Citizens of Earth (PC)

7.5 Overall Score
Gameplay: 7/10
Graphics: 8/10
Sound: 8/10

Great Story | Fun Gameplay | Witty Humor/Voice acting | Lots of content

Travel Points are frustrating

Game Info

GAME NAME: Citizens of Earth

DEVELOPER(S): Eden Industries

PUBLISHER(S): Atlus, U.S.A, LTD

PLATFORM(S): PC (Reviewed), Vita, PS4, Wii U, 3DS

GENRE(S): RPG

RELEASE DATE(S): January 20, 2015

I’m a big fan of RPG’s, in fact I believe our next podcast topic will be focused on RPG’s. I’m especially a fan of games that give homage to older cult classic games specifically the SNES title Earthbound. Citizens of Earth clearly was influenced by Earthbound, especially with the setting of Anytown, USA and some of the enemies and characters you encounter on this adventure. Citizens of Earth has a very tongue and cheek style of story and has excellent and lovable characters throughout the game along with great voice acting.

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In Citizens of Earth, you play as a newly elected Vice President of Earth who still lives with his mom. Now, we don’t get any details why there is a president of the Earth or what led to that, or even why he still lives with his mom besides the fact that he may be a momma’s boy but I suppose that’s where the fun lies within the story, it’s just wacky and fun. The story begins with an odd protest happening within your hometown, and you need to figure out what the heck is going on. Things start off slow and you try and make your people happy and deal with a few protestors outside of your house. After that event, things start to get odd at Moonbucks which sets the stage of the story and causes things to go into chaos, this is where the story begins. Since you’re clearly a savvy political figure, you realize why should I fight my own battles? So, you use your politically persuasive skills to recruit people around town to battle enemies for you and join your team and cause. In the end, the goal is to figure out what’s going on and then save the world and make it a better place. All of this, while at the same time making sure people still like you.

The graphics have a great hand drawn illustrative quality to them that gives this game a lot of personality, the tone of the music and voice acting helps add to that as well. Both graphical treatment and sound design are done so well. The music adds an epic tone of playfulness or seriousness depending on your surroundings and the acting is top notch and over the top. There were a lot of one liners during battle and outside of battle that had me laughing. One for example was “Yikes, I’m glad I’m not fighting. This is tough”, “I’ll take you out for ice-cream if we win” and also “I promise not to back down in the face of peril, unless you know, my life’s in danger or something”. There are a ton more that will make you giggle at times you won’t expect.

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To progress through the story and to do battle, you’ll need to recruit citizens to join your roaming party and save the world for you. In order to gain a follower you’ll need to complete a quest or some sort of task to gain their trust and loyalty. These will definitely take some time, there are over 40 different citizens to bring into the story so creating a full battle party will take some time and dedication on your part. It’s like Pokemon but with real people, you have to collect them all…and then have them battle other real people.

During battles your party have a wide variety of abilities to use, from attacking strong to healing, to even buffing your team. You can only have three active citizens in your party at the same time. If you want to level others up while you’re out exploring and saving the world you can send them to school. Doing this will cause them to level up while you’re playing with other citizens. There were a few citizens in my party that I realized didn’t do a whole lot or at least I didn’t see what the use of some of their abilities were but other than that a majority had amazing attacks and were quite humorous in the process.

Since this is a RPG, I’ll start off my saying enemies are smart. Some can be quite difficult to battle. Since this is a turn based RPG battle, you’ll be able to strategically employ the right attack, buff or ability to knock your enemies stats down and make them running in fear. A lot of the enemies have character, some are human animal hybrids, and some are just outrageous people with a lot of personality. Either way, this battle sequence is more like an act in a play, with great dialogue and interesting difficulty to each encounter. During fights you’ll have a ticker that prints our descriptions across the screen of various moves and quick time events but you can miss them sometimes as they pop up fast. That’s one of my only complaints about battle. There are a ton of enemies to battle though so you won’t have any problems leveling up your citizens along the way. There are over 40 hours of gameplay depending on how fast you grind or slow you play, but there is a lot of content to experience. Eden Industries did an amazing job on this game.

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Since I reviewed this on the PC, my experience at first was a little choppy. The game crashed a few times but I noticed a patch that came through and all that went away. So, I’m not holding that against my review but it’s still fair to note. I think that an over world map would have helped this experience go a little smoother when it came to navigation and moving throughout the world since it’s fairly large. There are some fast travel options available, there is a helicopter and a car. However, they have limitations since the car could only drive certain roads and the helicopter would overshoot you sometimes making you travel further than needed. I just think this could have been handled in a cleverer way, or even just plain simple to get to one place or the other without all this hassle.

The Recommendation

I absolutely loved the whole story and idea behind Citizens of Earth. I also love RPG’s, did I mention that? This game was highly enjoyable with only a few frustration points of moving around the world. If you are a fan of RPG’s and love some humorous dialogue and games with great personality then I highly recommend checking out Citizens of Earth you will not be disappointed.

 

Summary

Review Date
Reviewed Item
Citizens of Earth (PC)
Author Rating
41star1star1star1stargray

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getamikeON
Author: getamikeON View all posts by
Managing Partner/Editor-in-chief and owner of GameGravy & NintendoFever – Mike spends most of his time working with the top brands in the Game industry & Advertising. Fun Factoid: he is also a musician and song writer. Google+ Author