Said premise is like something out of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (though, to be clear, not half as clever or witty) – you play as the Ambassador of Earth, who is extremely self-centered and narcissistic to the point of being satire. However, the character is more Michael Scott than any present day politician you may want to draw a parallel to, because he’s actually naive and unexpectedly well-meaning at times. 

Shortly after taking on the mantle of the Ambassador of Earth, you realize that the Earth itself is missing. More out of acknowledgement of the fact that your position is meaningless without there being a planet for you to represent than anything else, you decide to set out in search for the earth.

Dialog is cheery, light hearted, and very funny, though there is some unnecessarily crass humor sometimes that seems as though the writers were trying too hard. NPC banter is especially engaging, especially between your assistant (who is called The Assistant, because names aren’t necessarily this game’s strong point) and you, and it’s actually really fun to walk up to the NPCs, each of whom are brimming with personality, and engage in conversation with them.

"Dialog is cheery, light hearted, and very funny, though there is some unnecessarily crass humor sometimes that seems as though the writers were trying too hard. NPC banter is especially engaging."

That chatter with NPCs has another major benefit, however, one that ties in to a substantial gameplay mechanic – NPCs can be recruited to your party. There are actually very few exceptions to this (you can think of it like how the recruiting skills work in Octopath Traveler for an analog), although in most cases you need to complete quests for these characters before they’ll join you on your quest.

This is where the first problem with Citizens of Space shows up – the quests are sub-par at best, and offensively tedious and sloggy at worst, and the fact that you have to engage with them so much means a bulk of your time with the game can end up feeling trite. To be clear, this criticism does not just apply to the NPC recruitment quests – across the board, the quests in Citizens of Space are poor, and end up leading to you feeling discontented more than anything else.

Getting party members can still be worth your while (even if not to the extent of getting every single one of them), because it enriches the already fun battle system of the game.

The battle system feels like something out of Mario RPG (and to a lesser extent, Paper Mario), with specific in-battle QTE prompts for actions that can lead to offensive (such as critical hits) and defensive (such as a defense boost) perks. Actual battles are fundamentally fun on a base level, and recruiting NPCs makes them more nuanced, with more elements to juggle.

There are three kinds of NPCs, once recruited – those that can be directly controlled in battle, those that can be called out in battle as a special attack once per fight, and those that have passive abilities that can be used as you navigate the world. The first two kinds especially add to all sorts of layers and dimensions to the battle system, though eventually, repetition starts to set in, and the battle system itself, while remaining intrinsically fun, plateaus.

It’s entirely possible the battle system would come off stronger in the end if we didn’t have to engage with it so much. This game has a positively obscene encounter rate (though you can eventually adjust it, it ends up coming well after you’ve already started to tire of the relentless fights) – far too high for how simple the battle mechanics are. Simplicity is not a bad thing, in and of itself – but if the bulk of your game’s playtime is going to be battles, you need to ensure your battle system is deep enough to remain engaging and varied throughout, and Citizens of Space does not fully meet that threshold.

"What is undoubtedly pleasant is the game’s fantastic presentation – everything, from the art style, to the animations, to the writing, the voice acting, and yes, the music, all seems like it came out of a Saturday morning cartoon."

One area where Citizens of Space has made strides over its predecessor is traversal and navigation. You, at last, get a compass showing you where you should be going, which can be useful since some of the locations in the game seen like they would be borderline impossible to get through without it. The in-game map constantly shows you your location and destination as well (though it doesn’t always take topography into account). Given how much time you spend going back and forth between locations in this game, and how much battles constantly impede that progress, it is good to see the game at the very least tries to make this aspect as pleasant as possible for the player.

What is undoubtedly pleasant is the game’s fantastic presentation – everything, from the art style, to the animations, to the writing, the voice acting, and yes, the music, all seems like it came out of a Saturday morning cartoon. It is corny and cheesy, and rarely feels like it is taking itself seriously, which is one of the things that helps keep absolute frustration with Citizens of Space at bay – it is hard to get angry at something that doesn’t seem to place too much importance on itself, after all.

There are many, many RPGs on every major system (all of which Citizens of Space is available on), and many of them are far better than this game. However, for what Citizens of Space is, it’s hard to find much fault with it – a not overly long, light-hearted, witty jaunt through a surprisingly well written and well playing inter-galactic adventure. 

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

Citizens of Earth was a fun, Earthbound-inspired romp (which you can see our take on here), and now it seems the follow up is aiming for something quite a big bigger as it breaks out from the confines of our lovely planet into the uncharted frontier of space with Citizens of Space.

You can check out the announcement trailer for the game below. Those that enjoyed the previous title from Eden Industries will find a lot of familiarity here with a similar, but overall sharper, art style and battle system as the original, along with the promise of a cast of 40 different fun and wacky characters to employ. It seems the Earth has mysteriously vanished and the freshly elected Ambassador of Earth to the Galactic Federation of Planets will have to recruit the Citizens to figure out what is happening.

