Slop It On: Earth Defense Force 4.1
E! D! EEEFFFF!!!
Welcome to the first edition of We Love Slop, my “lowbrow” side of the high/low dialectic conversation in games. We’re a day late on this one, but blame my sore back, and know in your heart that the content shall flow.
There’s no better game to start this off with than Earth Defense Force 4.1: The Shadow of Despair, or EDF. The Earth Defense Force series is long and storied, primarily in Japan, though we’ve seen more and more port over to American shores after a somewhat inauspicious introduction during the PS2 era. The most current one is EDF 5, which I haven’t played enough of to speak on yet, but it’s totally okay because the series provides the same stuff in the same comfortable, repetitive, and satisfying package every time, so I’m confident I’ll love that one too.
Basically, if you haven’t heard me drone on about this before in any number of places, EDF is like if you took the basic political impulse of Helldivers 2, sanded down the details, and made it kind of more intuitively a part of the theme. The EDF, the force, not the game, is a giant military force that kills and is killed by a bunch of giant bugs who are invading Earth. They’re very militarized and fascistic and all, and they’re totally destroying the cities just as much as they’re saving them, but the reason this game is slop (non-derogatory) is that it never looks at the camera and winks at you either. It’s just text.
The gameplay essentially is a loose musou style, as you are a relatively tiny little soldier with a squad of NPCs and, if you can find anyone to play with you, non NPCs up against a massive, massive number of ants, spiders, bees, and such. You’re talking not hundreds but thousands of bugs per level, a truly overwhelming amount of legs, abdomens, etc, and a truly overwhelming amount of individual player deaths in the process. You take and discard guns as you go, there’s a general strategy, but not a “get good” path so much as a “get through” path. There are, I kid you not, 98 levels in the game, and I have beaten them all. It’s wonderful.
If you’re reading this and thinking that this sounds like torture, I’m sure you’re not alone — as we’ll find with slop, it really has to strike you, and if it doesn’t, it’ll fall flat. But I genuinely think EDF is a wonderful as a sort of accomplishment, even if it isn’t your cup of tea. It’s an arcade style slog with a political message that’s just kind of there and gone, in the way of the kind of ineffectual but ultimately resonant satire children of Troma and hastily packaged zines-cum-Hot-Topic-tee-shirts will recognize. I won’t even go so far as to say it’s effective — no one’s going communist because of the EDF, after all — but the whiff of political annoyance mixed with a sense of massive, almost irresponsibly vast gameplay that is at once repetitive, compelling, and totally throwaway is something I think we don’t get enough of.
While games like Red Dead Redemption 2 get the constant “oh remember x moment in the game” or “god, I think about x character a lot,” I think there’s something kind of refreshing in a game where the only specific level I can remember is the first one because I’ve played it so much. The other 97 are, to use an annoying phrase, simply a vibe — a feeling and an emanation more than anything. That sense of being able to connect with something and not entirely have to worry about why? That’s slop, pure and simple — it’s easy, it’s brainless, but that doesn’t make it bad.
And that’s why EDF 4.1 is perfect at being slop.