A fun Earthbound style RPG that suffers from pacing and grinding
Citizens of Earth is a game that has been described as Earthbound meets Pokemon, which is by no means an inaccurate comparison. You play the newly elected Vice President of Earth, attempting to save the Earth from a variety of bizarre occurrences plaguing the land. Immediately after being woken up by your mother in classic RPG style, you set about assembling your team of Citizens to battle for you.
As the Vice President, you do not engage directly in combat, instead enlisting a variety of Citizens to fight for you, thus the frequent comparison to Pokemon. There are 40 citizens to recruit over the course of the game, each defined entirely by their job. Brother, Mom, Conspiracy Guy, and Cop are just a few of the characters you can enlist, and they are all heavily stereotyped personifications of that job. This is probably one of the major draws of the game, as each of these characters has very unique play styles in combat. The Barista is a support character who can inject your team with speed and energy via her coffee abilities. Cop is a powerful combat character that uses guns and bombs to fight her enemy. Each of these characters has a short recruitment quest associated with them, though none of the recruitments are particularly difficult. In addition to their combat performance, every character has an out-of-battle Talent that range from making transportation faster to giving unused characters experience. Many of these Talents simply give access to new areas, but a few are interesting enough to make leveling them worthwhile. The variety and combination of 3-man teams you can construct is probably one of the most appealing parts of this game.
This is probably a good thing, because you spend a very large amount of this game in combat. Combat is a classic turn-based style set on a field that is very likely intended to invoke nostalgia for Earthbound. All characters function on an energy system, using weak attacks to build energy which you can spend on more powerful attacks. The system is fairly simple, but modular enough that the way every character interacts with this system is different and interesting. The game is never overly difficult however, especially if you focus on a small core team of characters that you over level. One of the characters, School Mascot, has the ability to tweak the difficulty of the game for added bonuses, and is worth using if you find the game's difficulty too difficult or easy.
Outside of combat, the game has a pretty light hearted feel. The story is nothing to write home about, and the humor sometimes falls flat, but it all fits the theme pretty well. If you are looking for a deep and serious JRPG story, this is probably not the game you are looking for. If you don't mind some bad puns and a light hearted atmosphere, the game delivers. Every character is an extreme personification of their job, from the excessively perky and over caffeinated Barista to the steroid infused Bodybuilder.
The game's major flaws revolve around pacing. For a game where you spend so much time in combat, things move too slowly. There is a pause anytime you kill an enemy as experience fills up, anytime a crit happens, and there is a mandatory 5 second announcement around every item drop. This doesn't seem bad at first, but after hours of combat, it just drags things out unnecessarily. You can theoretically avoid all encounters by dodging enemies on the main map, but the size of your party and the size of the environment makes this almost impossible for much of the game. Combine the excessive amount of combat with unnecessary fetch quests and backtracking, and the game ends up being about three hours longer than necessary.
At the time of this writing, the game is also plagued by some fairly major technical issues on PS4. These seem to revolve around the game's announcement system primarily, especially in relation to the Teacher's ability to put unused Citizens in training to get extra experience. I had three crashes on PS4 to XMB because of these, usually due to training finishing during cutscenes and freezing the game. Additionally, the game defaults to highlighting New Game when you start the game up, and will immediately overwrite your autosave if you select it. As a result of these issues, I recommend making manual saves very frequently in order to avoid losing substantial progress.
Overall, I really enjoyed Citizens of Earth, it captures the Earthbound feel reasonably well and caters well towards players that like to level a wide variety of unique characters. Unfortunately, the pacing and combat just get too grindy over the course of the game for me to like it as much as I really wanted to.