Citizens of Space will launch on June 18th for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch and PC.

Citizens of Earth is set up to play like a modern interpretation of SNES JRPGs. Specifically, the game plays a lot like Nintendo’s quirky cult classic, Earthbound. A lot of the inspiration is almost immediately apparent- you have the same kind of alien invasion story, the same bright, colorful palette for the artstyle, the same kind of bright and cheery soundtrack, and the same kind of pop culture references and deadpan satire as that game.

"A lot of the inspiration is almost immediately apparent- you have the same kind of alien invasion story, the same bright, colorful palette for the artstyle, the same kind of bright and cheery soundtrack, and the same kind of pop culture references and deadpan satire as that game. "

And what satire and pop culture references they are- the game is filled to the brim with puns, bad puns, good puns, puns that legitimately make you laugh at out; subtle references to other popular works in media abound, while the game doesn’t shy away from taking jabs at modern capitalism (the villain of the game is Moonbucks Corporation, which has made its name by selling coffee- hey, I told you, it’s not always subtle), and more gleefully, just taking jabs at politics and politicians in general.

For instance, the main character in the game is the Vice President of the Earth (don’t ask). However, in a twist that is genuinely amusing, he never actually participates in the game’s multitude of turn based battles- the various other party members that you recruit over the course of the game all do the actual work, while the Vice President just stands there in the corner, making wisecracks and quips as you fight.

And those fights are fun, too- Citizens of Earth has a fairly standard battle system, being turn based, and centered around the classic old school tradition of buffs and debuffs, energy costs and attacks, but a lot of neat little touches make the battles fun. The most amusing is how the characters’ actions correspond so well to their profession- apart from the Vice President just standing by the side and ordering people around, you have ‘buffs’ going to the bodybuilder (which is one of this game’s better puns, honestly, I giggled for a few minutes when I realized what the game had done there), or the computer coder using hexadecimal code to attack enemies (again, the picture of a real life coder just rattling off computer code at normal people as they walked by, and just terrifying them into submission made me giggle). It also helps that battles are fast– even if you don’t necessarily find yourself in the mood to appreciate all of their quirks, at least you can blaze through them quickly.

All of this is fun enough that you actually enjoy your time with the game, in spite of its considerable flaws, most of which stem, I suspect, from its reverent homage to Earthbound. The main issue is just how obtuse the game can be sometimes- players and fans of classic JRPGs will remember annoyingly cryptic hints that old games would drop at you as ‘quests’ or objectives, which would require hours of aimless wandering, even as you seemingly did what the game told you to do, and a complete inability to progress unless you made some amazing leap in logic to actually do what the game had intended for you to do, but simply refused to (or been unable to) communicate to you.

That’s what Citizens of Earth does- its objectives are vague at the best of times, with no specifics given to you (for instance, find x person or object. That’s all it will say, without even giving you some context as to where x person or object may actually be)- and even when you are seemingly in the right spot, the next part of the game often does not trigger, because you didn’t do things in the intended order, or missed doing something arcane and obtuse and stupid that game never told you you were supposed to be doing in the first place.

"I'm a fan of classic JRPGs myself, and I have a lot of nostalgia for them. But with that said, there is a reason we moved past design elements like these over the years- they're not good game design. They hinder progress, and are just there to artificially inflate length. They frustrate the player, and are so often enough to just make them want to give up."

Look, I know it all sounds charming- trust me, I do. I’m a fan of classic JRPGs myself, and I have a lot of nostalgia for them. But with that said, there is a reason we moved past design elements like these over the years- they’re not good game design. They hinder progress, and are just there to artificially inflate length. They frustrate the player, and are so often enough to just make them want to give up.

That’s not the only sin Citizens of Earth commits either- another unfortunate tendency it takes on from old JRPGs is its random encounter battles, which are far more numerous than they have any right to be. I am serious, literally every single step you take in the overworld will be interrupted by another random battle at some point, and while I know I said battles are breezy, constantly being interrupted by them breaks flow and gets extremely annoying.

It is often like taking all the worst parts of old JRPGs, and synthesizing them into one mix- which can be a pain, and is also very sad, because, as I said, Citizens of Earth is otherwise a genuinely good game, that I had a lot of fun playing through. The problem is, the fun came more from the charm and the wit, rather than the game design, which seemed to be actively holding back game design.

As long as you go into the game expecting wit and satire, parody and homage, and get into the mindset of enjoying it as just that, I think you will appreciate Citizens of Earth. As long as you go into it with the mindset of seeing how old JRPGs actually used to be, rather than how we remember them being, I think you will enjoy Citizens of Earth. But if you go into it expecting anything more, something like a game that is fun to play by today’s standards, for instance, I think you will come away disappointed. Which is, sadly, the truth.

This game was reviewed on Wii U.