D3 is a publisher memorable for two reasons: for being savvy enough to snag Tomy's Naruto video game license just before the anime exploded into mainstream popularity, and for otherwise being willing to publish the most insane titles imaginable (regardless of quality or actual sales potential). If it is weird and maybe a couple of dozen guys might want to buy it, then D3 seems like the company willing to give it a shot. While this has unleashed monstrosities like Work Time Fun on the gaming world, it's also uncovered low-budget gems like Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords and rescued import curiosities like Oneechanbara VorteX from obscurity. Their latest offering for the Xbox 360, Earth Defense Force 2017, is a little bit of both. It's a work of insane genius that's quickly turning into a cult hit, with positive word of mouth spreading both online and off as quickly as the title racks up glowing reviews attached to mediocre or outright negative scores.

Why the bad scores if people are so excited about the game? Well, "budget" and "Xbox 360" aren't ideas that fit together gracefully. Earth Defense Force 2017 is one of the ugliest games yet to be published for a system that's been forced to endure a lot of ugly Japanese shovelware. There are so many problems with its graphics and physics that it's hard to know where to start. There are relatively few character, vehicle, and enemy models in the game, and a lot of backgrounds are persistently recycled.

The main character's torso is rendered separately from his legs, to cut corners when it comes to rendering the game's different weapon-launching animations, and this means that running in one direction while firing in another makes your character resemble nothing so much as a G.I. Joe action figure twisting at the midsection. Physics are inconsistently implemented, resulting in silliness like being able to level a building with a single shot from a rocket launcher ... but not being able to damage trees or cars at all with a shot from the same weapon. No, instead, you'll simply cause their completely unaltered damage models to fly around the screen a bit. Hilariously, fences work the same way. Ankle-high barricades can be deadly, since jumping and dodging controls are awkward, and occasionally the game simply freezes up when there's too much happening on-screen at once.

Remarkably, these incredible graphics problems don't make Earth Defense Force 2017 any less fun. The game would perhaps be better if Sandlot had been able to polish it up to the standards of, say, Lost Planet, but the graphics manage to convey the idea of what's going on well enough without hamstringing the basic premise of the game the way Bullet Witch's simplistic visuals inevitably did. The basic premise of Earth Defense Force 2017 is, indeed, as basic as it gets: You are part of an army, weird aliens and monsters are invading, and you have to shoot them. You get to pick two weapons from your personal arsenal to take into combat with you, and over the course of 53 missions, you'll do your damnedest to single-handedly kill every single alien that ever even thought about invading Earth.

The missions are cleverly designed to minimize repetitive elements, like a given map terrain, objective, or enemy type, and take roughly two to 20 minutes each to clear. Where the gameplay becomes more than standard third-person shooter fare is when you get into the weapon unlock and armor upgrade systems, although "system" is, in some respects, too grandiose a term. When you defeat enemies in Earth Defense Force 2017, arcade-style power-ups rain from their corpses. You can get armor power-ups, a chance at unlocking a new weapon, or health refills. Any power-ups you earn are permanent and persistent, regardless of what difficulty level you opt to play in or what mission you enter. The game is, in fact, clearly designed to challenge players to complete every mission on every difficulty level, beginning with Easy and working your way on up. You haven't really conquered the game until you've collected every single weapon, and there are well over 150 weapons to collect in Earth Defense Force 2017 ... all from randomized, unpredictable drops.

It's the variety of weapons available in Earth Defense Force 2017, along with how satisfying they are to use, that make it so addictive to play. You begin with a simple set of hand grenades and a rifle, but before long you'll have a wide variety of shotguns, rocket launchers, missile pods, and even truly exotic weapons like flamethrowers, acid shooters, and remote-control gun turrets. What's useful in one mission might be extremely worthless in another, and varying weapons perfectly suit particular playstyles. Some are useful only in particular situations, while others might be all-around weapons you always want to have on hand. This, of course, makes the two-weapon limit interesting. You feel constantly compelled to check out new weapons you might have unlocked, and the best way to do this is to just play one more level.

Your entire style of play alters depending on what you have equipped. With a rocket launcher, you might take point and focus on obliterating buildings and catching enemies in falling debris, while using something like a gun turret prompts a more cautious style that involves hanging back and assaulting enemies from a distance. There are vehicles available in most missions, but most of the game's vehicle controls just aren't implemented very well, and vehicle weapons are often weaker than weapons you can carry on foot. Often they're only useful if you happen to have brought a poorly chosen weapons loadout into a mission and don't feel like restarting with something better.

While the weapons of Earth Defense Force 2017 are a demented near-future paramilitary dream, the enemies are pulled with loving care from the most infamous forms of B-movie science fiction schlock. If you've ever caught a '50s giant insect movie or saucer invasion flick, a kaiju flick starring Godzilla or one of his giant city-stomping cousins, or even the odd episode of Ultraman, then you'll be in familiar territory in Earth Defense Force 2017. Most missions are defined by which of the game's enemy types you fight there, and in what sort of terrain. While some missions mix enemy types, generally no more than three broad categories of enemy appear in any given level. The way those enemies are used is frequently awe-inspiring, though.

The game begins with hordes of dozens and dozens of enormous ants flooding cities, crawling over buildings and swarming over civilians and allies alike. From there, you begin fighting the sinister spaceships that drop giant bugs on Earth, the swarms of gunships that defend them, the giant robots that shake the screen when they explode, more varieties of giant bugs, and so much more. You even get to run up against bosses, like a pair of fire-spewing giant ants and a giant monster that resembles — but is legally distinct from — Godzilla. Explosions fill the screen, and sometimes enemies throng so thickly around you that you literally cannot move until you blast open a path. For short, quick bursts of intensity, there are few games that match the experience of playing Earth Defense Force 2017 at all.

Sound-wise, Earth Defense Force 2017 is something of a mixed bag. The soundtrack is a booming, brassy affair that really emphasizes the game's B-movie charm. The dubbed voice acting is much the same, full of painfully wooden and earnest readings of absolutely terrible lines like, "There's hundreds of them!" and "I don't want to die!" Unfortunately, there's nothing that forces the EDF NPCs around you to actually spout lines that are relevant to the mission at hand, so sometimes you hear, "There's hundreds of them!" while fighting a lone boss or a handful of robots. Likewise, the NPCs seem to have little effect on the course of a battle other than simply spewing dialogue and occasionally stealing kills. In most challenging missions, and especially on higher difficulty levels, your allies quickly die off and leave you alone to reach the goal. Playing in co-op mode alleviates this somewhat, but the co-op is purely offline, and that dulls its appeal quite a bit.

In many ways, Earth Defense Force 2017 is a very bad game. In many others, it is one of the most fun things you can play on the Xbox 360, especially when you consider the $39.99 MSRP. It's becoming hard to find at game stores, so snap up a copy now if this sounds like your cup of tea. If it doesn't, you can safely give it a pass. Objectively, it's not hard to tell that Earth Defense Force 2017 is poorly made compared to the vast majority of 360 titles, although the localization is quality work on D3's part. What makes it so compelling to play, despite its many obvious flaws, is that the gameplay formula is, by itself, amazingly addictive and satisfying, regardless of the graphics. While any 360 owner probably knows well by now why it's foolish to say that graphics don't matter to gameplay, Earth Defense Force 2017 is the rare game where this is actually the case.

Score: 7.0/10