I don’t know why I bought this. I never played the first Caligula Effect, or the “Overdose” version which I hear is much better. What I did experience was a few episodes of the Caligula Effect anime, which is an adaptation of the first game’s story. I wasn’t sure, watching that kinda-meh anime, how that translated into a video game at all, it was lacking in segments that could have gameplay other than boss battles… and that’s basically because, obviously, they removed the dungeons from the anime. It wasn’t a very good anime.

So anyways I got this one, hearing that it’s basically self-contained so knowing the original game’s story isn’t very important… let’s see if this is good!

Developer: historia Inc
Publisher: NIS America
Release date: October 19th 2021
Platforms: Switch, PS4 (Switch version played)
Genre: Console-style RPG

So there’s the obvious issue here that I didn’t play the first game. Thankfully this game does seem pretty much completely self-contained. They do mention Mobius, a world created by a Virtuadoll called μ (mu) where people were trapped in, and said world was destroyed by the Go Home Club, a group of people in that world that realized the truth of the world and fought to return to reality, and basically 2-3 of the characters are somewhat related to it.

This game takes place some time after the Mobius incident. There’s a new similar world that popped up called Redo and seems to have been created by a new Virtuadoll called Regret. People are brought to Redo when they have a heavy regret in life or something, it’s a world that changes both you and your circumstances to address those regrets. So a person in Redo might be nothing like they are IRL. Maybe they’re ugly or a different age or a different sex or… whatever. They have no knowledge that the world isn’t real. You play as “Boring McNobody”, a protagonist so silent there’s no sign of a personality at all. Your character is the least-explained… thing… in this whole game. But I guess you realize the world is fake somehow, noticing a crack in the sky. The crack is cause by χ (ki), the “daughter” of μ from the previous game, so she’s also a Virtuadoll. Virtuadolls are, I guess, a mix between vtubers and vocaloids, combined with AI? And they have the power to create alternate electronic worlds and draw people into them I guess? It’s not… super explained. Maybe the first game would help. Anyways, χ “hires” you to destroy Redo and help people get back to reality, as the only person who realized Redo wasn’t real. You do find other people that actually have personalities to interact with and join you in the quest, each having different regrets, but also finding out in different ways that the world isn’t real.

There’s people called musicians, essentially they compose music for Regret to perform or something, and they can use that music to control people in Redo. So the goal quickly becomes to fight the musicians, as you learn about Redo, how it works, and how to possibly get out, while recruiting anyone that might be able to help. There are some optional things story-wise. Specifically there’s side-stories about some NPCs… they all kinda suck, not super important to even talk about. Your playable characters do have their own side-stories, mostly meant to learn about why they’re in Redo, such as real life trauma, what their regrets may be and so on. On a story level, this is absolutely optional, so that means character development, as a whole, is optional, except for… Kobato somehow. There’s 2 endings, one of them is a bit past halfway through the game (the bad ending) and is pretty obvious that it’s a branching point (they fool you later into thinking there’s another branching point, but there isn’t), so save before that and try it again if you want to see what the bad ending is. The true ending is a bit disappointing, for reasons I don’t want to spoil too much, but let’s just say there’s many characters who we don’t know what happened to them after everything. Yay! The story is find overall, but there’s a few things that are introduced that lead to nothing, optional character development is really weird, and the ending needs some help. A funny thing at the end is χ pretty much admitting that she doesn’t know shit about Boring McNobody. No one knows who you are.

So on a gameplay level… This is a pretty standard modern JRPG. There’s a few locations you can go to to… talk to boring NPCs that literally have nothing to say (I remember in the old days NPCs used to say things that would… be important… like hints for how to progress or where to find hidden shit). Some of them are side-quests, if they have a name it means they’ll probably give you a sidequest, or be part of a sidequest. Game progression is very very simple. You have these segments where you can do sidequests (and revisit old dungeons at the same time, for sidequests and to fight enemies if you want very minor EXP), then if you go back to the train base you can tell χ you want to go home, which will lead to cutscenes, eventually probably leading to the next dungeon. You do the dungeon, then get back to the in-between segment, and so on. Dungeons have enemies walking around for you to fight, which you can try to surprise by kicking in the head from behind (otherwise they’ll see you and initiate battle). If you kick them the enemies get 3 risk levels (more on that later). Then there’s chests lying around, and you gotta find the way to wherever you need to go… usually the game just tells you where the next exit you need to reach is so… follow that. The dungeon are PRETTY linear.

