[archived from a cohost post, originally made on november 9, 2023]
usually there's some redeeming feature or point in a game I play, even the ones I hate. something, ostensibly, to glean some value from the time I've spent on it.
with this one, I have struggled for upwards of 14 hours (at time of writing) to process any component of this game that is worth even a dull compliment. ...the best I can really come up with is that the protagonist's villain form is a really good design.
the caligula effect is, ostensibly, the name given by (apparently exclusively japanese) psychologists to the phenomenon where someone's desire to do something increases when they're prohibited from doing it. one must imagine the desire to make a truly dogshit persona game grew immensely in the heart of tadashi satomi after handling persona 1 and persona 2 and then not being involved in further persona games
the short premise for the caligula effect and overdose, its... "improved" remake, is this: protagonist realizes miku
NOT MIKU and a bunch of vocaloid producers / "Ostinato Musicians" are
running the escapist matrix and makes it their mission to escape to
reality
the longer premise is:
the protagonist, a high schooler, realizes that people they recognize as
having graduated are coming in as new students, and in doing so, sees
the cracks in reality around them. they realize they're currently in a
digital simulation of the world, overseen by μ (aka "mu", I'm not
copy-pasting that symbol every time), a not-vocaloid virtual idol who
aspires to make everyone happy by brainwashing them (with music) into
forgetting the real world and its troubles. working for her are several
producers, under the Ostinato Musicians label; these Musicians use their
power to keep the populace complacent and turning them into Digiheads,
which rampage with the power of their stress and emotions running wild.
on the flipside, the go-home club, the protagonist's new group of
friends who have woken up to the (un)reality of the situation, are
assisted by another not-vocaloid, Aria, who wants to get through to Mu,
make her realize she's doing more harm than good, and get everyone back
to reality.
all of the party members have Musician counterparts, and while I'd usually be on board with this kind of mirrored theming where each villain of the week type chapter highlighted a party member's internal struggle, but... all of the party members are awful? precisely none of them have shown a glimpse of anything worthwhile, and every time it's come to their chapter, they get worse. almost consistently, at this point.
the first dungeon is the protagonist vs kagi-p, and like.... starting out with the protagonist is a funny move, but nothing comes of it, because the protagonist is still a blank slate and you haven't had time to get attached to them or your party members like you would in something like persona where the protagonist-foil is a much later-game consideration. but also, you beat the guy up and he just joins your party! there's no real characterization of the main character, nor kensuke, the kid playing kagi-p.
the second dungeon is focused on sweet-p, and it's immediately much more vile than the bland first one because the fatphobia of the relevant party member, mifue, comes to the fore, and it brings transphobia with it! sweet-p surrounds herself with moderately sized anime girls instead of stick-thin ones and it just sets mifue the fuck off. it turns out sweet-p, outside of mobius, is an overweight closeted trans woman who has been terrified of the prospects of transitioning, and the game largely fucking hates her for it. every party member will ridicule every fat character they come across, and sweet-p is regularly misgendered by your party (the "good guys"), and her own allies, with the party even later using transphobia to force her out of her comfort zone when she's just trying to relax at a hot spring, while being ogled by the peeper villain who is the dungeon's leader!
the party members really only hit one note at a time so far:
- kotaro is an idiot
- shogo is trying to be the leader despite handing the role to you
- kensuke is a pervert (but a respectable one unlike the villain)
- izuru is a spoiled twink
- mifue is fatphobic
- kotono comes off as proper to start but has a cruel streak
- naruko is an otaku
- suzuna is a scaredy-cat
- eiji is violent but trying to keep a polite facade up
- ayana is androphobic to the point of yelling at all the boys for existing near her
in theory, you're supposed to see more of these characters as you progress both their character episodes (every character has a point where the game asks you, pointedly, if you would like to dive deeper into their heart, even asking "are you sure" when you do say yes) and their relevant chapters in the main story, but there's just. nothing compelling in either. and there's ten of them. two of which got added with overdose, and they're both only really interlinked with each other; ayana because she doesn't trust half the party due to her trauma, and eiji because he disagrees with the go-home club's plan of chasing after producers blindly and doesn't really bond with any of the other characters. their backstories are linked, though they haven't borne out so far as I've gotten
oh also overdose added the ability to side with the villains and actually get backstory on why they're all the way they are. because they couldn't be bothered to do anything but degrade them in the base game for their own traumas, it seems
in the process of investigating the Musicians, the leader, Thorn, invites you to anonymously join, to see the other side of the story, and by doing so, you get to see much more sympathetic sides of... well, most of them, so far. the Musicians have had a lot of shit go wrong in their lives and Mu really did want them to find solace in escaping into mobius. a few are still awful (Stork, for one, is still a peeper with a fixation on women's bodies, and Mirei is a rancid bitch) but like. there is some effort here to characterize them.
