travel thing to our advantage.

"The Earth Defense Force 8 begins now."

This time, the scientist managed to avoid the insane asylum, and uses his time traveler knowledge to invent newer and better weapons for the EDF.

And then, he gives us the plot twist.

The aliens aren't from another planet.

They're from Earth, but millions of years into the future.

They're not teleporting in monsters that look like giant ants.

They're sending the result of millions of years of ant evolution back in time.

These aliens evolved from an Earth where mankind is extinct and the world is ruled by monsters.

When they asked, "Are we alone in this universe?"

They discovered the ruins of human civilization, and went back in time to check us out.

When they descended in their egg-shaped ships, early humans mythologized them as gods.

However, one of them said, "Imagine drunk driving one of these" and did exactly that.

After finding the ship, humanity realized, "Oh shit, there's aliens" and formed the Earth Defense Force.

If the EDF exists, the world will never be ruled by monsters, and the aliens will never evolve.

That single drunk driving incident just time paradoxed the aliens, but they have one last option to stop themselves from getting blipped.

They evolve from a world where humanity is extinct, so they just need to make us extinct.

Now, you may be thinking, "Why not just go back and turn Grug and Grunga into paste?"

Because that would cause another time paradox.

If they solve the problem too early, then they never needed to solve the problem, and will never solve the problem.

That's why they invade at the start of EDF 5.

It's just after the formation of the EDF, so there's still a reason to go back and invade.

All of this means, we have a chance.

We just have to do well in one loop, and we can time paradox the aliens out of existence for good.

This time, we do so well against the aliens that instead of emerging from a bunker into a war zone, you're greeted by an army of advanced soldiers, living in a high-tech utopian Wakanda.

Then, you blow it all up, but despite your efforts, the aliens are still one step ahead.

Every loop, they send their evolved ships back into the ring.

Turns out, these ships carry a log of everything we did during the war, and they go back in time and use that to retroactively win the war.

They've been doing this the entire time, but out of everything in this fucking game, they were being subtle about it.

At the start of the game, a ring ship appears.

Then, in the next mission, everything is destroyed.

They didn't just move quickly, they went back and changed the timeline.

We can only go back in time by shooting at the ring at a specific time, but if the aliens time travel before then, they can retroactively change the current timeline from one where we have 10 billion civilians to one where we have 500 civilians because of EDF's time travel rules.

Every mission takes place in its own temporal pocket dimension.

Any attempts to change the timeline past or future will get queued, and all the queued actions resolve when the mission ends.

If we're in mission 50 and you send me back in time to introduce your father to competitive League of Legends, you can watch me leave and you'll be perfectly fine.

Then, on mission 51, you no longer exist because you never existed.

Who are you?

So, when the mission ends, the evolved ships going back in time gets resolved, and in the next mission, you're fucked.

The scientist couldn't care less though, he's got bigger issues at the moment.

In order to win, we have to do so well in one loop that we can assault the time machine before the evolved ships can go back in time.

We're done playing around, it's time to win this thing.

"The Earth Defense Force 9 begins now."

Now, we've gone all the way back to the very beginning of EDF 5.

This is the payoff for everything we've had to put up with.

From the very start, the EDF has giant mechs called Bragas lying around.

Why don't they use them? Because they're construction cranes.

The EDF doesn't even think to use them as weapons until months later.

But this time, you snuck your weapons through the metal detector, so you can save one guy that dies during the tutorial.

Turns out, this was the single most important person in the fucking universe, the linchpin that turns the tide of the entire war.

This one guy is the only person who knows the code for the Braga elevator.

In EDF 5, the base gets wiped and they have to fish out the Bragas from the rubble.

But this time, they drop the anchors and you hold the line, punching them to death and saving the base from annihilation.

Every mission in this timeline corrects all of your mistakes.

These guys got squished by a pylon, but now we can block their convoy so they don't.