Combat is definitely the most interesting aspect of this game, as it has a system I had not seen before (though a quick glance at the first game shows that it used pretty much the same system). This game uses a semi-real-time system. When a character’s cooldown ends, you will get to choose their next move. But instead of just doing the action, you actually get to choose how long until the attack or skill will launch, in a timeline (showing startup time, actual action time with dots that show when actions occur and cooldown). The game also gives you the ability to see the future of your choice, so you can see if your attack will even hit, if you may get hit before the attack and other such things. You can even use this to time, say, the back-jump at the end of the attack to avoid enemy attacks and such. This becomes very helpful to hit airborne enemies and keeping them in the air. You don’t only have the ability to use attacks/skills, but you can also move (which takes almost no time and has no cooldown), set up an emergency barrier to fully block attacks, use items, or use Soul Surge to fully recover SP. So a big amount of strategy is not just based on what attacks to use when, but also avoiding attacks. As a quick note attacks labeled as “unavoidable” are absolutely avoidable, like if an enemy does a back jump at the end of an attack or something, a swing might actually miss… what “unavoidable” means is that they won’t have statistical chance to miss when the attack animation actually touches the enemy.

Enemies have circles that will show down under them when they’re about to launch an attack. Much like you, they have startup time, so you’ll see what the attack is ahead of time (and see if they’re melee or ranged skills, or neither). With the whole “seeing into the future thing”, you can also see what attacks enemies will be launching ahead of time of course. Specifically, characters may have attacks that counter Melee, Ranged or Guard Break. If you hit the enemy during either the startup or the “active time” of the attack with an attack that counters it (or while the shield is up for Guard Break attacks), the enemy will be launched in the air. An enemy launched in the air will be completely unable to do anything until they fall back to the ground, spend some time laying there, and then finally getting up. If you time other characters’ attacks well, you can hit an airborne enemy to make it gain more air, thus stay in the air longer, thus be incapacitated longer. If you’re really timing things well, you can keep an enemy in the air forever. This is a big aspect to not just fighting enemies, but fighting enemies that are stronger than you. This is something you’ll notice pretty early, with good timing you can defeat enemies over twice your level pretty easily. I fought a level 52 enemy for a sidequest when my party was around level 24. It was tough, but a good launch had me keeping it in the air for a few minutes, enough to take out about half his HP.

You can pretty much compose your party as you want and you probably will have something pretty balanced and usable, though you’ll likely end up having 4 characters you prefer. I was pretty set with Boring, Sasara, Gin and *insert whatever cute girl was available to use at the time in the story* for all the game and I never really needed to switch anyone out. The characters do have some different things gameplay-wise though. Some may deal more damage to airborne enemies, or deal risk damage (which fills up a meter, and a risk-broken enemy can be dealt extra damage), or deal more damage to enemies with a high risk meter, or be tanks that catch enemy focus (there’s a defense-based tank and a dodge-based one), or deal different kinds of status effects and such. Of course at first you have pretty limited counters so you’ll probably want one character with melee counter, one with guard break and one with ranged counter, but eventually they’ll all have at least one or two options like this.

And finally there’s Voltage. Basically you choose a song for χ to sing, and when the Voltage meter is full, she’ll sing it, giving you a buff based on the song, as well as other buffs based on if you powered her up. By the end of the game, Voltage is auto-win, even against the final boss, even if the final boss is 20 levels higher than you. Basically, I just used Voltage against bosses (or strong normal enemies, the ones protecting chests a lot of the time), so I’d have a full meter pretty much all the time. A powered up χ removes startup and cooldown for attacks, as well as a faster risk damage and a couple other things, so you just wreck the shit out of everything. Also every character has a super attack, they have a super meter (stress) that goes up as you fight shit, they’re basically small cutscene attacks, they’re very strong.

