Earth Defense Force on SNES is a port of a horizontal arcade shooter. Before each stage you choose one of 8 weapons to use and there is a levelling system dependant on how many enemies you take down.

A key feature is changing the use of your small companion ships with the later levels gained give the addition of shadowing your ship and a broken homing option. Once you max your levels you can get more shields above the highest default option of 3.

With only 3 continues you’ll need to prioritise your strategy so you can gun down as many enemies as possible. Some weapons are great for early game without many good upgrade options and some weapons without much use at all until upgrades come available.

The game looks pretty good for an early release SNES title, it uses some minor Mode 7 effects in the background to convey movement between levels. I love the little mobile suit enemies but they joined far too late into the game. The story is near invisible apart from the opening sequence, again this is where reading instruction manual scans can be of great benefit. I thought for the inclusion of the SNES online package you really can’t complain. I’m curious to check out more of Jaleco’s offerings.

Had to replay this to make sure I wasn't crazy about the weapon imbalance. After testing every weapon, Homing was the only thing giving me the consistent firepower and range I needed, S. Laser and Explode were okayish, everything else was totally ill-equipped to kill anything. And then one of the end-game bosses has the audacity to throw a nullifier at you that makes homing weapons useless.

It has generally fine gameplay and good background art if you can make it past that, but I couldn't get into this. I don't want to play a shmup where only 1 of 8 weapons feels comfortable, that just irks me in a deeply personal way.

Playing Through My Evercade Collection Part 15: Jaleco Collection

EDF! EDF! EDF! Oh wait wrong game, this isnt the fun insect destroying game. Instead its a rather bland arcade shooter with a hitbox thats a fraction too large, slowdown that hits a fraction too often and enemies that like popping in from unusual angles (thus ruining half the available weapons) a fraction too much.

Its not a particularly horrible game but its just a bit too far on the bland and unexciting side to want to play.

Wasn’t really gonna review this but I wanted to rant. This game is just mid at best, it does nothing too awful but for 1991, this is just nothing interesting. I was just astounded at how there is just nothing interesting. You just shoot enemies, no interesting setpieces, no gimmicks in a stage, just shooting enemies and it’s so dull. Most of the bosses aren’t even that interesting either. The game has a lot of weapons to use but most of the game will have you using the S. Laser. Now about that final boss…

Noticed only like one other review brought up this boss. Screw this boss so much. I almost rage quit because I just kept dying really fast even at my top speed and I was barely doing damage to it. The only reason I didn’t quit was because I remember the options had the ability to go right in the face of an enemy and even then dodging this stupid boss’ homing projectiles is still really damn annoying! This alone makes me not want to replay the game even though the game being boring already made it so I don’t wanna replay it anyway.

It’s a shame it’s one of the only few shmups on NSO in general. In fact if you want to play a Super Famicom shmup, just play the other option which is Pop’n Twinbee. God I really should get back to reviewing Twinbee games. I guess the one thing I can give it is, the music isn’t too bad and there wasn’t too much slowdown. Yeah that’s about it, what a lame game. I need to stop playing SFC games by Jaleco. I still would rather play this over the first Rushing Beat game though so that one comment I made about it still stands.

Horizontal shooter. Drops the two player support of the arcade version and adds the ability to select between eight weapons at the start of each stage or at each continue use instead of four. Also changes some stages and enemies, and removes the ending plot.

You can swap between three speed levels, though I never felt a need to go under the max. As you gain score your weapons level up to five and get stronger, you always have two option weapons you can change between four different modes as you level they both do damage to enemies they touch and destroy some types of enemy bullets. You first have the ability to have them inside your ship or to spin more defensively around you while firing and as you level up you get the choice to have them act more independently as they split up and move around based on your movement and finally you unlock a more aggressive mode that has them both move together locking onto enemies and staying right in front of the until they are destroyed. Some weapons are more viable as you level up like the grenades and some like the homing shot or s laser are great all the time (except for the final boss where they auto aim at an unkillable target). You can take three hits and dying allows you to continue at the start of the stage but you keep your current level progress. Decent music, nothing too interesting about the backgrounds or enemy design but not bad or too repetitive. Solid shooter with a fairly easy normal difficulty (depending on weapon choice, and ignoring the final boss).

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676354381384675329

Jaleco had this amusing tendency to repeatedly put out incredibly middling efforts during genre renaissances of the time like for shmups and beatemups. Here's one of them, an inoffensive but bland shmup. I actually couldn't get the music working on Snes9x for some reason and had to switch over to bsnes for basically the first time.

Weapons aren't too great here. You're given a selection of like eight or so but you're only going to want to stick to a couple. I used Vulcan for the whole game because it was treating me the best, up until the final boss where I got completely obliterated. He's this turtle looking monster thing and he is incredibly miserable, way way too difficult to dodge his attacks and has tons of health. The only real strategy, as I've later learned, is to go into the stage with the Atomic weapon and throw your options right in his fucking face until he dies. Atomic worked poorly for me prior but I will admit I didn't really think of doing this. I didn't exactly assume this game would have enough depth to actually require strategies.

Even as one of the earliest shmups for the console, dating October 1991 in Japan and January 1992 in North America, there was still better options to choose from even in that launch window, such as Gradius III or Darius Twin. Even HyperZone has a little more novelty to it, and in that game you can just go in circles and nothing will hit you. Thanks, Jaleco. I think in about a couple days' time I'll forget everything about this except the annoying turtle creature.

Es un mal Shotem up, o Shmup o matamarcianos, como prefieras.

Puedes elegir bastantes armas, pero realmente solo un par de opciones son buenas, el resto apestan.

No hay powerups... solo podemos alternar unas bolas que se acoplan a nuestra nave para disparar más potente, o hacer que giren o que vayan automáticamente a por cada objetivo... esto último rompe el juego totalmente y lo hace aburrido de narices.

Los fondos están mal escogidos, pues te comerás más de un disparo porque no ves el ataque enemigo gracias a esos fondos sobrecargados con cosas.

La música, para ser un shmup, es muy regulera, y este tipo de juegos suele contar con bandas sonoras brutales.

Ah, buena suerte con la segunda parte del monstruo final, una aberración de la programación hecha únicamente para destruirte y que jamás veas el final del juego.
Por eso mismo reconozco sin pudor haber abusado del rebobinado y de los savestates, de lo contrario ni en mil millones de años habría podido.