#citizensofearth

Citizens Of Earth is obviously inspired by Earthbound. Well, lots of games are these days. Earthbound is a game that tends to generate that level of devotion in its fans. But friends, I can't imagine any RPGs I'd less like to try to ape than the games in the Mother series. Think of it this way. I think almost everyone reading this could imitate a formal business letter. Given the same topic and data, I'd say we'd probably all turn out more or less the same letter. Business letters are conventional. There's a form to them, and part of that form is removing the personal. So, we can all do them and they all sound like they're coming from the same faceless company representative, and that's kind of the point. It's considerably harder to mimic someone's personal letter. Or at least, it's hard to do it and have it come out with any sort of sincerity, I think. The more personal something is, the harder it is to imitate it without the mask slipping off.

Earthbound is a really personal game. All of the Mother games are. I'm not a big fan of the series, at least not yet, but you can see Shigesato Itoi's fingerprints all over it. He's got a very distinctive voice and tone, and Mother is drenched in it. The guy has basically plied his trade on having a way with words nobody else can seem to approximate. But people love Mother, so people will try. The best successes are the ones that seem to catch onto the source of Mother's feel and go their own way from there. I would say most, however, either don't see its basic framework or feel it's more useful to imitate its more front-facing elements, focusing on the wacky absurdities rather than the basic principles that make those wacky absurdities so charming.

It doesn't feel like Citizens Of Earth gets it. Now, I'll admit, I only played about six or seven hours of it. That's all I could take. Maybe if it was for a job or something, I could persevere. But in my brief pockets of spare time, I'm not going to stick with something I'm not enjoying if it isn't giving me even a slight indication of better things to come. I believe I saw Citizens Of Earth's pitch, and I'm not interested in buying. Like most games that don't quite measure up, this isn't so much a singular failing as it is a death of one thousand paper cuts. I found the main character, the Vice President of the World, to be boorish, one-note, and all-around unlikable.

The absurdities start right from the opening moments of the game. You're playing a high-level politician who lives in his childhood bedroom at his mom's house. Bizarre things are going on right outside your door, and that's pretty much how things go for the portion of the game I played. It's noisy. There's nothing wrong with the jokes it's tossing out there, but the fact that there is no reprieve, or really, no solid ground to even start from, makes them melt into a wall of stupid pretty quickly. Absurdity needs an anchor, and there isn't one among the massive cast of Citizens Of Earth. Every character is silly in some way, and they don't seem to develop at all. There are all kinds of neat surface attempts to give them personality, but they just never go anywhere.

The same goes for the plot, at least as far as I played. There's always a goal, but what is missing is a reason to aim for that goal beyond the game telling you it's what you ought to do. But sure, it's funny at times, or at least pleasant. Did you ever know anyone who was always trying to please everyone, was completely agreeable, and couldn't stop telling jokes for fear someone wouldn't like them? That's Citizens Of Earth. Noisy, but it's trying so hard to please everyone, so it's hard to get too angry about it. I just wish it would show some honesty now and then, but I guess that's politics.

That said, it takes a bogglingly bad story to chase me away from a game that is otherwise sound. But Citizens Of Earth has an awful lot of problems outside of its story, too. The world is too big, and too full of hard-to-avoid encounters. There are too many people and too many sub-quests associated with them that you can have open, and no great way to organize all of the information that comes with that. At first, it's kind of exciting to have all of these possibilities, but as they multiply, it starts to feel stressful. Then, you realize that you don't need any of these characters to beat the game, and the stress gives way to annoyance. You can either try to ignore the clutter or take it on knowing it's mostly pointless. If you opt for the latter, you'll have to do a lot of running around, fetch-questing, and engaging in mini-games. The game has awful and frequent loading times on the 3DS, which makes those activities even less enjoyable than usual.

I appreciate that the battle system tries to address the old "MP problem", where nobody wants to use their characters' special abilities because they're trying to conserve MP for a deadly boss battle that may or may not ever come. That's a problem because it leads to people just jamming the fight command during random battles, making for a dull and repetitive experience for many. Unfortunately, the solution Citizens Of Earth presents leads to a similar end. There are no MP, but to use more powerful moves, you need to build up some energy. You build up the energy by using weaker attacks or chugging an item. In practice, it makes the battles last a lot longer than they should. When you add in elemental strengths/weaknesses and enemy skills that just flat out extend the battle by making you unable to hit your target, combat gets to be a slog pretty fast.

Each of the game's many characters brings different skills and flavor text to battles, which is probably the best part of combat in Citizens Of Earth. It doesn't take long to see all each character has to offer, though, just as in the story itself. It's at least easy to switch out party members, but it's tiresome trying to keep everyone leveled up in case you might need or want to use them later. This is one of those games where levels are super important, too, so you can't leave anyone who is potentially useful behind unless you really want to lock in for some tedium down the road. As far as battles go, characters mostly come down to one of three types, so once you have a group of three, it's hard to find the motivation to care about changing them.

That ends up being the problem with Citizens Of Earth in general. There's so much here, and none of it matters or stands out at all. To experience the best parts of the game, you have to do things in the most boring possible way, and it's in no way worth the suffering. To be totally fair, games like Suikoden and Chrono Cross also had a similar sort of excess, but while many of the characters in those games were fluff, there was at least a core group of developed characters to get invested in. Here, everyone is equally throwaway, even the main character, who talks a lot but never says much. He actually does speak, too, with almost every line voiced. Other characters are relegated to reaction noises and the odd one-liner that they will repeat over and over again in battle. Friends, don't put repetitive, voiced one-liners in your 20+ hour RPGs. That's not a win for anyone. I'm pretty sure the voice work accounts for the sheer size of the game's footprint in memory, too. So it's irritating and it has negative practical value.