Thanks to NIS America for the review code
Title: The Caligula Effect: OVERDOSE
System: Nintendo Switch
Price: $49.99
Release Date: 03/12/2019
Story
In this RPG adventure, you take control of someone who found themselves in a strange world known as Mobius, made to try and keep people away from reality by providing them a seemingly perfect world, but when the determination to go home and escape this strange dimension rises, a “Go-Home Club” is established to take out Mu, the guardian controlling this world!
Written by people involved in earlier Persona games, Caligula really tries to focus on tougher subjects, along with having multiple endings ala earlier SMT titles, but almost every attempt for the game’s plot to hook into me bounced off with nothing sticking. Some conversations started out thought provoking, only for them to drive back into the boring generic goal of “escape the world” without much of a hook to get you invested in that aspect. You just know this world is bad, and your team wants out. Of course, as part of the alternate paths, you can work against that goal if you so choose, but that doesn’t really help with the game’s other problems that keep Caligula from being engaging…
Presentation
My first impressions back in 2019 was dear lord, this game is bathed in vaseline. How unusual. My first impressions pulling this game out for the queue was dear lord, this game is a typical Switch port before those started becoming more common around late 2019/2020. You know the typical drills with these rougher ports; vaseline/low quality visuals, still accompanied by low framerate dips and a generally unpleasing to look at experience. The text was readable on my Switch Lite despite the blur, but I didn’t have fun looking at anything here.
Still, you’ll immediately notice just how samey everything in this darn game looks. A lot of enemies are generic people with weird stuff coming out of them, and that just keeps being the case for the hours I played, even as you go to newer areas and fight new types of enemies with different strange things on them, they’re all mostly just guys that look the same.The game seamlessly transitions into battles, which I guess is a neat touch, but the framerate likes to dip during these segments, though not enough to bug me considering how this is ultimately a turn based game at the end of the day, and the low framerate doesn’t make me screw up the fights or anything.
The framerate also dips especially hard in outdoor areas or more complex dungeons. Turn a corner a certain way, pan the camera to a bunch of buildings, and it tanks hard. This, combined with the insanely blurry visuals of this Switch port, really lead to an unpleasant playing experience. It also doesn’t help that the music, while trying to fit the musical theme of the game’s plot and how you’re taking on a group of musicians, is incredibly repetitive and obnoxious. Each area has a theme that transitions into a vocal version during battles, but none of them I found particularly good, nor did I find any of the BGM during story scenes all that remarkable.
Gameplay
In Caligula Effect, you go out, find your next objective and follow it on a handy minimap, and rinse and repeat, seeing the story unfold, unlocking new mechanics and characters, and also being able to delve into some optional exploration, item hunting and NPC bonding while you’re at it. It really strips the basics of a modern RPG down to the most cookie cuter outline imaginable, and while it clearly tries to ape titles like Persona in particular, I couldn’t help but get vibes of the Cold Steel games here as well, although Caligula does everything much, much worse than either of those RPG greats.
The big positive here comes from the game’s battle system. While it does use a timeline structure akin to a lot of other RPGs, I really liked being able to manipulate the timing of my moves and chain them with my other party members. This offers a refreshing amount of strategy and allows you to do fun things such as kick them in the air, do an aerial attack, and then finish them off with a move once the enemy lands on the ground again, and it helps makes the tougher fights and bosses a lot more fun. It still feels rather generic outside of that however, but luckily the auto battle mechanic helps for wiping up weaker enemies and grunts, and I didn’t find the battles to take that particularly long, at least to the point it ever annoyed me.
Sadly, once you get out of the fun battle system, you’ll quickly realize the fatal flaw of Caligula Effect; everything is so repetitive. Seriously, you think once you cleared the first dungeon after a bunch of point A to point B without much happening, that you’ll be treated to some new variety and differing objectives in the next areas, but you won’t. Every god darn dungeon I came across had the ultimate goal being to reach the big bad at the end of the dungeon, but oops, their path is blocked, so you have to do a run around, usually with silly mandatory fetch quests, and then have a path to them open so you can take care of them properly. Rinse and repeat until you’re bored, and for me that was midway through the second dungeon after around 2 hours of play.
There just isn’t much else to these dungeons to make them interesting, and when a bunch of the generic enemies look the same, I really didn’t have much interest and I honestly began to feel that even some of the generic EXE-Create RPGs I covered for SFG had more memorable aspects to them. On the plus side, you can increase your affinity with other characters, including a variety of NPCs you encounter in the dungeons, but any sort of battle bonuses that stuff could have built up, I barely stuck around for because the main game is just that dull and boring. Even cranking up the difficulty, while making the battles more exciting, still won’t fix the dullness of the dungeons or the game structure.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, you have a very generic, very boring RPG ported in such a way that while it runs semi-stable on Switch, it looks like a vaseline smeared mess. Not that I cared much, as so much in this darn game looked the same and had repetitiveness kick in really quickly. I could quickly see why I dropped it during the first hour back when I first played it before the whole queue situation got outta hand, but even when spending a few more with the game proper now, I found it to be a boring set of point A to point B with too many fetch quests.
Yes, the story in Caligula can have some mildly interesting aspects. Yes, there are characters, and they exist, and I couldn’t care much about them. Yes, the battle system has a weird timeline combo mechanic I got the hang of quickly, but then quickly shifted down to the easiest setting since the hardest one just made a tedious game even more tedious after battling the same looking grunts over and over, and I wanted to be done with this and see if any more variety would change. No, no it didn’t.
Would I have liked Caligula more if it ran and looked way better, and didn’t just have the typical Switch Port quirks? No, not really. The music is annoying, the gameplay is generic, and even after making a good bit of progress, I barely felt like anything changed; sure enough, this is one game where the FuRyu curse struck and it struck hard. Definitely avoid this one, and if you must somehow play it, get it on any other system so higher framerates will make it end quicker, so the genericness can finally stop. Was this game the reality all along?
I give The Caligula Effect: OVERDOSE a 4 out of 10.