W'oops, look like winter attacked out from nowhere in it's dieing breath while I was planning to do the rest of my valentine's review and I have caught the stomach flu again. However, while sick, I was introduced two games that tries to capture the heart of what made the original games that they are based on. Like Shovel Knight, which shows the good parts of the NES games like Mega-man and it's other cohorts, Citizens of Earth wants to show what's good about Earthbound and Freedom Planet wants to show the epic story of Sonic Archie's counterpart and Sonic 1-3 gameplay in the 90's.
When the earth decided to unite in a cutesy world, it makes one wounder if it has been taken over by the female Illuminati. That is at least one thing they got right with right when it comes with the Earthbound influenced world as Itoi would make it. The player star as the president, as he recruits people to fight for him, as he doesn't exactly fight the random monsters, aliens, and creatures himself. The one thing that this game has over earthbound is the different citizens you could recruit like in The Wounderful 101. Each citizen has their special abilities they have can can unlocked, different dialog, and the different names they can take.
However, unlike Earthbound, it lacks the hidden dark tone and the humor of the game, as most of the jokes are either hit or miss. Personally, they seem to be mostly misses, as they wanted to hit the players with the punchline, but misses as it closes up to the end of the joke. Most of the lines, as much as the characters, are too two dimensional. While the fighting system is solid, it is just dose not have the heart as earthbound.
In the end, I recommend playing the fan translation of Mother 3 over Citizens of Earth. Mother 3 that is a great sequel to Earthbound. Yes, the different cultural name for earthbound is different, but personally agree that at least mother is a much fitting name. In fact, there's a new fan game that's coming out this year. I recommend to look into that as well. Earthbound is also available on the Nintendo eShop, but beware, as the game is long.
Meanwhile, Freedom planet started out as a fan game to the Sonic 2D games, but in the end, the developers realized that the idea should be rewritten as an identity as it's own. It starts as a evil leader storms the castle, killing the king and brain-washing the prince to his bidding. meanwhile on a literal animal planet, a ship comes in, two women characters with abilities of their own, must fight to liberate the planet from evil leader...With also a help from a bunny/dog thing later in the game.
This game is a love letter to most Sega games within Sega's counsel era from the character's design looking like abandoned characters that Sega and time forgot, as well as the game-play controls, to even the Sega CD music. This is a colorful game all around! You can play either by story or skip it via classic mode you would expect from any Sega game of the past. The story plays as the freedom fighter story, as it was a popular edgy story element since the 90's.
However, there is one minor problems with the game: One would be the very configuration issues. For one, the sound options are one in the same, so you cannot adjust the music from the voice acting in the game, which leads into another flaw with the game: The quality of the voice actors are phoned in. This is where the lines are in low quality because of limitations of either technology or quality. The smallest issue is the design since there's a lot of anamorphic characters now. But the biggest issue is the controller configuration, as it easily confuse your keyboard as a controller. Joy-to-keys dose help, but it's an error that is usually rare and should not exist.
If Sonic couldn't scratch that itch to that one 2D sonic fan to another, this is the game for that one sonic fan. As for Sonic himself, I fear that he has really dug himself into a very deep hole that not even Mario can dig him out. Thankfully, Sega is making more careful investments in Aliens thanks to creative assembly and they're making money thanks to Free-to-play games like PSO2, so they are making back their investments.
All and all, The love for one thing can make another, especially when aliens help make games like Mertoid and Doom. Sure, it can be misused and exploited like with the spider-man franchise, but when use cautiously, it can birth some new IPs!
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