Review: Citizens of Earth (Wii U version)

Debaters gonna debate.

Eden Industry’s Citizens of Earth is a love-letter to the console RPGs of the 1990s, especially Shigesato Itoi’s legendary MOTHER trilogy (known as EarthBound in the west). Both are comic RPGs, set in a fantasy counterpart to modern-day America rather than the traditional Medieval-style fantasies of Dragon Quest and company. However, whereas EarthBound had (and lets be honest here) unremarkable, cookie-cutter gameplay, Citizens of Earth is more ambitious, and displays a solid understanding of what makes RPGs work as a game and not just a story. With a forty-character-strong roster, interesting dungeons, and a unique battle system, Citizens of Earth has the basic ingredients of a masterpiece. And yet the end result still falls short of EarthBound's greatness.

The game opens with a delightful Chrono Trigger homage that perfectly sets the tone: the protagonist is sleeping comfortably in his bed when his Mom comes in and wakes him. Except the protagonist is the adult Vice President of the Earth. Your first challenge--the metaphorical Rats in the Basement, if you will--is to take down a group of violent protesters roaming the Vice President’s hometown. And things just get more EarthBound-esque from there, as you follow the second-most-important man in the world on an epic quest, filled with mutated animals, robots, and (of course) hippies.

A modern Fellowship of the Ring.

But despite Citizens of Earth's best attempts at copying EarthBound’s surreal, almost Lewis Carroll-style humour, it doesn't have quite the same charm. The Vice President frequently says something arrogant or stupid, then gets a sarcastic comeback from one of the citizens. This is more vaudeville than EarthBound generally got, and even then it's flawed vaudeville. With forty citizens, writing a separate bit of banter for each would have been extremely time-consuming, so Eden Industries just wrote a single response for each stupid VP quote, then programmed the game to randomly assign it to one of the active citizens. I suppose that's understandable, given the development teams' size and budget, but it's also unquestionably bad writing. If the citizens were intentionally written as personalityless and interchangeable I could understand, but, outside these types of cutscenes--when you're talking to a citizen on the map, for example--they have clearly-defined (and usually exaggerated) personalities and, often, distinct speech patterns, so their lines should not be this interchangeable. Grouch cannot steal Chico's jokes, but in this game, the cheerful Cat Lady, the paranoid Conspiracy Theorist, the anti-social Programmer, and the intellectual Psychologist can all, potentially, share the exact same zinger. 

But to be fair, the writing, when not being tripped up by the game's scope, does have its moments. The Vice President, being always present and thus important enough to get his own custom-written dialogue, is consistently portrayed as bumbling, clueless, tacky, and egotistical, but deep down, he’s a good man who really does want to help out. It’s easy to make a comic character--and especially a comic politician--all-vice, but this touch of goodness makes the VP genuinely endearing. The game's also a lot sparser on pop-culture references than you might expect. I mean, yes, there are a few, but they don't overwhelm everything else, and generic jokes about Internet Memes are (as far as I remember, at least) non-existent. I should probably admit that this game also enjoys its puns--the “Anchory Bird” enemy being my guilty favourite--but fortunately, Eden Industries is wise enough to use these for atmosphere rather than punch-lines. It's certainly no EarthBound, but I generally found the humor enjoyable, and even at its worst, it was never annoying.

And then there's the most important part of any video game: the interactive element. When you pick up a new title, what’s the first thing you’ll want to know about the gameplay? Are the controls tight? Are the goals clear? Is the challenge just right? All good questions, but if there’s one thing that Citizens of Earth taught me, it’s that the first question should be: how far can I get before the game crashes? When this adventure first came out, the answer was: not far enough, bud. I wanted to play Citizens of Earth so badly, but the stupid thing froze so many times that I just couldn’t finish it. It was eventually patched, reducing the glitches and crashes to a more professional level (so, yes, I did eventually finish it), but even so, that initial level of quality-control is inexcusable. 

Post-patch, the crashing is no longer a problem. Unfortunately, the loading-time still is. Like many old-school RPGs, Citizens of Earth requires a lot of screen transitions--some rooms last only a few seconds. When you have to spend a second or two on a loading screen each time that you change areas, it can feel like you’re wading through a tub of molasses. This problem also improved significantly after the patch, but it’s still noticeable, it’s still too long, and it still makes transitioning from point B to point C a huge pain in the A.

