On two separate occasions I lost enough interest in Citizens of Earth that I took a couple months off from playing it. Today I've finally finished it, including recruiting all the citizens (I'm a completionist), and am ultimately left disappointed. Much like the character of the Vice President (VP) of the World that you play as, I found this game initially appealing but shallow once you dig in a little.
My biggest complaint has be the direction they chose to go in designing the recruitable characters. Most are caricatures based on common stereotypes and much of the comedy is too. Some examples: the Car Salesman is a slick sleazebag, somewhere along the way the Cop will mention donuts and the Artist will talk about happy trees. It's predictable and, as I mentioned before, shallow. With such a large cast of playable characters it's not unexpected that many of them don't get a chance to build depth, but that doesn't excuse that I never felt attached to any of them besides the VP. This isn't to say that there aren't any good moments, there are, there just aren't enough of them.
From a combat standpoint there is a lot of variation among the citizens, leaving you plenty of room to get creative with your party setup. Equipment is very limited but each has the potential to significantly change how you'll want to use that character and who to team them with. For example, an offensive character might be able to be equiped with something that doubles their attack but also halves their defense. You might accept this tradeoff if you pair them with a teammate that is able to protect them.
Similar to Earthbound, battles aren't the highlight of the game. They can be enjoyable at times or tedious and repetitive at others. With the large cast you're bound to have many under leveled members as well as some potentially over leveled favorites. Difficulty is largely left up to you, either by directly altering it with the special talent of the Mascot character or by choosing lower level members for your party. That can make it tough to consistently find a good balance between challenging and cakewalk.
Visually the game is pleasing to the eye. I'm particularly fond of the style of the citizens and enemies. The world has many areas to explore but loses some beauty points with its tendency toward vertical and horizontal lines. Also hurting the good looks was frequent screen tearing and no V-sync option available to remedy this. While on the topic of game performance issues, the game crashed on me numerous times throughout my time with it. The autosave feature made it so I rarely lost more than a few minutes of progress, but it's still distressing.
The soundtrack is another area of great disappointment. It tries to emulate the quirky style of Earthbound. Unfortunately its tunes aren't able to breathe the same life into the places they accompany. None of the music is grating, it's just very forgettable.
Despite some good aspects to this game and my appreciation for where the developers hearts were at in making this, I cannot recommend it. If you're dying to play a comedy heavy RPG that's not part of the Mother series then maybe give this a shot but keep your expectations low.