EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 6.2 INVADERS FROM ANOTHER WORLD has been announced for PlayStation 5 and is scheduled for release in Japan in 2027. It will be playable at Tokyo Game Show 2026, which runs from September 17 to 21, at the D3PUBLISHER booth in Hall 5, 05-C03. It is the newest entry in a series that has been running for more than twenty years — and for the first half of that run, players outside Japan had almost no way of telling which game was which.

It started on a budget label

The first game was SIMPLE 2000 Series Vol. 31 THE EARTH DEFENSE FORCE, released for PlayStation 2 on June 26, 2003. SIMPLE 2000 Series was D3PUBLISHER’s low-price label, and this was one of its releases. Japanese game magazines barely covered it before release. It found its players through word of mouth online instead, and went on to sell more than 150,000 copies. The engine was not new either: it came from SANDLOT’s own first game, a PlayStation 2 title released in 2002. SANDLOT had been founded on March 12, 2001, in Tokyo. The follow-up, SIMPLE 2000 Series Vol. 81 THE EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 2, arrived in 2005 and sold more than 320,000.

Then the names stopped matching

The first game reached Europe under a title that did not reflect its place in the series: MonsterAttack, published by Agetec, Inc. SANDLOT’s own product list writes it as a single word.

The third game came out in Japan on December 14, 2006, for Xbox 360. Outside Japan it was Earth Defense Force 2017 — a year, not a series number — released under the D3 PUBLISHER OF AMERICA and D3 PUBLISHER OF EUROPE names. The fourth game, released in Japan on July 4, 2013, for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, became Earth Defense Force 2025 outside Japan and arrived in February 2014.

So for about a decade, a shopper in North America or Europe was looking at MonsterAttack, Earth Defense Force 2017 and Earth Defense Force 2025. Nothing in those titles says they are the first, third and fourth games in one line. In Japan the series had spread by one player telling another, and that model is harder to sustain when games in the same series appear on shelves under three unrelated names.

EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 4.1 THE SHADOW OF NEW DESPAIR arrived in 2015 and brought the series to PlayStation 4 and Steam. The naming mismatch ended with the entry that came after it. EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 5 (Japan: December 7, 2017, PlayStation 4) was the first entry released outside Japan under the same number it carried in Japan, and the numbering has held since. EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 6 launched in Japan on August 25, 2022, and its PC version and its release outside Japan both followed on July 25, 2024.

Then the names stopped matching

Who has been making it

Every numbered entry has been developed by SANDLOT and published by D3PUBLISHER, a publisher founded on February 5, 1992, with 22 employees as of April 1, 2026. Some spinoffs have been developed outside the studio. EARTH DEFENSE FORCE: INSECT ARMAGEDDON (2011, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, with a PC version following that December) was made by an American development team, credited as Vicious Cycle Software, Inc., and EARTH DEFENSE FORCE: IRON RAIN (2019, PlayStation 4, with a Steam version following that October) was developed by YUKE’S. Another entry sits outside the numbered line: EARTH DEFENSE FORCE: WORLD BROTHERS arrived in 2020 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PC.

What the numbers look like now

EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 4 sold more than 320,000 copies in Japan and more than 130,000 outside Japan, for over 450,000 in total. EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 5 passed one million copies worldwide between its 2017 release and 2022. EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 6 had passed 550,000 copies by September 6, 2024. On April 6, 2026, D3PUBLISHER announced that the game had passed one million players worldwide — a figure combining packaged shipments in Japan, worldwide digital sales including play through the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog, and PC sales on Steam and Epic Games Store — about three and a half years after release. It also took the USER’S CHOICE AWARD at the PlayStation Partner Awards 2022.

And now 6.2

At its peak, EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 6.2 INVADERS FROM ANOTHER WORLD puts roughly twice as many enemies on screen as EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 6. Weapon customization is new to the series: item boxes dropped by defeated enemies contain devices that upgrade weapons, such as custom rounds that add a burning effect to an assault rifle, or rockets with a freezing effect for a rocket launcher. More than half of the existing missions have been reworked, and new ones have been added, which D3PUBLISHER says gives the game the largest mission count in the series. Part of the weapon customization will be playable in the Tokyo Game Show build. SANDLOT is developing the game, and D3PUBLISHER is publishing it — the same pairing as in 2003.

Knowing where a game sat in the series was once something a player outside Japan had to bring with them. Since EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 5, the title has said it.

Sources: D3PUBLISHER official site (EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 20th Anniversary, EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 6 and EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 6.2 pages) and D3PUBLISHER press releases (April 6, 2026; August 25, 2026); SANDLOT official site; PlayStation.Blog (February 18, 2014); 4Gamer (June 20, 2023). Compiled from Japanese-language sources.