Citizens of Earth is a game developed by Eden Industries and published by Atlus, a game very similar to the old classic Earthbound. Following the Vice President of the world you will explore the world, fight off angry protestors and solve mysteries and problems that can be found throughout your adventures.
Story
The game starts off like any other RPG, being awoken by your mother as you have slept in too long, even worse you are wearing one of your new suits as Vice President, a position you had won just yesterday. As you leave the house you recruit both your Brother and Mother and walk outside to see a protest about your candidacy going on, with both shouting sign holders and people who wish to use that sign to hit you in the head.
Going around town you realise not everyone is against you, mainly the opposition leader and the few people he can rally up to stop you wherever you want to go. Fighting off the leader will make the protestors leave the area, but with a warning from the leader it seems the fight isn’t over just yet.
Throughout the game you will meet varying individuals, from school teachers to journalists and even a Scout leader who will join you along the way, if you help them out first. You’re going to need these people to fight your battles for you, as the VP can’t possibly get his hands dirty, with some characters being crucial to opening up new areas and abilities.
The main story will last you around 20-30 hours long, depending on the difficulty you choose and how much time you spend grinding levels. The game can be lengthened with gathering all recruits possible, with over 40 possible candidates, as well as missions to complete for each one and other side quests to complete on top of that.
Gameplay
Citizens of Earth is a mash of RPG and adventure/puzzle game, the battle system is almost identical to Earthbound, with both the art style and attacks, and exploration that will lead you to new characters, bosses and quests to do. While the gameplay is neat and easy to get used to it can become quite dull after a while, battles take too long and become wars of attrition and movement is impeded by small objects that get in the way.
Fighting is done between 3 of your recruits and between 1 and 5 enemies on the opposite side, with everyone having different stats, skills and specialities. Characters all have 1 world ability, either being used to change the time and difficulty or changing names and giving advice. Along with the world ability the characters also fill certain roles, healers, damagers, tanks and buffing and with that comes character specific abilities.
The base difficulty of the game can be unforgiving, more the cause of players not taking the time to recruit more characters, zone switches jump up the health and damage of enemies which can take someone off guard. Once you learn the moves of enemies and the best way to defeat them the fights become a cake walk, with debuffing, high damage attacks and unique moves being lined up correctly and killing an enemy in one turn.
Besides abilities, all the characters can use the items you gather on your journey, from dirty socks that inflict damage over time to bakery goods that heal allies. These can be invaluable at some points, when your healer goes down or you need an extra boost to your damage against a boss, though the items are very sparse on the map. Buying the items or getting them from defeated enemies is the best way to go about it.
Overall Thoughts and Feelings
The music and sound effects in Citizens is amazingly fitting the feel and style of the game, the comedic quirks and attitude of the characters never feels out of place in the world and the music that fills it. All the tracks are clean and appealing to the ears with happy tunes for exploration the towns to action packed tracks for the battle that still keep a cheery essence to them. I find it hard to fault the music at any point in the game as it fits so well.
Citizens of Earth never struck me as a hard-core game, or even one with a serious story, but like Earthbound it starts off all cheerful and fun then slowly gets more serious as the game progresses. Citizens fills the in-between times with comedy and funny exchanges between characters and it really makes the game more fun to experience, but harder to feel any real attachment of input to the world and it’s events.
Overall I give Citizens of Earth a 4/5, it emulates old games very well but with enhanced graphics and seamless battle. There are some hiccups in the game, with the delay between items and windows that pop up which break the flow sometimes. The game doesn’t take itself too seriously which is both good and bad as I found it hard to grow attached to any of the characters, but found them all funny and interesting. Fans of RPG’s or top down classics will love this game, it also feels like a toned down version of South Park: The Stick of Truth in some ways too.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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