There is some solid stuff in here, though. Citizens of Earth’s most important asset is the citizens themselves, and (ignoring the aforementioned screw-up regarding their inconsistent dialogue) Eden Industries did a good job there. Since you're the Vice President of Earth, you're too important to fight yourself! Instead, you must recruit up to 40 other people to fight for you. Mom and Brother join you automatically, but everyone else requires the completion of a sub-quest. Each citizen is truly unique, packing a different out-of-battle ability as well as their own in-battle specialties. For example, the Barista has a high speed-stat, specializes in recovering other citizens’ energy (sort of like MP--more on that later), uses fire-based (well, hot coffee-based) attacks in battle, and can sell energy-restoring (and less lethal) coffee out-of-battle. The Weightlifter is physically powerful, uses muscle-based attacks, and can move heavy objects out of your path on the map, but he can’t attack and build energy on the same turn, making him a slow and inefficient brawler if someone like the Barista isn’t there to back him up. The game is generally easy enough that you can design a team around the standard “attack/heal” combo and still win, but for those who like to tweak their party and find the most brutal overkill combos, there is a lot of potential here.

When they're not in your active party, these citizens also act as the game's NPCs. Some of them can even use their out-of-battle abilities before they join you, albeit only offering the lower-level wares and services. Fortunately, none of these citizens ever have vital information, or at least not after it becomes possible to recruit them, so you don’t have to worry about walking around getting stuck just because the guy with something important to say is following tight-lipped behind you.

Incidentally, almost all the non-recruitable NPCs are benevolent versions of enemies, recognizable by the speech bubble protruding from their sprites.  Some of them give quests, or discuss some element of the plot, or provide other useful services, but if you want to go Western RPG and kill them for the experience or just out of spite, you can do that too. In fact, there’s at least one type of enemy (a rotund fellow known as the Gourmand) who--as far as I could find--can only be battled if you pick the fight yourself!

Citizens of Earth doesn't have as many NPCs as other RPGs, so the world feels a lot emptier, but then the people you do meet make up for it by being a lot more well-developed and chatty. Both approaches have their own advantages--it's all a matter of personal taste.

The battles are extremely well-done. This game has a more interesting alternative to the standard MP- and charge- systems used in other RPGs. It uses an energy system; stronger techniques use up more energy, while weaker ones recover energy. Most citizens only have three energy balls, though some reach as high as five. I just can't emphasize how brilliant this system is; most games expect you to save your best abilities, but Citizens of Earth instead encourages regular spurts of power followed by periods of restraint. And many of the energy-restoring moves are still useful, so falling back on them never feels like a punishment; you can recover energy and make real progress in one turn!  I’d even say that these battles are some of the best I've ever seen in a JRPG.

Created using the VR Arena.

Unfortunately, as great as the battle system is, it doesn't completely alleviate that one great annoyance of old-school console RPGs: there are a lot of fights. They aren’t random battles--like EarthBound (and some other JRPGs) enemies can be seen and theoretically avoided--but when the areas become more crowded, and the enemies more numerous, the fights become annoying just the same. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if there was more variety in the enemies, but most areas have you fighting the same two or three baddies over and over again. And because many of these enemies have attack animations--some of them sorta long ones--and the VP repeatedly insists on exclaiming things like “Ouch!” or “Walk it off!” during the fight, things tend to drag on. The enemies themselves, although varied in both design and battle text, usually fall back on the same stock-tricks as any other RPG beast: damage-dealing moves and status-effects a plenty, with the occasional enemy who counters your attacks or calls for help thrown in for good measure. A handful of them have some very unique and interesting abilities--most notably a boss who has the ability to “remix the battle conditions,” which means that your attacks will recover the enemies’ HP rather than deplete them for one turn--but these types of enemies are not as common as I would have liked. This is not a deal-breaker by any sense of the word--Eden Industries clearly went to great lengths to make the battles as interesting as possible--but I won't deny that, after spending a lot of time in one area, I'd switch the difficulty level way down (more on that later) just so that I could get through the repeat battles as quickly as possible. (I'm not proud, but I'm honest.)

