YMMV / Earth Defense Force 5

• Broken Base: The legendary EDF singing was replaced with an entirely new line of songs, both in English and Japanese. Some fans didn't mind it, as they considered it fitting for the Continuity Reboot the game presented, while others lamented the loss of such an iconic thing to the series.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Not the actual spiders, but instead the red variants of the unmanned drone enemy types. They not only have ludicrous amounts of durability, especially when scaled up in multiplayer, but dart around faster than any lock-on weapon can keep up with on very erratic flight paths and have a rather nasty attack: a concentrated and hyper-accurate laser beam that can melt your armor down in seconds. The only way to prevent this is to damage them and knock their aim off of you or your allies, but since they're basically silent, on higher difficulties you can be all but instantly killed from a single second of damage and never see it coming. Actually destroying them is absurdly difficult, as rapid-fire weapons or shotguns (that have the best chance of hitting them) just push them away and don't have enough damage for the player to really make an impact on their health; burst damage weaponry that can actually hurt them (like sniper rifles or rocket launchers) just push them away harder and that's if you can actually land the shot. Imperial Drones (the black variant of Type 2 drones) are just as annoying and even more durable, their only saving grace being their tendency to just hover above players and thus being slightly easier to shoot.
  • Silver spiders in the Hardest and Inferno difficulties. What makes them terrifying is that they have a lot of hit points, so it can take a while to kill even one. Meanwhile they have a habit of jumping past you, then attacking you from behind if you're not moving around enough. If you get stuck on their web, you also take damage for a few seconds even after the spiders are defeated.
  • Gold ants. At first they appear to be slightly faster versions of the black ants. But they have a spray attack that's akin to a shotgun blast. Even if you don't get hit by all of those acid attacks at once, they still do tremendous damage, often knocking half your health if not outright delivering a One-Hit KO. They also have an annoying habit of attacking you from behind if you don't keep an eye on where they are and move to avoid them flanking you.
  • Gold Armored Cosmonauts. Absurdly durable, and incredibly hard to stunlock out of focusing on a teammate. And like regular Cosmonauts, as you break off sections of their armor, they also start moving faster, which is bad if there are several of them and you have no meaningful cover to fall behind if they flank you.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Sarge is quite beloved by the fandom for being the closest thing the player character has to a mentor, the fact that he's at your side pretty much throughout the entire war, and his loud, bombastic way of speaking.
• Game-Breaker: The Air Raider's Spritefall Kill Sat is one of the most powerful, versatile weapons in the game: it can gain a firing solution from a truly impressive distance away, and the Beam Spam lasts for a good ten to fifteen seconds. A concentrated barrage on a particularly troublesome target like a durable teleportation anchor will level it in seconds, and it can pull double duty as area denial as giant insects or drones go charging blindly into the lasers, potentially ending a Zerg Rush with minimal hassle.
  • High 100+ level weapons will trivialize many non-Inferno level fights because of the sheer amount of power in them. Even giant monsters go down quickly if hit by a Wing Diver's fully charged Phalanx ZAT weapon. The Ranger's Blazer can also likewise mow down lots of enemies, pylons, teleportation ships, and giant monsters if they can focus fire on it long enough. And even on Inferno they can still make many of the levels easier.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The red ant types that are not only more durable than the base Alpha species, but make up for their lack of a ranged attack by charging at you to bite and thrash you around for small bits of damage each second. Bitten players are completely vulnerable and can't do anything besides spamming point-blank gunfire at their aggressor, which can be suicidal if you brought mostly explosives or support weaponry. Their corpses being larger also means they're likely to block your shots, though they can also block enemy shots too. Before you're even to the mid-game, red ants quickly become the go-to method of annoying the hell out of the player.
  • The pillbug "Gamma" species, which have some of the lowest health of the main monster species and do Scratch Damage whenever they roll into and knock you on your ass. The problem? They make up for this by always performing a Zerg Rush, where they can potentially stunlock players and give them little to no opportunity to fight back. On their own, this can equate to a Death of a Thousand Cuts if you don't wear them down in between knockdowns, but when grouped with other enemies, this can become extremely dangerous.
  • The green ant types combine everything horrible about the aforementioned red ants and "Gammas", swarming over the player and tossing them around, stunlocking them. Not to mention the fact their Zerg Rush acts as a particularly nauseating example of Interface Screw as the whole screen is filled with skittering green bodies making it impossible to see what you're doing.
• Narm: Whether it's meant to be a parody of badly translated Japanese-to-English B-movies back in the day, or it's a legitimate "Blind Idiot" Translation issue, the fact that no one ever refers to the numerous insectoid creatures as, well, insects is one thing. It crosses into pure absurdity when they start calling wasps "bird-like creatures", or legitimately think the fifteen-foot tall Colonist Frog Men are identical to humans to the point of hesitating to fight them.
  • Apparently, it took a while for EDF high command to decide to call the spaceships teleporting enemies on the battlefield "Teleporting ships". One has to wonder if the invasion goes so well for the Primers because the aliens are that good or EDF's management is full of dimwits.
• Polished Port: Much like Earth Defense Force 4.1, the PC port was worth the wait given that it loads and plays pretty dang smoothly, as well as having fairly-consistently working online functionality.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Playing online mode by yourself. Enemies have 3x their normal health, the same modifier as if you were playing with 3 other players, but you also have to deal with level restrictions until you've unlocked about 70% completion online ^note For context, beating every level on hard with one character will only unlock around 15%, so all 4 characters will only net you 60% completion, forcing you to play the harder difficulties for a little while before you can remove the restrictions, meaning your weapons and health, while level appropriate, will be severely underpowered. The intention behind this is to force you to play with other players, so adding another player will actually only increase the enemy's health by around 2x, and you have another player helping you to fight the Primers.
• Shocking Moments: How do you mark humanity starting to take truly the fight to the aliens and mark the Player Character as a true and unstoppable badass? By running through the "Brutal Battlefield" mission, where almost every enemy type thus far shows up in an elongated battle that pushes you into giving everything you've got. There's plenty of carnage and bigger scale battles later on, but this moment easily cements the turning point of the game.
• That One Level: The mission that introduced heavily armored Imperial Drones is an absolute pain. The player's weapons do very little damage to them, and while it is certainly possible to destroy them on foot, it takes a lot of time and patience as these insanely durable flying machines pelt at you with Beam Spam galore. The most effective means of actually dealing with them is with a railgun tank, which you can only pilot as a Ranger or Air Raider (Fencers and Wing Divers can only man the machine guns). The railgun can take out a drone in a few shots, but you only get about 25 rounds, and good luck aiming effectively when your screen is filled with flashing lights from the drones' laser fire. The only silver lining is that there are only a relative few drones to deal with, compared to the swarms of other drones types.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: The Primers were originally called the Immigrants in the original Japanese script, and a few lines that slipped throughout the localization have the characters complaining about these illegal immigrants and the genocidal destruction they're causing. Whether one considers this to be offensive in today's political environment or more a show of the Japanese mindset involving such matters, probably shouldn't be elaborated on.