Wrapping American cultural stereotypes and the feckless disposition of politicians around an effigy of Earthbound is an electrifying thesis, but not one that Citizens of Earth quite sees to its potential or conclusion. The ingenuity of its character-based progression systems is stacked against tedious battle mechanics, suspect level design, and demoralizing performance crashes. Citizens of Earth is ultimately a victory, but not without a few conspicuous bruises.
Citizens of Earth cultivates progression not under the duress of its world-ending apocalypse, but through the ordinary lives of its enormous cast of characters. Playing as the newly elected Vice President of Earth, it’s quickly apparent that your job is to literally do nothing. You can’t participate in battles, none of your skills have any sort of problem-solving relevance, and any breath of an endearing personality is suffocated under Phil Hartman levels of blowhard bravado. This is basically perfect ‒ right down to the Vice President’s mother being the first acquirable party member.
The proliferation of party members quickly becomes the driving force of Citizens of Earth. Closer to Chrono Cross than Pokémon, each honorable member of society has some busywork for you to complete before they’ll join your party. The Photographer, for example, needs you to scope out some obscure environmental scenery. The Teacher requires you to pass a quiz about local facts. The Bartender, for some reason, seeks mastery of an incredibly difficult timing-based mini-game.
There are forty citizens to enlist and employ, and, while obtaining most of them are optional, all offer some sort of contribution to both your battle options and ease of play. This is a double-edged sword; many of the abilities granted by newly acquired citizens amount of little more than navigational conveniences options. The Pilot can fast travel to any location with a helipad. The Used Car Salesman can summon a car for quicker, enemy-free travel. The Architect can build bridges to link areas and the Gardener can move progress-halting bushes. The School Mascot, of all things, can lower or boost the difficulty ‒ complete with respective negative or positive multipliers for money and experience.
The assets powering your collected citizenry are cool, but they eventually start to feel like pieces of your time Citizens of Earth slowly back to you. Coupled with some boisterous and winding level design, and one could Citizens of Earth would have been better off granting you some these coveted abilities from the get-go. I can see why development team at Eden Industries didn’t want to go that route, one of the endearing hooks of seeking out new party members is learning what cool tricks they have up their sleeves, but it’s hard to say that particular allure trumps the benevolence of convenience.
Citizens of Earth’s battle mechanics favor swift simplicity over arcane complexity, although a preference for the former doesn’t rule out an unintended appearance by the latter. Enemies are encountered by physically running into them on the field. There’s a tiny bit of strategy involved too; after a direct encounter other enemies can come racing in and join the fray. Turn-based battles are governed by an energy mechanic; certain moves generate energy and other cost energy. As you’d expect, anything dealing a significant amount of damage, status effects, or healing options will soak up energy – with requisite pecking attacks and minimal buffs bearing the responsibility of generating energy.
With such a large cast, how Citizens of Earth manages character and combat diversity is directly related to each party member’s relative value. The Vice President’s Little Brother made for a decent tank and offered reliable physical attacks, enough so that I used him for literally the entire game. Likewise, the Baker came equipped with a great healing move (one that only got better with experience) and he became a permanent member of my party. The third and final slot was filled with every new citizen I acquired, some being more useful than others. Everyone also has their own unique equipment, mostly found in treasures chests out in the field, but I didn’t make much use of any of it.
Party selection is a battle between loveable context and overt functionality. Every single citizen comes equipped with a myriad of unique attacks explicitly designed to capitalize upon their specific stereotype. The Programmer’s hacker skill include, “Virus” and “Trojan,” and all of his damage values are delivered in binary. Likewise, the Psychologist is exceptionally skilled in the verbal element, often confusing his enemies with mindless jargon. This attention to detail is undeniably cute, and goes a long way toward developing Citizens of Earth’s playful personality, but it can’t overcome mechanical convenience.
Citizens of Earth makes room for plenty of strategy; it just faults to capitalize on much of it. Different strengths and weaknesses, like thermal, bio, and verbal basically compose different “elements,” and at least one comes equipped on every citizen. Enemies are strong or weak to corresponding elements, but, more often than not, I just powered my way through with my increasingly overpowered combo of Baker and Brother. After I got everyone in my party to level 20 (a requirement for courting the Yoga Instructor), I stopped caring about newer under-leveled party members. There was no impetus to level anyone else up and, even though I could boost the difficulty, I had no reason to. I didn’t need anything else. What’s the point?