Though perhaps paradoxically, I enjoyed the VR Arena. This is a battle simulator that allows you to customize a team of monsters, then battle 'em. Most of the regular enemies and many of the bosses are available, so it’s possible to design more dangerous, or more interesting, teams than you’d ever encounter in the main game. And yes, you can keep any items, money, and experience you earn during the fight. Better yet, one of the citizens--the School Mascot--can freely change the game’s difficulty, making monsters stronger or weaker (and the rewards greater or lesser) as needed. I mostly used the VR Arena to grind my lower-level citizens, but how could I resist the occasional fight against a group of bosses? Personally, I’d love to see more games use something like this--it allows players to design the ultimate fight whenever you want!

Like Super Mario RPG or Final Fantasy VII (and, interestingly, in contrast to EarthBound) Citizens of Earth includes a number of minigames. A lot of these--including a game of Blackjacks and a car race--are presented using an altered battle engine, making the situation both familiar and new. Of course, not all minigames are created equal--there's always one or two that will make you pull your hair out. Here, it’s the Bartender recruitment quest, which is a drinking contest that takes the form of a button-mash-a-thon. It’s the sort of game that makes you think someone on the staff has a personal vendetta against thumbs. But other than that, most of the minigames are actually a pretty fun diversion.

And this game is open-ended. Boy, is it; once you finish off the bit of questing from your own neighbourhood, you can basically go (nearly) wherever you want, recruit (almost) whoever you want, and grab (not quite but close enough to) any item you want, without progressing the story one iota more, provided you recruit the right citizens. I recently finished playing EarthBound Beginnings, which is always noted for being more open-ended than EarthBound, but next to Citizens of Earth it feels like Uncharted. Of course, in a genre dedicated to growing in strength and fighting progressively stronger enemies, this magnitude of sandbox-style gameplay makes balancing difficult. It’s easier to wander into the wrong area and get stomped into the ground by a jogger or a ten-year-old camper, or to get too bulked-up on sub-quests and steamroll your way through all the killer robots and giant monsters in your path once you return to the main storyline. But try to remember that, using the School Mascot, you can weaken the enemies and strengthen them back up to compensate for this freedom, so playing the game your way is actually much more reasonable here than in most other open-ended RPGs.

Of course, like all RPGs, open-ended or not, Citizens of Earth has to end eventually. Spoiler alert: the ending sucks. (Feel free to skip this paragraph if you don’t want the ending spoiled.) Once again, it tries to draw inspiration from EarthBound, whose ending involved channeling the hopes and prayers of all your friends to defeat a seemingly invincible monster, switching from comedic to serious in the process. The problem is that EarthBound did it well; these uplifting scenes are brief, subtle, and interspersed throughout a real battle against a particularly memorable final boss. In Citizens of Earth, these scenes are much longer, with each citizen and a good chunk of the supporting cast treating you to some mawkish comment about what a great person the VP really is. I suppose that I can see what they’re going for: we’ve spent most of the game thinking of our protagonist as an egotistical, unlikable half-witted manchild who gets by on looks alone, but the very nature of the game requires that we play the VP as an empathetic hero who goes out of his way to help everyone he meets; seeing people acknowledge that there’s a very good reason this man became the Vice President is kind of sweet. But I don’t think we need 40+ people commenting on the same thing. Worse yet, all this mush is placed in the middle of an unlosable battle, which reduces the end-boss to little more than a cross between a cutscene and a stack of Hallmark cards. Considering how delightfully "video gamey" Citizens of Earth had been up until this point, I find this fumble outright stupefying. There is a real, losable boss battle right before that, and I am reluctant to say that it’s too easy since, as noted above, you can adjust the difficulty level, but I will say that if you play the game as I did, leaving the difficulty level at or near the default, completing most of the subquests, not grinding excessively, and using the same citizens for most of the game, the battle is too easy. I suppose that I can’t be too hard on Eden Industries for this one--they had a good idea--but as far as I'm concerned, the endgame is a bust.

Citizens of Earth combines everything that I love about my favourite RPGs: plenty of characters, tons of exploration, and a great sense of humour. On paper, it’s perfect. But when you take it off the paper and put it on a console, that’s when you encounter the annoying loading times, repetitive battles, balance issues, and other problems. This game is fun enough to justify at least one playthrough, but there are simply too many little annoyances for it to really reach its full potential.