Newly appointed Vice President of the World wakes up to find the world has become a strange place, with the madness appearing to originate from the Moonbucks Corporation, the massively popular coffee chain of stores. The dialogue contains constant puns and silliness, and is mainly accompanied by voice acting which is pretty impressive.
Citizens of Earth is a turn-based RPG, with citizens battling against all kinds of strange creatures. The Vice President never fights but leads the party. You start off with your Mom and Brother but will recruit all kinds of stereotypical characters along the way by accomplishing side-quests. There are 40 of them to collect and you can find them in multiple places around the world so they are hard to miss. There are various styles to these characters so some are very attack based, while others provide stat buffs to your party, or others are focussed on healing. They all have some kind of speciality you can use outside battle such as the High School Mascot can adjust the difficulty, the Car Salesman provides a car for faster movement, or the Gardener can chop down plants that block certain paths.
Due to the large cast, the game seems to assume you will be constantly swapping out your team-mates. If you don't you will find the game is rather easy as you will be well over-levelled. The difficulty can be changed via the High School Mascot, or you can swap out for low levelled characters.
One annoyance I had with this system is that certain abilities would be a given in other games e.g. the Bee-keeper's ability to zoom out the camera or being able to change the difficulty. Another annoyance I had was that late in the game, there are plenty of short-cuts available by having certain characters, although it always seemed to be characters I didn't have. I then had to back-track a bit and find an alternative way of proceeding.
In battle, your moves are chosen from a menu spread across a few tabs. Some moves replenish your energy while others consume it. This means you need to mix up the moves you use; stockpiling energy to use for your stronger attacks. There are a variety of elements which the enemies are strong/weak against. Attacking with an element that they are strong against penalises you with energy whereas taking advantage of their weakness gives you energy rewards in addition to extra damage.
The enemies are visible on the map and colliding with them triggers a battle. You can press a button to charge your party at them. If you collide that way and take them unaware, then they are instantly defeated but you get a small amount of EXP. If they take you by surprise, then your energy is reduced as the battle is initiated.
Being able to view enemies on the map and avoid battles sounds like a great idea to negate the tedium often found in RPGs. However, it's actually poorly implemented. Often, the map is overpopulated with enemies and you find yourself navigating narrow passageways. This means you can't easily walk around them, especially when their AI behaviour is to move towards you when in range.
Tapping the Right Trigger brings up a map which is rendered a bit too small to be highly useful. You cannot zoom in/pan either and the amount of icons on the screen often obscures parts of the map; It's far too cluttered for my liking and it takes a while to realise where your current location is. You can only see your current area too, so if you get told to travel to a certain region, you have to remember where it is, rather than quickly checking on a World Map. The final annoyance with the map system is that you can only check it whilst on foot (and inside some buildings). Using some kind of vehicle means your button press is just ignored without any good reason for it. Not having a map in some of the more complex buildings is extremely annoying and there doesn't seem to be any consistency of which buildings actually allow you to use the map.
The game auto-saves after you enter a new area. Every area gives you a loading screen though, it's only for a few seconds but it slows the game down. It's a particular annoyance when you find yourself in locations where you need to pop in and out of rooms in quick succession.
As the game progresses, the amount of tedium seems to increase. There doesn't seem any effective way of quick travelling. The Pilot has an ability to transport you to certain areas which have a helipad, but some of these areas are stand-alone areas only reachable by the pilot. Therefore you have to fly to a different area, then trek across several screens to get where you want to. You can travel faster than walking speed by using the Car Salesman's car, although you can only use this when the terrain has roads; so you are severely restricted.
Many RPGs these days feature complex plots so can be forgiven if the fighting system is boring or feels a bit grindy. I felt that Citizens of Earth had a very boring bare-bones plot, but then combined that with a boring fighting system and forced you to play way too many battles. The frequency of battles was just insane, and it just keeps increasing the tedium to drag out the final stages of the game as long as possible. In the end it took me about 18.5 hours to complete but does not have enough substance to the game to justify such longevity.