The Caligula Effect: Overdose
The Caligula Effect: Overdose is a game that I purchased at release and never got around to. A friend online was playing it near launch and singing praises about its writing, music, and combat system. Having similar tastes in many aspects, I made a mental note to get to the game sooner than later. Other friends had cited the game as poor, bad, and a waste of time yet all of these statements came from people who played the original release on Vita. The friend singing praises however had similar things to say about the original entry. I’d wondered just how different a remaster could be for someone to be so negative on one iteration yet quite positive on the next. Almost a year later, I finally ripped off the plastic wrapping and gave it a spin and learned its far more than a remaster. The game is essentially a complete remake.
In Overdose, there were new characters added to the story to help flesh out the narraitve. The combat system is completely revamped and the game is essentially doubled with the addition of the Musician route. Players now have the choice to join the games antagonists, known as the Musicians, and see just what their forbidden lives are all about. I was quickly warned by a friend in regards to the ‘forbidden Ostinato Musician route’ – and that warning was to not refuse taking the route. There is no moral choice in joining them as the games main antagonist even invites you to see just what they’re about and let you decide how you want things to go. Consider it acting as a double agent. It’s highly encouraged to do this as you’ll see just why this game does not have a traditional concept of good or evil.
The game plays with psychology almost exclusively, diving into myriad traumas, phobias, and desires that initially define the people within, yet ultimately become just a tiny part of the character. The Caligula Effect is named for the feeling of doing something one shouldn’t, breaking taboos and engaging in acts that should otherwise be forbidden. I’ve read that the game is named for the film as there is no actual ‘effect’ in psychology but more along the lines of the number of people who rushed out to see a highly nigh-pornographic film about the emperor Caligula and his endless sexual deviancy. Only a few times does the game give a namedrop, but the reason for choosing it – breaking taboos – it seems to fit in with the overall theme of the game.
The story is about a virtual world that people are transferred to upon hearing a song by a virtual idol that is similar to our very own worlds Hatsune Miku. People with sadness in their lives, difficulties living every day, and even severe traumas are offered a chance to live out their days in a virtual utopia free from pain. The place is built by two virtual idols who want to create a perfect world and allow people to live in blissful ignorance. Yet in their naivete, these idols Mu and Aria never stopped to think about peoples actual feelings. They continued building this paradise thinking it was the way to ease pain.
What would a perfect world be? This virtual paradise, Mobius, isn’t made up on the actual inhabitants ideal world. Instead, it’s a copy of the real world based on whats found online and in fiction – the thought that the best time of ones life is their high school days. While such a sentiment is incredibly incorrect for many people, television shows, manga, games, music, and more often pain high school life as something grand and fun without ever getting into just why it may an exercise in social torture. So, those transported into Mobius from the real world will live out their days as happy high school students regardless of how old they are in the real world. Upon entry, they’re asked a few questions by Mu and given what they want to help them feel at easy.
Could it be a perfect body? A different gender? A multitude of friends? A string of talent? Fans galore? It could be anything that someone wanted to change in the real world. While living out their mindless bliss, once a person becomes aware that they’re in a virtual world, everything changes for the worse. What used to be friends and family are now just faceless NPCs who act on a set routine. Imagine waking up to find out your entire family are just virtual clones programmed to do your bidding. One wouldn’t be blamed if they went crazy at the thought.
Those who awoke to find out their perfect world is a sham now have an intense desire to throw away this world and go home – as part of the Go-Home Club. There are those who have awoken to this false reality and have decided they want to keep it going forever. Thus, they become musicians, namely the Ostinato Musicians. They create music that gains fans, much like the virtual idols, and keep more trapped souls addicted to this farcical world in an effort to keep the facade up for the rest of them. While it’s easy to see why some people might want to continue living in such a paradise, some of these musicians take their freedom and power to an extreme.
