Day Fifteen

• Game: Citizens of Earth (Eden Industries).
• Release Month: January.
• Source: The Steam Explorer Sale.
• Quick Look: Here. (Alex/Vinny)
• Started: 12/12.

I wasn't sure what to think of Citizens of Earth going in. I'd heard mixed things, to put it mildly, and it's very easy to do a JRPG-styled Indie game poorly. Well, not so much poorly, but just in a way that makes it really boring. As someone who adores JRPGs and always will, I've come to think of them as like video game soufflés. It takes an especially talented creator to make them turn out right: to understand the annoyances and tedium that are sometimes inherent to the format and attempt to alleviate them as best as they are able, to find a pace to the story and a length to its dungeons that won't send players to sleep, and - first and foremost - a battle system that goes quickly enough for inconsequential random encounters but still offers a sufficiently deep level of strategy for whenever a boss shows up and the game demands you pull out all the stops.

The developers of Citizens of Earth know what they're doing with regards to almost all of the above, I was relieved to discover, though time's going to tell if the game's pacing holds out in the long-term. The game is set in an alternate version of the United States, not entirely dissimilar to EarthBound which appears to be the modern Indie game developer's bible when it comes to JRPG throwbacks, and the player is the slightly pompous newly-elected Vice-President of either the States or of the World entirely. The voice actor's doing his best Phil Hartman in the role, and it mostly works: rather than controlling him in combat, he relegates the fighting to his constituents who have agreed to help him, starting with his mother and brother. These need to be recruited with various tasks, like the PCs of any given Suikoden game, and each has a specialized RPG "class" built around their profession. A local bakery chef, for instance, has an array of heat-elemental attacks as well as a means to heal other characters. As well as combat skills, each character in the game provides a special talent that ranges from vendor menus to more meta assistance such as changing the game's difficulty for increased rewards or changing how zoomed in or out the screen happens to be. While never the core directive of whatever calamity is bogarting the Vice-President's attention that moment, it behooves the player to recruit as many characters as possible for a tactical spread of disciplines and a convenient array of special skills to draw on. Alas, characters don't level with you if they're not in your party, requiring that you either leave them behind in the dust, switch them around constantly or drop them off in the nearby school to learn XP outside of combat for increasingly hefty tuition fees. Still, a neophyte character will level very quickly with a couple of high-level heavies to help them out if they seem like a promising pillar of your three-person team. I'm going with a trio that approximates a buff/melee/healer configuration right now, but I may well change that up eventually.

What's impressed me most about Citizens of Earth, more so even than the idea that someone thought to combine two of my favorite JRPGs, is how on-point it is about mitigating the more irksome issues intrinsic to older JRPGs. For one, you reset to the start of the area when you die, no worse for the wear and no loss to whatever you had on you between your last manual or auto-save and going into that boss fight. You're then free to reorganize the party and try again. Enemies are visible, which lets you avoid them to an extent. "Ambushing" a weak enemy instantly destroys it, giving the player their cash reward and a fraction of the XP they would've earned. The player can gather enemies together for a tougher battle but a higher reward, similar to Blue Dragon. There's no finite magic supply - instead, characters earn "energy" for basic attacks and spend them for more sophisticated or damaging ones. NPCs not in the party return to wherever they are in the world, but can be put back into the party at any time. There's no equipment to worry about, but each of the game's forty recruitable characters has a few special items that provides them bonuses. Players earn XP for achievements - something I saw in Xenoblade Chronicles and was amazed no-one else had thought of implementing. When I say Eden Industries know what they're doing, I mean that they've studied modern RPGs and the various features those games have come up with and have built as many of them into this game as is practical. The resulting user experience, therefore, is top-notch.

As for the rest of the game's presentation: I think the art style really lends itself well to the game. It has a distinctive cartoonishness that is both a far cry from EarthBound and from the standard Indie game pixel art. The game's humor is in that gray zone of being amusing if not hilarious, which I'm perfectly fine with. It doesn't try to hit you with constant one-liners or video game references - it's mostly fun dickishness from the main character and some incidental weirdness here and there.

The recent travails underneath a "Moonbucks" filled with coffee cyborgs and rabid mutant java beans went on almost a little too long for my liking, though I've not hit that point yet where I've lost steam (as it were) and am just going through the motions. It's early days, of course. We'll see how I feel about Citizens of Earth tomorrow, but so far I'm into it.

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