Earth Defense Force Spoilers

Plain of Conflict has the aliens marching on a major city.  You meet them in an open field and are fighting Colonists (the frog humanoids) with various giant insect support.  This is a large battle, you have plenty of NPC infantry and armored units along with you.  Its a long battle with waves of reinforcements.  As the mission ends, you hear the current situation, there are 5000 soldiers moving towards Beijing and you're going to need to pull back into the suburbs to protect.  Along with that, there's no victory here, more enemy reinforcements than they've seen before are coming your way, so its time to retreat.

Current Headquarters mission briefing paragraph is done by what appears to be Sarge, who is the first regular NPC you meet and who is with you on a lot of the missions.  As you're a civilian at the start of EDF 5, he tries to reassure you that you're not gonna need to fight anymore, and he'll get you to safety.  Eventually as there appears to be no safe places, he tells you to enroll in the EDF.  Once you do join, you're called newbie by Sarge and the other NPCs.  Its not out of malice, your character doesn't have a name or nickname, so its the game's way of addressing the player.  He's a good character and his delivery sells a lot of the moments he's in.

The briefing is Sarge writing "my line broke and we got routed" and mentions you're in the same situation.  Sarge tells you that he's going to buy some time for the infantry units to regroup and he's just gonna go himself and gives you the proper farewell speech.  Of course, being the protagonist, you and some other NPCs join him.  You're fighting in rice fields with loads of teleportation ships, some colonists, and insects you need to destroy.  There's not much cover.  The opening mission chatter is your NPC buddies telling you that "Since the Newbies staying, so am I" and Sarge apologizing for getting you into this mess.  You hear the officers talking about Beijing getting its reinforcements, but its still not looking great, and humanity needs to win decisively here or its curtains for us.  You wipe out this FOB and get told another army is coming your way.

Brutal Battlefield begins with the briefing of:
"The enemy army is closing in.
We are on our last leg.
We've lost our hope for survival.

Have you still got ammo?
You can't take those with you to the other side.
So shoot it all!  Send all ammo to the enemy."

Its you and 5 other folks versus basically every enemy in the game you've encountered so far in a ruined city. There are times the numbers game is against you, but in this mission you feel it.  Any positivity you could glean from the last one is gone, you're in last stand mode.  It starts raining mid mission and you hear the NPCs going "and now I can't see, we're gonna be soggy corpses".  The Intelligence Division contacts you and says they'll help, which Sarge correctly goes "what are you going to do from behind those desks".  They send an elite fencer unit called the Grim Reapers over to you who basically say the same thing "we're gonna get killed doing this, but its our job".  Even with the reinforcements, the odds are still against you.

My playthrough of this mission was me in a bunker of ant corpses using them as cover as I used my shotgun with piercing rounds to punch through the corpses and get kills.  It wouldn't fly on higher difficulties, but on Easy/Normal, it felt like a struggle as I kited around the larger groups and fought my way out of getting surrounded.  The gameplay complimented the story telling. I didn't sleepwalk through the mission, for any other soldier in the game it would have been a last stand.

As you wrap up the mission you hear the cheers over the radio, humanity did it.  Routed the enemy with minimal causalities.  You hear Sarge get congratulated by the EDF commanders and the Intelligence Division saying they'll keep an eye on those vital to the win today.  At this point, Sarge says the player did all the heavy lifting and they can't call you Newbie anymore.  Its a compliment and you sure felt like you earned it.