At the start of the game, you meet with one of the two virtual idols who helped create the world. She’s distraught and seeking help, having realized that Mu is slowly going crazy. Aria allies herself with you and you quickly join up with the Go-Home Club. She attunes your emotions and allows you to weaponize them, granting you a means to fight back against those who the musicians have turned into psychopaths. As you go through the game, you’re introduced to more and more people who awaken to the fact that their reality is false. Over time, their emotions are tuned and formed into weapons – many of which represent some of the characters pasts, issues, or traumas.
Tying into weapons, the games combat is a treat. It’s a mixture of strategy RPG, turn-based RPG, and has a touch of Active Turn Based systems found in games like Final Fantasy or Grandia. While this may seem like a difficult mixture to pull off, the game does it phenomenally well. In battle, you’ve four characters – all of which fall into particular types or styles. Some may be aggressive and offensive, others may be defenders who focus on counters, some may be technical powerhouses who need to be guarded while a few excel at support and long range attacks. Every single character is unique with their own style and half the fun of the game is in toying with new team compositions.
In battle, when you select your actions, you can see a prediction of the future across five seconds or so. You get whats called an Imaginary Chain that depicts what you’ll do, what your enemy will do, how much damage they’ll take, and so on. What it does not account for, however, are missed attacks. You can set up what would be the perfect chain of moves, but if you’re lacking in accuracy or the enemy is simply too high a level, you might completely scrap your entire battle plan.
As you battle, you start off your turn by selecting three actions per character. Each of these actions can be delayed along a timeline to set up follow-up attacks, exploit weaknesses or altered states, or event delay your defending to ensure you block every portion of an attack. In the top left you’ll see your hit rate. With a 95% hit rate, there’s a high chance everything you see will go according to play. With a 25% chance to hit, you’re better off trying for basic potshots that don’t require any detailed setup.
Once you get your moves set up however, it’s incredibly satisfying to see the entire chain play out. You may spend a thirty seconds to a minute planning out your attack and seeing the chain upwards of 12 times per round, but once you confirm your final action, it’s time for the battle to shine. Some fights can be knocked out in seconds while others may take minutes, depending on your setup and what you’re fighting. I’ve had regular enemies stunlock me with large area of effect attacks while bosses were on the other side of such an onslaught.
It rewards tactical thinking and preparation in such a grand way. It’s quite amusing to suffer a verbal beatdown by an enemy who spends multiple minutes trash talking you, only to have them get wiped out in a single turn as you tweak and tailor your chain in a perfect manner. Countering their attack, sending them airborne and delaying your allies attacks until they’re in the air, then exploiting their downed state as they land and even dealing critical damage as their ‘risk gauge’ raises as a result of getting hit so much.
The number of tools at your disposal is quite high, be it from a large number of attacks to a slew of support skills. At any point, characters can dash out of the way of attacks at the cost of an action, as well as guard or restore their SP which is used for all the attacks in the game. The way the combat system comes together is wonderful and I must say I enjoyed every moment of it. The game has an incredibly high number of battles (with one dungeon making practically every single battle in it mandatory due to corridor sizes), so its recommended to get familiar with the system quickly. That said, on Normal, combat was a breeze in most cases unless an enemy was 10+ levels above me. I did have a few boss fights push back quite hard on me, but I only ever saw a game over screen no more than three times in 35 hours.
The music in the game is another part where it shines. It’s a beautiful mixture of artcore, pop, rock, electronic, and indie all blended together. With every antagonist having their own song that’s made by real world vocaloid producers, there’s a fantastic soundtrack that serves as a perfect backing for the hail of bullets and flurry of blades. The way the songs are portrayed in the dungeons is quite intriguing with pianos replacing all vocals until a fight actually start. Once the lyrics kick in and the music turns up, it adds an intensity to the control chaos of the tactical battles. With the addition of the musician route, listening to these songs at will has made me quite happy as there are a number of them that I simply could not get out of my head. The protagonists song is made by none other than Utsu-P, a favorite producer of mine who is known for making vocaloid metal and notable for being one of the first to make a vocaloid scream.
