by Omar (@siegarettes)

• The Caligula Effect
• Developer- Aquria
• Publisher- Atlus
• PS Vita

You’re about to give a speech to the incoming class when you suddenly begin to hallucinate, turning everyone around you into a grotesque, gltiched out mess. Welcome to “graduation”, where you’ve come to realize the nature of the world around you. None of it is real. In fact, as certain classmates of yours will inform you, the school and the entire world around you is a simulation, a product of a misguided digital idol named Mu. In her attempts to bring happiness to others she’s trapped hundreds of people in a virtual highschool, having them relive the same three years over and over. So far so anime.

Naturally upon realizing this you immediately seek to escape, and are blocked off from doing so. Enter the Catharsis Effect, a power which draws upon the user’s hidden desires to create a powerful weapons shaped of a black mass. Which of course means your hands turn into guns.

From here you’ll be thrown into the combat, which sees you selecting skills and placing them within a combat timeline in order to react to the enemy’s predicted moves and chain together combos. It’s a finicky system, but when it works there’s a satisfaction to seeing a plan come together, and picking the right skills to counteract enemy attacks. A good thing too, since this is where the majority of your time is going to be spent. 

The same satisfaction can’t be gleamed from any other parts of the game, unfortunately. Despite bringing on the writer from the three Persona games (Persona 1, Persona 2 Innocent Sin and Persona 2 Eternal Punishment) The Caligula Effect fails to capture any of the personality of the series, despite trafficking in similar themes and psychological concepts. The school is an uninteresting setting that lacks a sense of place or consistent internal logic. Each character’s motivation is also thin, often coming off as more of a tantrum than a deeply personal moment that would induce catharsis. It causes the story to quickly feel rote, and it becomes obvious it’s more interested in shepherding you around to the next task instead of providing an interesting narrative. 

The satisfaction of the combat fails to distract from these flaws for long. It kept me playing long after my interest had waned, but soon enough I was encountering enemies who were high enough level that their resistance to the various stun and juggle states prevented me from using any of the interesting tactics. Instead each battle became a test of patience, fighting against the finicky controls and struggling framerate to position my team out of harm and continually spam attacks to slowly drain their HP. 

With that all my interest in The Caligula Effect died off. Despite the presence of plenty of ideas, every one of them ended up feeling shallow and empty. Worse still, it ends up playing with ideas so similar to other RPGs that it only serves to remind you of time spent with games that execute on its concepts better. The only catharsis I felt from it was in the feeling of putting it down.