Leveling is fairly straightfoward. Get  EXP from battles, get enough to level up. Levels give you stat boosts and skills (new attacks and stuff). Another thing you get is points for passive skills. You have equipment, here called Stigma. Red Stigma are attack, green are defense and blue are… accessories I guess. Red and blue will generally have a passive skill. Equipping a Stigma equips the passive skill right away in a special equipment-only slot, but if you master the equipment with those points, you can equip that skill to one of your I think 6 skill slots that aren’t based on equipment. Those skills are basically all stat boosts, with a few that are special effects (like “gain Attack when you get hit”). You can’t stack, so if you have the Vitality skill equipped in your slot and have the equipment that gives it equipped, you only get the effect once. So it’s all about balance as you get toward the end, since a lot of the good skills are ones you’ll want for every character. χ can be powered up if you find specific currency (from sidequests and beating bosses), it’s pretty useful to make Voltage really really strong. There’s one more way to power up that I will explain later, but I do like the skill system.

This game is fillertown. There’s lots of filler. It’s also pretty much all optional, but you will want to do some of it. I talked about the optional plot stuff for your party characters. You don’t need to do all of them if you don’t want to, though the last story point one for each character unlocks their strongest attack. So for me, I just got 2 of them to the end, and ignored the rest entirely. Yay. The other optional stuff is sidequests, and this is important to do. Since your main character is the most versatile in battle, you do want to make her stronger. There’s 2 types of side quests, I think they’re called Group and Solo. They’re all important-ish. Most Solo quests require either talking to someone, or finding some amount of some items (gonna have to collect lots of tissue). Then you have to re-find the person that asked you to find it and you’ll get some reward. The group quests are all “go talk to this person”, which is easy enough… except you need to have a specific skill equipped for most of these, and that skill needs specifically to be equipped to Boring McNobody. So… I gotta admit, I stupided pretty hard with this one. I assumed you needed to have actually MASTER the skill and then equip it in one of your skill slots… but a skill is counted as equipped if you just have the piece of equipment that teaches it equipped. So… I wasted a lot of time waiting to master skills when I didn’t need to. Lol. ANYWAYS… so the reason these are important is pretty simple. One of the quest rewards for I think every quest is a power-up to one Boring McNobody’s attributes. Each other character has a set “stat” to their attributes, from E to A+, which determines their actual stat for that attribute (stuff like strength, agility, vitality and whatever the fuck else I’m forgetting about). Boring starts with E on everything, doing a bunch of sidequests will eventually increase that letter.. So if you want Boring to be strong, and you do, you gotta do sidequests. It’s filler, but it’s filler you have to do and waste a lot of time on. It’s REALLY FUCKING BORING, but you gotta do it.

Overall

This game is very okay.

On the story side I feel it needs closure on parts of the story that don’t get any (there’s some characters you just… don’t get any knowledge about after the ending), and there’s one or 2 parts that don’t lead to anything, and character development for most of the characters is hidden behind optional shit that… you might as well ignore for any character you don’t plan on using, just for the sake of saving time. Why’s Niko depressed? Who knows! I don’t! This could’ve been built in a way where you still get some of that stuff through the story, instead of making it optional and, thus, completely worth ignoring.

On the gameplay side, I do quite like the combat with the airtime thing where you can keep enemies in the air for combos and extra damage, how you can time your attacks, how you can defend yourself or move to dodge attacks, that’s all pretty cool. The basic leveling is pretty simple, the customization is interesting enough… As far as the RPG aspect, it’s fine. Where it’s less fine is the pretty heavy amount of really lame filler.

I’d put this as a pretty mild recommendation. Either this or the first are probably pretty equivalent, from the 2 minutes of gameplay I watched of the first one. Lots of other JRPGs this year you should check out long before you get to this one.