With a lovely soundtrack and magical battle system noted, it’s time to move onto where the game shines the most – the characters. The entire narrative is driven by character interactions across a cast of over 20 characters. As mentioned before, this game does not have a traditional concept of good versus evil. As you interact with both the Go-Home Club and the Ostinato Musicians, you learn more about each person and why they are the way they are. You learn about why people came to Mobius, why they want to go back, why they want to stay, what they’ll fight for and who they truly are.
Over the course of 35 hours I had an emotional rollercoaster across the entire cast. There were characters who I outright hated and wanted dead for hours only to turn around as I learned their story or they did something that essentially redeemed them. There were characters I trusted and liked, yet realized later they were little more than a lying snake. This entire cast of people starts as just a group of individuals defined by their disorders and traumas. Messiah complex, dysmorphophobia, sociopathy, bereavement, androphobia, aphonia, peter pan syndrome – you name. Someone has something psychological that brought them to Mobius. And the interesting part? They may just be a random NPC walking the halls.
As you get to know your comrades on both sides, there may be a flow of sympathy and empathy from the player as they may relate to one or more of these characters. I know I certainly did. Yet over time, that trauma or disorder or phobia eventually becomes something that doesn’t define them. It becomes something they either learned to accept, to get over, to try to work with, or to simply deal with in their own way. By going through character episodes, I saw these allies being fleshed out as real people with real problems, some of which I personally shared. I grew close to them and was eager to find out more about them, to learn what they wanted to do about it if given the chance to go back to reality, and what I could do to help them with that.
Near the tail end of my playthrough, I wanted everyone to be able to go home. I didn’t feel there was any good or evil save for one or two characters who were truly monsters. There was no good guys versus bad guys. It was simply people on two sides of a conflict with opposing viewpoints. Once I got to see why those who wanted to stay truly wanted to stay, I felt almost guilty for taking away the one place they could truly be happy – even if it was a lie and they knew it. As every characters story reached its climax, I felt there was a fantastic resolution to everything shortly after the ‘secret’ scene after the credits rolled.
The story was expertly crafted from a character perspective. The ups and downs, twists and turns, the guesses that made me suspicious of some members and trusting of others being flipped around, the gradual reveals, and the overall growth of these people really made the cast stand out as one of the best overall groups I’ve seen in a game. These people grew up over the course of the game, trusted and confided in one another, and exposed their damaged hearts to the world in an effort to form a bond with those they never thought possible.
When it comes to games being subtitled or dubbed, I’ve no real preference unless the dub comes out bad due to poor acting or poor direction. Caligula is a game where I’m uncertain if the voice acting would actually be viable in English due to how much screaming there is between characters. Hearing these men and women pour their hearts out, get at each others throats, and scream until their voices crack as tears stream down their face is a level of drama that isn’t often seen in English voice acting. It’s not to say that it would be bad in English, I just feel that the voice directors wouldn’t push for such brutal emotion in the most heated of lines. I felt like some members could be heard practically shaking as they lamented and their performances certainly elevated the experience even if they weren’t speaking my language.
I had favorite members who I wished a better world for, hated members who I wished would turn themselves in when they got back to reality, and even those who I questioned the sanity of because they seemed to be people who could not operate in a society in any form, be it virtual or not. Yet as those credits rolled by, I learned why they’re like that. There is a reason for everything. Every action taken by these people on either side – and they’re all understandable save for one vile human being who I won’t touch on for the sake of spoilers.
It’s incredibly difficult for me to imagine this game without the musician route and without the seven additional characters and storylines that came with the Overdose release. It feels like the original wouldn’t even be half the game. It’d be a soulless husk operating on a theme and idea that never would be actually realized. Overdose is the second chance that this game deserved and it did such a wonderful job of telling a story about empathy.
While I could gush about the combat, story, characters, and music, not everything in the game is great. To point out a few negatives, the game generally looks pretty flat with some stiff animations that look bizarre or out of place at times. Weapons clip through clothing, legs jut off to the side in strange angles when spinning, and there’s a weird sense of the characters looking like they’re on ice at times. The models themselves aren’t anything special and its pretty obvious they’re just up-res’d Vita models. Thankfully, most of the talking is done with portraits which are expertly done and simply drip with style.
