For 10 years humanity has been the subject of a brutal assault by alien invaders. The ozone layer has been depleted and the human population has been reduced by a factor of 500 to 1. But not all hope is lost. Humanity has left racism, nationalism and other divisions behind and hope to take back the planet using Earth defense's secret weapons. As a pilot in the Anti Alien Airforce, you are to take part in X-Day, a massive counter-offensive against the invaders.
The game plays much like a typical arcade flight combat games. You and another plane (either through Co-Op Multiplayer or a bot) participate in various missions, most of which involve defeating specific boss characters or protecting an object from enemy attacks. Progressing throughout the game will unlock additional planes, weapons, and tuning options which allow to increase one aspect of the plane's or weapon's performance to the detriment of another. Also of note is that your sorties are televised, and the audience will cheer your kills or booh you for letting friendly targets be destroyed.
This video game provides examples of:
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: You'll be fighting giant shrimps, scorpions and sandworms among other critters.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: The European releases is written in very stitled and awkwardly worded english, as is typical of 505 Games's exports of budget Japanese games at the time. Of particular note are the weapon descriptions, which are written as if they're more useful to the enemy than they are to you.
- Bottomless Magazines: Every weapon except the bombs have unlimited ammo. Carrying duplicates of the same ordonance simply increase the number of times you can fire it without having to reload.
- Energy Weapon: Among the weapon roster are so called "Pulseguns". They basically act like slower-firing but more powerful and semi-auto-aiming version of your machine gun.
- Excuse Plot: The game has no real storyline beyond an Opening Scroll explaining why your sci-fi jet is shooting giant shrimps.
- Macross Missile Massacre: One of the early unlockable weapon is the Divide missile, a warhead that splits into 8 smaller missiles after firing. The warheads will converge on a single target or divide among multiple depending on how many enemies were locked-on to prior to the firing.
- New Work, Recycled Graphics: The game reuses and repurposes many graphics from the Lethal Skies series, most noticeably the entire HUD.
- Pass Through the Rings: The 2nd EDBC challenge tasks you to fly through a series of suspended rings. Unusually for this trope, you're not required to go through them in a specific order beyond doing them all.
- Self-Plagiarism: While the game's tone and premise bring to mind the publisher's own Earth Defense Force series, it is not officially considered part of the franchise.
- Shout-Out
- The Japanese title of the game is one to the movie Battle in Outer Space (whose original title basically translates to "Great War In Space).
- Your first mission against enemy motherships have an ally remark it's like a scene out of Independence Day.