This particular realization was where Citizens of Earth began to break down into a colossal slog. Dungeons, once sparsely populated maps with a focus on exploration, suddenly experienced rapid enemy population growth. Coupled with needlessly complex navigational intricacies that seem to encourage critical examination of your map, and fun quickly gives way to frustration. There are a considerable amount of optional areas to explore and exploit a citizen’s particular skill, but after the credits rolled I didn’t want to bother finding the eight remaining citizens I failed to acquire.
I haven’t properly relayed the depths of my dismay, please consider the following. For one of the latter dungeons in the game I had to circumnavigate the premises of a hideout in a vain attempt to reach my destination. I eventually made it there by climbing up some connected hedges and reaching the quest marker, only to discover there was no avenue for “exiting” the hedge I had been walking on. I went all the way back to the beginning, made my way to different entrance and was greeted with the notice that I had to go find some other NPC, on a completely different screen, to take that particular guard’s place. Progressing past that, I found another guard posted slightly ahead in the path, and I had to backtrack again and find another specific NPC to take his place. Keep in mind that, this entire time, I was being repeatedly assaulted by multiple encounters with the exact same enemy. It wasn’t hard, I knew how to take it down, but it was a huge waste of time for almost no material gain.
If I weren’t reviewing Citizens of Earth the scenario above would have been the time where I stopped playing the game. In totality it doesn’t really commit any single grievous error, but rather cosigns a bunch of tiny, amateurish offenses into a general malaise. If I want to remove a bush, why do I have to have the Gardiner on-screen in my active party? Likewise, if I’d like to quicken my pace and drive a car, why do I need to have the Used Car Salesman with me? Why can’t I get back in a car I just got out of? Why does the Vice President make the exact same joke when examining every car, and why is that option even there? Why can’t I access the map, a vital tool in figuring out where in the exact hell I need to go, when I’m on my sea monster or inside a vehicle? Furthermore, why is the map so god damn small? Why is there only one sound bite for Little Brother to yell (WHY MEEE) every time he’s attacked? All of these seemingly innocuous oversights coalesce into a giant hassle, snuffing any resolve to power through Citizens of Earth.
Citizens of Earth is also something of a mess on the technical end. In the past I’ve criticized games like Dead Rising 3 or LittleBigPlanet 3 for an alarming frequency of hard crashes, but conceded that, given the relative scope of those games, it was (almost) justified. Citizens of Earth crashes out as well, but without the technical chops to account for it. Presently, I can never return to the southern part of Home Town, as the game completely crashes every time I try to leave. This means I can’t recruit the Bodybuilder or the Bartender, presumably ever. I’ve tried flying in, riding my sea monster in, walking in, and going in at different times of day ‒ whatever, my game crashes. This instance appears to be a repeating fatal bug, but Citizens of Earth also inexplicably crashed a half dozen times throughout the other twenty hours I played it. The game’s frequent auto-saves mend this wound a bit, but it’s still annoying.
Take all of that in; the vitriol at inexplicable crashes, the perceived monotony of a passive battle system, and bizarre design choices. Despite all of that, Citizens of Earth has this intangible heart that lets me fall in love with its more enjoyable qualities. You just won’t find another game, let alone an ode to one of the finest and more unique JRPG’s around, that tries half of this stuff. There’s a Hippy enemy that shares everyone’s HP around. An entire dungeon is composed of sugared-up campers twitching with implicit maleficence. There’s a cat/cactus hybrid called a “Catcus,” and a snake with a maraca on its tail with an attack called “Snake, Rattle, and Roll.” Whether it’s a savage pun or some deep esoteric game reference, Citizens of Earth always feels eager to please.
This leaves Citizens of Earth in a weird position. Its battle mechanics aim for depth, come up way short, and yet remain peppered and populated with outrageous and endearing context. Characters aren’t much more than their given stereotypes, but they don’t have to be in a world that mechanically justifies their existence. Citizens of Earth is a pulsing wave of contradictions spiraling out of control, so much that I’ve overshot my usual word count by about 500 and still aren’t sure if it’s appropriate or responsible to recommend this game. If you can get past Citizens of Earth’s grating qualifiers then deep inside you’ll find a game that mostly does right by Earthbound’s memory, even if it can’t quite match the endearing depth of its rich sentimentality.