Another negative, though its something that ended up being practically useless, is the Causality Link. There are over 500 students in Mobius and each one of them has a problem. Be it a fear, a fetish, a guilt, a complex, a disorder, a trauma, or simply just an issue in general, there are so many students who are tied together in a massive web that covers the entire school. There’s a huge mystery surrounding a murdered girl, there are those who question the nature of reality, there are gangs and turf wars, and there are even those who are aware of the world and just want to be left alone. How do you interact with these people? Well…
Unfortunately you have to talk to every person up to three times to get them to befriend you. Then they may reveal what their problem is. You’ll learn their problem and then get a hint on how to solve it. At that point you’ll invite them into your party and do what it asks of you such as equipping a specific item or talking to a specific character or raising affinity with someone they like. It’s a world of tedium that simply takes far too long to ever be worth it. The biggest issue with this system is that its’ entirely optional but it’s the only way to get passive skills.
Thankfully, I got through the entire game having only resolved one random NPCs issue because it just happened to be convenient. I nabbed a 10%+ experience boost passive which helped me with catching up lower leveled party members, but I found just doing one of these quests took enough time and effort to make me shy away from wanting to resolve them all. I imagine on higher difficulties, these passive skills would come in handy and I’m sure with a guide there’d be a way to beeline towards the crucial passives. I’ve also been informed that completing the Causality Link can lock you out of the True Ending due to an unpatched bug, but I feel like anyone crazy enough to do do all 500+ of these social links would have already seen that ending by this point.
Finally, level design is a bit bizarre in some cases. The game handwaves away the insane dungeon design by stating the virtual idols simply put together a mishmash or everyone’s memories in regards to floorplans, hence why there are doors to nowhere, massive gaps in floors, incredibly tight corridors, and mazes galore. With the addition of a dash feature and enemies having relatively small vision cones, skipping battles is quite easily with the exception of one temple that is incredibly claustrophobic. I’d say half the dungeon was spent in battle due to how many fights you have to do thanks to the tiny walkways and throngs of enemies littering the map.
Despite a few issues with animations, level design, and presentation, I felt the game handled its psychological and social commentary quite well. There are a few slip-ups that seem mostly attributed to ignorance than malice such as heterophobia vs androphobia and the localization of some societal issues and syndromes that simply do not exist in the US can lead to a bit of confusion. However, it’s a game with a message that needs to be heard in full, as taking a simple sentence or screenshot out of context could paint the games commentary in a negative light.
One such example could be a character who struggles with her weight in the real world due to her dysmophophobia. This causes her to be extremely critical and mean to overweight people as she lashes out against the fear of something she may become. What would seem to be a series of fat jokes and trashing on overweight people does eventually get resolved in a dearly apologetic and heartfelt way with a series of scenarios that tug at the heartstrings. It’s a reminder that context is key and that these characters are just humans who make mistakes. They can be mean, cruel, awful, and harsh while also being kind, loving, supportive, and gentle. No one is black and white. They’re a murky mixture of grey that is subject to emotions.
I think it’s worth looking at for anyone who liked the earlier Persona games as its written by Tadashi Satomi of Revelations: Persona, Persona 2: Innocent Sin and Persona 2: Eternal Punishment fame. By the end of the game, my playtime was around 35 hours though I’d say two hours of that was idle time due to chores and errands taking place between a few scenes or battles. I didn’t do any of the endgame optional superbosses nor did I dig too deep into the chaotic web of social links in the Causality Link.
To wrap it all up, I think The Caligula Effect: Overdose is a wonderful game that may not be for everyone. While the battle system and UI were overhauled completely, some may find issue with the way the game presents itself, the pacing, or just find themselves turned off by it being somewhat like a Persona game. I had a lot of fun playing it and I enjoyed my time in the world. I really loved the characters, enjoyed the sadistic dungeons, bounced my head to nearly every song, spent hours setting up the perfect chains in battle, and found my eyes watering up as someone shared a bit more of their hurtful past. Despite a few notable flaws that don’t detract too heavily from the experience, it’s a wonderfully written game with characters I’m unlikely to forget for years to come.
