Although I have a few videos of EDF PS3, PS4 and Vita games I have no claim to be a stellar EDF player. I'm just a slightly above regular player who tries to find good, clean, easy and replayable strategies for the most interesting and useful missions. The vast majority of the videos provided by western players are tasteless. Either:
- they use obnoxious amounts of armor, at which point the game becomes a mindless moronic game and just shows that they don't have little idea how to play the game or that the only way they managed was by using a ton of armor (aka no skill or effort needed)
- they have little to no strategy at all, usually reflecting the previous reason because the more armor you have the less inclined the player is to have any strategy, they only need to shoot things and run for the nearest health crate when they need
To find really good ones you'll have to check the japanese players videos. Finding them is relatively easy, but not all due to how they were tagged and named. It's not only westerners that publish crap, you'll find tons of it there too. Thankfully the majority of good videos published by japanese players are without commentaries (what a relief), I hate them too on western ones. Worse, a few (uf!) use a japanese Voiceroid, a speech synthesizer that will likely drive you insane, only easy option is to disable sound. If the gamer is good on EDF, what he's doing will be mostly self-explanatory and no details will be necessary.
Many videos will be coop ones. They're less useful as you only get one player's perspective. I do enjoy playing the game solo (or coop solo), so I find these less interesting anyway.
Although it's easy to figure out which weapons they're using, with the sites:
http://weapon.edf.jpn.com/4-1/
http://weapon.edf.jpn.com/5/
you can find out the less obvious ones. There's no need to know japanese, from the kanji characters it's possible to see which are the weapons and then use the weapons site english translation or a web browser with an embedded one to find out its English name.
To find videos use these keywords on Google (other search engines can provide good or unusual results but it's seldom, Google's results are usually better).
地球防衛軍4
for EDF 2025
地球防衛軍4.1
or
地球防衛軍5
or
地球防衛軍6
add INF to search for inferno runs. If you want a specific class use:
レンジャー
Ranger
ウイングダイバー
Wing Diver
エアレイダー
Air Raider
フェンサー
Fencer
Also useful is:
初期体力
Initial physical strength
for videos from players that finish missions with base armor, which obviously are the best ones.
Separate each keyword with spaces.
Finding a specific mission is more difficult. Not only is the search engine not totally smart (even inside YouTube), but most gamers use different ways to describe the mission. Some will use the mission name in japanese. But many fortunately will use something like this:
M83
ST83
DLC01-10
DLC2-4
Try several ways for these, as some will provide better results than others.
Many videos will be on YouTube, but you'll find a lot, especially for 2025 / 4 and still for 4.1 in Nicovideo, which is a sort of Japanese YouTube.
Don't expect to be able to duplicate easily their results. Most of these are stellar EDF players who have thousands (the majority several tens of thousands) hours on the series. Also do remember that many videos were most likely difficult to achieve. Still, the strategies and ideas you can get are several times very useful.
Mostly ignore EDF 5 videos with the Wing Diver using the Dragoon Lance Tri (ドラグーンランス・トライ), which was a broken weapon that enabled infinite flight without much effort. It's pretty easy to see which are these videos, but do expect most of those circa 2017 and 2018 to have been made using this weapon and this exploit so they have 0 interest. The weapon behavior was changed in the first patch and was never possible to use it that way in the western version.
For the Air Raider many players use a specific class of vehicle. It's difficult to find AR videos not done with helicopters, which frankly do break almost any point of seeing them, especially 4.1 ones, as it's not that different from the exploit of WD's infinite flying in 5 (well they did have infinite flight in 4.1). Although some specific missions are extremely difficult to do solo without helis, only using helis isn't interesting at all, at least to me.
I'll give a few suggestions of good ones.
One of the most prolific suppliers of videos and information is Leafierlemon. Not only does he has a web site with useful information:
he has some really good videos on his channel, the kind you expect from a stellar player with a lot of original strategies:
Lately, he publishes mostly co-op videos but has some really good solo stuff too. He's a master at using NPCs. He's a Wing Diver and Ranger master. Kudos to him for all his work and information sharing. 素晴らしい仕事
He also has most of the best and most clever ideas for many missions, the vast majority of them originals.
This gamer is very, very interesting:
because he streamed playing Inferno with Ranger from base weapons and armor. The awesome part is that the streaming contains everything, the failures and successes. Very good for learning.
An awesome EDF gamer, sadly retired:
Another, but sadly with less than good EDF 6 stuff:
Another (mostly 4.1):
A pro using the Armored Vehicle Grape with the AR, which clearly is stellar if you master it (do check his DLC solutions for 4.1):
Absolutely stellar with Fencer on EDF 5, but do realize he's using DLC weapons in most of them (but his WD 5 videos use the Dragoon Lance Tri exploit, and his AR stuff is not interesting at all, just helis):
A very interesting and unusual series that I found lately, all EDF 5 missions with 4 rangers but with views from all of them. Gives a different perspective since multiplayer videos are usually not interesting as you only see what one player is doing:
Absolutely stellar videos:
No words to describe this one. As a small reminder he only has short range weapons, and yes this is online solo as the mission is online only:
What you can do when you're really good at it and know the mission inside out:
Demon Army in 4.1 done solo with a AR, can't even imagine how much time it was but surely a few hours (4 videos, heavily cut):
Amazing strategy on a tough EDF 5 mission for Ranger. If you can understand what is going on and why he does what he does, you're on the right path:
This would be awesome with a normal core, but it was done with the level 0 one. Awsome idea, awesome gameplay. WD on EDF 6.
PS Vita games
For the EDF Vita games (Earth Defense Force 2: Invaders from Planet Space (地球防衛軍2 PORTABLE V2 in Japan) and Earth Defense Forces 2017 (or 地球防衛軍3 PORTABLE in Japan) ) it's extremely hard to find good videos. Not only taking vides of Vita games is considerably more difficult, although both games can be played on the Vita TV, the games were very neglected and have not many players (they're both some of the the best Vita action games by far).
Modesty aside, some of the best EDF 2017 videos are the ones I published on my Youtube channel. There's also a few more I'll add.
This one is memorable:
This is the most difficult mission on EDF 2, and probably the most difficult offline by far in all Sandlot EDF games, and it's played with base armor on impossible difficulty (unlocked once Inferno has been completely finished). There are no trophies for this difficulty and no weapon drops. Almost unbelievable. His YouTube channel is listed above too.
I'll keep on adding information to this page.
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