The promotion for The Caligula Effect: Overdose certainly got with the aesthetic and a massive cast of characters to me. However, does the movie of the 2017 PS Vita name manage to impress on its outing on PC the Nintendo Switch and PS4? Read on to find out.
Developed by Aquria, the very same people The Caligula Impact, specifically Hollow Realization and Hollow Fragment: Overdose is a RPG. Was written by Tadashi Satomi, the author of this first Persona, Persona 2: Innocent Sin and Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, when exploring about the game I was intrigued to discover the game. Those three games feature mature themes that were unseen in RPGs back and with The Caligula Effect: Overdose, Satomi proceeded to make a narrative around the titular term which describes needing execute and to see . Although an interesting idea, the game’s narrative, and the environment neglect to capitalize on it.
The game’s story had a really promising concept, however, the over-exaggerated Japanese tropes stuffed into the sandwich ultimately waters down the experience. The game starts off with the silent protagonist realizing something weird is going on in his school. This is because of “μ”, pronounced Myu, an AI which has gained sentience and has trapped the souls of people that can’t deal with issues of the real world. The player character, accompanied by his allies of the “Go-Home Club” must go against μ to leave Mobius as they’re the only ones who know what’s going on.
Gameplay wise, The Caligula Effect: Overdose, as mentioned earlier, features a turn-based battle system. The screen shifts to combat when you bump into an enemy character during exploration. A standard battle will allow you to choose a party of four characters, from a choice of 9 main party members. The player can choose up to three actions and have them act out as the titular “Caligula Effect” to see how the battle will unfold before actually performing them.
The main selling point of the battle system was that you can recruit NPCs when you create a strong bond with them, and there are a ton of them to recruit. Similar to Persona games, you can raise interactions and gather more characters to your cause by hanging out and interacting with NPCs you see. Although the battle system certainly differentiates itself from other turn-based RPGs, most battles are simply too long which makes the overall experience tedious. After a while, the novelty ran out and I was just going around enemies so that I wouldn’t waste my time fighting them.
The Caligula Effect: Overdose is an okay RPG that will last you quite a while if you like the themes and concept presented. It certainly isn’t the Persona-like game we were expecting so you may want to skip this if you were under the same impression as me.
