A baseball player, a rookie soldier, and two random ladies with jetpacks go to save a random “Asian City” in Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2. PC screenshot captured by the author.

Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 Almost Learned From Past Mistakes

I’ve fallen back down the EDF hole after four years away

I used to be a huge fan of the Earth Defense Force game franchise. The series has been around since the PlayStation 2, and it’s about running around large cities as a hapless soldier blasting giant bugs and alien spaceships with an ever-evolving collection of weapons and tools.

In the summer of 2021, the series’ long-time publisher D3 released an English language localized version of Earth Defense Force: World Brothers. The game was meant to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the franchise while also bringing it to new audiences with a cutesy cube-infused art style and an even wackier story.

It technically did all of that, but it also made me super mad. Perhaps even irrationally so. Although it starts out telling a campy cartoon version of the typical EDF alien invasion plot, it quickly diverges into being about the titular World Brothers. These characters come from dozens of different real-world nations (and also time periods), and you collect them somewhat at random as you progress through the game.

Most of these characters are designed entirely around clumsy racial stereotypes. There are some attempts at absurdist humor, like a Ninja who always…