clickbliss — The Caligula Effect Overdose Review

The Caligula Effect Overdose Review

The Caligula Effect Overdose
Developer: FURYU Corporation
Publisher: NIS America
PS4, PC, Switch

When I originally reviewed The Caligula Effect for the Vita I found it to be a dire RPG, with a half-baked story and combat that was held back by its abysmal technical performance. I questioned the merit of returning to it for a PS4 remake. Still, I was curious if any of the original game could be salvaged. So once again I found myself, like the game’s protagonists, stuck in an endless loop of high school life.

A quick refresher for those who (justifiably) skipped the original release of Caligula: during a speech welcoming the incoming class, you begin to hallucinate, seeing distortions in the world around you, and in the faces of your classmates. You’ve “graduated” and become aware of the true nature of the world, specifically, that it’s a simulation named Moebius, whose residents live an endless loop of high school life, finishing school only to return to their first year again.

Moebius is the creation of Mu, a virtual idol who seeks to bring comfort to fans of hers who’ve experienced trauma, and provide them with a world free of pain. Your attempts to escape Moebius bring you into conflict with Digiheads, people corrupted by their strong desire to escape their lives, and the Ostinato Musicians, students who compose music for Mu and seek to increase her influence. Basically, you gotta fight Vocaloid stans and artists who refuse to stop posting and log off.

To stop them each of the members of the Going-Home Club have to awaken to their inner desires, channeling their strong impulses through the Catharsis Effect, which allows them to fight back against Moebius. Basically their arms turn into guns and stuff.

It’s a loaded premise, full of interesting directions to pursue. Questions about the nature of fandom, virtual personhood, the value of pushing back against a restrictive society and particularly the endless adolescence, are all potent for thematic conflicts. The endless high school life and stunted growth that comes with escapism could easily form a strong meta-commentary, taking aim at the culture and fans of anime and games that constantly returns to high school life and sometimes feels incapable of moving on. Or it could provide commentary on a homogeneous society with little tolerance for aberrations.

Don’t worry, they don’t do anything meaningful with any of these themes. Instead characters get their catharsis by talking at length about how much they hate fat people and other inane garbage, while the main plot relitigates the value of escapism in a format that’s been done better by other games and half the isekai genre.

Overdose is largely the same story, aside from allowing you to play as a female protagonist, introducing a few characters (one of which is even more unlikable than the original cast), and adding scenarios that allow you to take sides with the Ostinato Musicians. It definitely bulks up the story, but it’s hard to argue that it meaningfully alters it. The script does get small improvements, and in one case it helps make a character read more like their awakening come as a result of strong determination, rather than having a tantrum.

Most of the meaningful revisions come as a result to changes to the UI and battle system. Functionally, it’s mostly the same, but a visual overhaul and technical changes turn make the game a lot more readable. The UI moves the grungy, noisy art direction to a more fitting pop aesthetic, with the textured black elements becoming lighter, pastel colors with slight transparencies. Battle icons also take up a lot less screen estate, letting the visuals breathe and allowing the hectic and often crowded battles more room before they turn unreadable.

Best of all, the instant battle transitions now bloom into lovely pastel arenas, with digitized effects dancing around the borders, creating a window into the setting around you. The improved presentation works strongly in Caligula’s favor, since the battle system carried me through most of my time with it. Essentially, you’re using a series of predictions to carry out a chain of up to three actions per character, attempting to inflict status effects to interrupt enemy attacks and put them into a vulnerable state.

Characters move according to turn order, but their actions occur in real time once executed, and can be fine tuned to better interact with other characters’ moves. For example, you might set one character up to they counter two enemies’ melee attacks and send them airborne, have other characters juggle them with ranged attacks, then have another follow up when the enemy is downed to finish them off. It turns battles into interesting tactical problems, which when dealt with well become spectacles of stylish combos and super moves that lend a flair that calls to mind character action games. With good decision making even bosses can be interrupted and run over with the same momentum, providing a satisfying reward for playing well.

Of course, that’s only when everything plays out the way you want. Caligula throws a wrinkle into its battle system–the predictions of the enemy moves aren’t always accurate. The stronger the enemy the more likely they’ll be able to outwit you, and having backup plans to ensure your combos go off properly is key. Characters also need time to recharge their skill points after a few turns, which requires some long term planning to make sure you aren’t standing around out of energy while the enemy runs you over. These considerations keep battles from being predictable, but also makes an already finicky system more touchy. So while higher level enemies still prove engaging, later battles, with tons of fodder enemies and a larger squad of teammates, turns into a cacophony of abilities and explosions that are honestly better left to the auto-battle option.

At its most messy, these battles still provide the main impetus to keep playing, and Overdose’s welcome makeover helped it get closer to its ambition. It’s the one part of the game I can say I found all around enjoyable. The same can’t be said for its ambitious social system, which incorporates and massive web of characters to talk to, both in person and over the game’s version of the LINE messaging app. There are literally hundreds of these NPCs, each which you can have a quick chat with to raise your affinity with, rewarding you with bonuses and unlocking other, more reserved characters in the massive relationship chart.

While I appreciate the sheer amount of effort it takes just to name these characters none of them have a unique appearance or dialogue, mostly spouting stock lines that barely make any sense. Worse, your chats with them over messenger amount to you sending them a series of random questions with no connecting throughline. I don’t know about you, but if someone kept asking if I liked strawberries or oranges then jumped to something like what my greatest fear was the next sentence I’d think they were a bot trying to get my passwords, not a relatable human being. You party doesn’t fare much better, since not even they get real conversations.

It’s even harder to escape comparisons to other high school life RPGs now, then it was at the time of its original release. Even if I’m not a fan of it, Persona 5’s shadow looms large over Caligula, since it explores similar themes and shares a history. Closer to Caligula’s scale, and maybe more relevant, Blue Reflection–Gust’s magical girl RPG–also released since then, which incorporates several similar ideas, but executes them more successfully. It’s hard not to look at the unique social media interactions and personal problems Blue Reflection gives to your schoolmates and see a better implementation of the generic, stock dialogue Caligula assigns to its high schoolers. It puts into perspective how thoughtless Caligula feels on that front.

I’m glad to see more games explore the space around modern day settings, and I’m all for more fake LINE interfaces where I can chat with friends. At the same time I can’t help but see that as a primary mode where The Caligula Effect Overdose falters. It can’t get by on the sheer novelty of the setting anymore, not with so many other notable players, and the story it tells nowhere near matches the ambition elsewhere.

Worse, it’s genuinely ugly and cruel in places where it doesn’t feel justified, and which it never earns the right to be. Every social aspect of the game is riddled with narrative shortcuts, hoping to blast through the story fast enough and overwhelm you with a massive quantity so that you don’t notice that it’s not telling a story with any substance. Overdose makes it more tolerable, and highlights the more enjoyable aspects of the combat and artwork, but in doing so ends up bringing further into focus the other places Caligula is lacking.