we're going to be talking about this game on the podcast I do (live genre chronicles woooo) but I feel like I need to talk about this before we get to that on sunday.
it's, frankly, fucking miraculous that this game is as good, as considered, as deliberate as it feels. where the first game was callous and flippant, trudging along with awful people in a battle system that amounted to just about nothing, the sequel has managed to make me cry multiple times, to build a set of challenges I felt satisfaction in overcoming, and to fill a world with NPCs with coherent, if ridiculous, motivations. the sidequests in this game, even at their worst, have more character to them than the entire party from the original caligula effect, which I've already written about.
the writing, I can explain easily. tadashi satomi was the scenario writer on the original game, but couldn't return for the sequel due to scheduling conflicts. good riddance, then. while we did play megami ibunroku persona/revelations: persona via its PSP remake, most of the apologists for satomi's writing, in my experience, would have been coming from his work on persona 2.
I don't know if the seventeen year gap between persona 2 and caligula effect made him a shittier person. I don't have experience with persona 2, so I can't even say that his work there was stellar, or worth defending. however, the difference in tone between overdose and 2 is so unbelievably stark that I find it hard to believe his absence was not part of the equation.
the fact that the rest of the game, mechanically, works so much better, as well, is equally astounding. there's a sense of craft to the characters' toolkits, and the party decisions you can make, and the choice of locales for dungeons. there's so much skill here that was just completely absent from the first one. while I would love to dismiss it outright as casting off the limitations of the original's home platform of the vita, there is some je ne sais quoi, truly, that is present here. I want to shake the hands of whoever worked on making this game work. and then shake the producer for giving me whiplash after how badly the first game handled everything. it's going to take all year to process how much of a turnaround this was.
they really did need a Redo.