When the drop ships appear in EDF 5, you're not allowed to kill them because nobody has ever tried shooting the glowing weak point.

But now, as a civilian, you start blasting them out of the sky and get immediately conscripted.

When Godzilla shows up, you waste no time and immediately bring out the Braga to kick his ass.

In fact, this timeline goes so well that the EDF has developed their ultimate weapon, Braga with a gun.

The aliens are throwing everything they have at us.

It's time for us to use our own trump card, another Braga.

This is basically the perfect timeline for us, but the aliens still manage to send the evolved ships back.

If we want to win, we need our own ace in the hole.

Luckily, the scientist has one.

The EDF's ultimate secret weapon, coincidence.

That's right, random chance.

The aliens have a finite number of evolved ships across every time loop.

If ten go back and we destroy one, then they can only send nine back in the next loop.

So, all we have to do is time loop infinitely and eventually kill every single evolved ship, stopping them from going back in time and wiping our progress, and actually allowing us to gain the upper hand.

To communicate this, EDF did the last thing I expected.

It got meta.

To go back in time and kill the evolved ships, you have to physically go back through your mission select screen.

These include the only mission that takes place at night.

They can reuse their entire game three times, but darkness, whoa, that's way too disruptive.

We can only do that once.

After that, you're finally ready to assault the ring.

You gather the EDF's finest and attack.

Then, they all die and tell you to run away.

Great work, guys.

You shoot the ring and it goes horizontal, opening its portal to rain enemies.

It's revealed that you're not just fighting one group of aliens from one point in the future.

You're fighting all aliens from every point in the future.

They're throwing everything they have at you, but nothing is more effective than the ring because it stuns a player in real life.

Then, the final boss.

Of course, everything in EDF is big, but this thing is legitimately too big.

It flies outside the sky box, attacks by turning an entire city block blue, and outruns all of your attacks.

When you blow its head off, the front opens up and is revealed to be...

Mega God.

What the fuck has happene- The time travel rules have either been making sense, or the oxygen deprivation has finally gotten to me.

Allow me to explain what's actually going on.

We are currently in a time duel to determine who gets time paradoxed out of existence.

Humanity, or the aliens.

The aliens caused a time paradox with that little ship crash, and we caused a time paradox by launching a dirty bomb at Mars to prevent the crew from evolving.

Now, time itself has chosen us as humanity's champion and Gigagod as the aliens' champion.

Whoever loses this fight gets their entire species time paradoxed out of existence.

I'll reiterate, time is a sapient entity, which manually resolves paradoxes by hand-picking contestants for a death match.

This is no longer humanity versus aliens.

This is Four Retards vs. God's Final Form.

Remember, aliens, you're no match for the indomitable human spirit.

I've met men who could goon for 36 hours straight.

I've met stronger men who could flicker-goon for 7 seconds.

Humanity always has, and always will, overcome adversity.

Because we have something you don't.

STUPIDITY.

And you get nothing, no ending, goodbye.

Thank you for the 60 bucks.

Earth Defense Force 6 is a lobotomizing experience, where every single design choice is intentionally wrong.

It's a sacrificial altar where you trade neurons for dopamine, coded by Emperor Hirohito himself.

The weapon descriptions are lies, the dialogue is primordial brain rot.

I am the Manchurian candidate.

My MK Ultra activation phrase could be any line of dialogue from this game.

But I'm not complaining.

Coming from a race of people with a history of being fried in DiGiorno easy bake ovens, parting with 60 dollars was a difficult decision.

But it was worth it.

This is a series made by the same five guys for the past 20 years, and I'm cheering them on.

Nonsense is an antidote in a world where nothing makes sense, and there's value in something that transcends reason.

This is a product of unintelligent design, and I love it.

As always, more content to come, so stay tuned.

A warm thanks to the many members of the Merchants Guild, generously funding and bankrolling these videos.

You're all truly wonderful.

Have a good one.