Today’s the big day for some gamers in Japan as Earth Defense Force 4 is out and getting furiously played by many. Those of us who’ve imported copies will be waiting patiently around their mailboxes like vultures for our copies to show up and it’ll be hiding away from the sun for a bit as we plow through the game and see what developer Sandlot has done with the series in the five or so years since they last worked on a home console EDF game.

From some poking around on GameFaqs, a few users who live in Japan and have the game are loving the changes so far (a good sign) and combined with the positive Famitsu scores (a 34/40 average), this one looks like a keeper.

Of course, when the game hits US shores next year, you WON’T be seeing these wacky Japanese ads for it at all, so I’m doing my civic duty as an EDF patriot and running them here.

I don’t know what D3Publisher of America’s ad plans are, as they generally don’t run a ton of ads for their games anyway, but it would be nice to see some sort of equally oddball campaign here that’s inexpensive yet equally amusing and effective.

Impressions of the import to come in a bit – I’m going to go get my vulture outfit out of storage and go hang out downstairs…