YES! At first glance this is the game that I would like, and dived right into it. The basic story is that we control our prime minister, who does not even rest on his day off. Evil monsters suddenly roam the Earth, and appear in different forms. Such as protesters, secret agents, the opposite party, and countless evil coffee beans. The first problem that I noticed is that the game screams that the developers wanted more than what the actual game represents.

 

Our main objective seems easy, roam the planet to side citizens to our cause. We have to create a band of heroes that will follow our orders against the evil forces. This can be done by going to the citizen, talking to them and completing the received side mission.

Good day fellow citizen!

The world’s presentation is okay. It’s colorful, and during our adventures we meet funny, and interesting NPCs. The side missions at first seem especially creative at first, some even allow to explore unique levels, while others will let us collect weird objects.

At first the atmosphere of the game is great. It reminds us of the old RPG era, although this can only appreciated by such old timers as me. Nostalgic memories resurface, as I see familiar RPG mechanics in this game.

Gaining a citizen to fight for us

Once we played a few hours with Citizens of Earth, the issues start appearing. On the PS Vita version, there can be a few minute long load screens. The game has its own distinct graphical style, and while it looks great, requires a lot of loading.  The recruiting is also interesting, fun … but only in the beginning, after a while doing constant side missions will become a bother. Your journal will be full of quests, and NPCs that you don’t know when you talked the last time.

Some of the end game for the side missions will be entirely predictable. As in we’ll now how to recruit a photographer to our team. Also on a more subjective note, the game would be better off on a tablet or smart phone, primarily due to the graphics. However the combat system is objectively bad.

A mind numbingly boring combat system

Once a battle beings, the events slow down to a grinding halt. The system is based on an energy, which completely divides the combat time.  Basically the light attacks do not eat up too much energy, while the heavy attacks use all of it up. So you’ll be forced to use light attacks, and gather energy to use a heavy attack. If the energy is collected for a heavy attack, you better hope that it’s enough to take out the enemy. Because if not well you’ll have to keep collecting the resource. Not too varied.

We ask the question: Why should they use such a boring system? There is potential to upgrade skills, and maybe this should have been the main focus. When you level up, experience points can be spent. However these can be forgotten, as the constant energy collecting will make them useless.

 

The real issue is that the horrible combat, also adds one more bad mark, to the game’s boring, repeating nature. Combat becomes a focus, with too many enemies surrounding us. Even if we can see the objective we won’t be able to finish it, because of the high enemy numbers with their mundane combat section.

It would have been better to have a system that is much faster, and doesn’t bore you to death with its animations.

A game that I would not recommend to anyone.

Citizens of Earth has its own retro style RPG magic, but the repetitive missions, horrible combat makes it boring. In the beginning the funny scenes will fade away, and will just turn into constant running, and fighting.

Good jokes, better graphics, and especially better combat / recruiting would place this into a good middle place in its own category. I would recommend this game only to fanatics, and masochists, for me it went straight to the trash can.

-Malachit-

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Editor: Atlus

Developer: Eden Industries

Genres: strategy, manager, RPG

Publication: January 2015