you do, also, in fact, get to befriend sweet-p, and though most of the dialogue options available are fucking awful, you can make an effort to help her work through some of her stuff and aim toward losing weight and becoming more okay with herself once she leaves mobius, too. and like... that's a brief breath of fresh air from the rest of this mess. but it's a pitifully small amount of how she's treated.
so the characters are awful.
there's too many of them.
let's talk about the mechanics of the game, then. because those fucking suck ass, too. the dungeons are messes of bland corridors with, generally, the longest path being the correct one and all branches off it being for trash items, all backed by the dungeon boss' theme song which is like a thirty to forty second loop that restarts anew every time you leave battle or a cutscene.
combat is like they turned grandia into video editing. I don't know how else to describe it. you place your planned actions on the timeline, using the Imaginary Chain system, which simulates a projection of the enemy's future actions and lets you react to them with counters or various sorts or movement around the battlefield.
this would be a neat idea if you could handle more than one character at a time, or swap back and forth to coordinate attacks properly, but. you can't. of course you can't. it's each character's full turn (up to 3 actions) at once, in the order they come up. every time. it's infuriating, trying to deal with four characters and use this complex mess of systems when you can't even undo to a previous character's turn because, oh yes, your party members can get out of sync so of course you're not allowed to go back to the previous units. nor can you interrupt the timeline to make new plans for your character or anything. that'd be silly. and good. can't have that.
to draw this ramble to a close.... this game is making me regret coming back to it. it's making me regret giving it a chance in the first place, and regret that we're giving its sequel a chance, but mostly just... I regret that my stubbornness means I am going to clear this fucking game.
some deeply naive part of me that was hoping something positive would come before the end of the game might've been burning a hole in the bar that was holding up my expectations for the remaining 8 hours I spent playing the game. they collapsed along with my patience for the final dungeon, where the sympathetic villains are brainwashed into being boss fights locking doors in a mazelike gallery, and the unsympathetic villains are simply obstacles to knock down in the mad rush to escape the escapist nightmare of mobius
mifue, who was dealing with internalized fatphobia that she's at least partially overcome, makes up with sweet-p, who is set on accepting her lot in reality. the androphobe in your party still makes a snide remark about sweet-p's gender, albeit one that mifue rebuffs. the rest of the party makes no effort to apologize for their remarks.
at the final confrontation, you are able to, for no real reason, pivot on a dime and betray everyone. they come at you in waves, their anger and disbelief justified. who would do this they shout. please tell me you're lying, they plead. I loved you, they sob.
why is this even an option, I wondered. it's as devoid of meaning as anything else in this game, to a degree that borders on parody. shogo, the "if we didn't have the blank slate protagonist, he'd be the main character" character, goes "we're basically a bunch of clowns!" and. yeah. these characters, this swath of too many characters, are all essentially extras for this nonsensical ending where, after BOTH SIDES-ing me, Thorn, another "oh no it's a man pretending to be a woman" character who isn't actually trans this time, has just. convinced me it's better to destroy reality.
the ending where mu wakes up one day to realize that mobius is devoid of people,
except for me,
and turns to ask me
"why did you go, too?! didn't I make you happy!?"
and I fade to black before my answer can reach her
it made me laugh.
it definitely wasn't meant to.
but I don't know what emotions they hoped to inspire, because it's
empty. it's so empty. there's no weight to being able to simply pivot on
a dime and give up on reality. and no part of the musicians' side is
about them trying to convince you, it's just "look at all these
traumatized people!" round 2, because that's also the party's shtick,
but those are buried 7 of 9 social link episodes deep and they don't get
any time to explain or explore any of them in any meaningful way and
AUGH
this game is empty. there's nothing there. waste of my money, waste of my time, waste of development, barely manages to have characters worth a second of my time at the end of a 21-hour experience. the "good end" fmv is too vague to be satisfactory, the "well, we improved as people, shame about the dead party member, also shame about the fucking psychopath we're letting out because the player failed to do social links properly" ending falls as flat as everything else.
for all the minuscule motes of sympathy for the trans character I was willing to offer similarly slight praise for, I have to deal with the fact that the peeper character and the androphobe who shouts I LOVED YOU at the female main character if you betray her still don't respect the trans woman. and they were added with the new version of the game that added the basic sympathy for sweet-p. get the fuck out. what is your fucking problem.