RPG Talk: The Caligula Effect: Overdose

In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: PS4 (also on Switch and Windows)
Release: 2019

I was interested in the original The Caligula Effect from the day I first heard about it, when it was still a Japan-only title that might never be localized. I liked the idea of characters trying to escape a virtual world that they originally arrived at in order to avoid the pain and trauma in their real lives. And the game had a pedigree, having been written by one of the original Persona writers, from before Persona 3.

However, Caligula Effect was plagued with gameplay and loading issues so I ultimately decided to pass on it.

Then The Caligula Effect: Overdose was announced with additional content, a new game engine to go with the new consoles it would be releasing on, and perhaps the best form of advertising; an anime series. I ended up reviewing the anime at Diabolical Plots and while it was flawed, I really liked the core of it. So when Overdose released, I bought it.

Though the loading issues are gone, The Caligula Effect: Overdose is still a flawed game with a flawed story that I think otherwise had so much potential.

What I liked about the game is that it pulls from a wide range of reasons that a person in pain might withdraw from the world. Every playable character suffers from a personal trauma. Some of the traumas are definitely in the vein of "Yes, that's a problem!" and it's easy to see why someone suffering from bereavement or body dysmorphia could find solace in another reality. But even the more "mundane" issues can still mean a lot to the right person, and I'll get to specifics after I lay out how the story is arranged.

Much like the Persona series, Caligula has your band of high schoolers with issues who come together for a purpose. Only they're not actually high schoolers. The only people in the virtual world of Mobius who are "real" appear as high school kids, but could be any range of ages in the real world.

All of them have realized that Mobius is fake and decided that they want to go back to reality. As with Persona 4 and on, the cast delves into one dungeon after another that focuses on individual characters and gradually more people join the party as we run into more dungeons.

The problem with Caligula Effect and particularly with Overdose is that there are too many damn characters! Our heroes are part of the Go-Home Club, and for every one of them, there is a Musician on the antagonist side, who is fighting to preserve Mobius. Each dungeon beyond the first focuses on a duo, one member of the Go-Home Club and one Musician, who are thematically linked in some fashion. For instance, Mifue has body dysmorphia that makes her starve herself, and she shares a focus dungeon with Sweet-P, who likes to eat but hates being fat.

This gives us a cast of twenty humans plus two virtual idols, μ and Aria, who are the ones responsible for creating Mobius in the first place. With few exceptions, when the plot demands it, there is no time in the main game to do more than touch on the problems these characters are facing, leaving their personal stories for the optional Character Scenarios.

Persona does this as well, but it's much better integrated because Caligula does not have an in-game calendar. Instead, new scenarios are unlocked by dungeon progression, and because there are only so many dungeons in the game (even with the four new characters original to Overdose) this usually means you'll end up doing scenarios back to back.

You also can only do scenarios after having done their dungeon (with the exception of Shogo and Thorn, being the final duo), so with late game characters, this creates an unfortunate logjam where you'll end up doing six or more scenarios in a row because the game is ending and you literally could not start sooner, but the scenarios themselves treat the story as happening over several days, which is frankly baffling.

And this is too bad, because with room to breathe, these characters really could have been something. This cast is broken and it is absolutely no surprise when their secrets come out why they could have been seduced into leading a virtual life where they don't have the problems they have in the real one; whether it is a lack of self worth, grief, or fear. No problem, whether society would consider it big or small, is beneath μ's desire to help.

Suzuna's trauma is referred to as "lunchmate syndrome" where she ate lunch by herself in the bathroom because she didn't want to be seen as having no friends to eat with. It sounds like a nothing problem, high school angst that she'll eventually get over. But it was traumatic for her and that's enough reason for μ to want to give her a better life in Mobius.

And Sweet-P's trauma, if handled with more time and sensitivity could have been amazing (cw: transphobia).

Unsurprisingly, Sweet-P would like a world where she looks like her ideal self, which is physically a far cry from her real world body (not just in terms of gender), and because of that she's one of the Musicians, the game's antagonists. Her character scenarios focus on her dissatisfaction with her real world life, being in middle age and considering gender reassignment surgery, and what it's like being assigned male but liking stereotypically feminine things (especially as an older person with a masculine appearance). In more capable hands her story really could have been good!

So it's terrible that the Go-Home Club, despite being the heroes, frequently says things like "she's actually a man" and outs her status to other characters who otherwise wouldn't know. Worse, the game pulls stupid crap like having everyone pause before the gendered doors in the sauna dungeon so one of the characters can wonder which door she used. Though only the group's meathead thinks Sweet-P would have gone into the men's sauna, showing that most of the characters are aware she thinks of herself as female, they clearly don't agree with her assessment of herself from their behavior elsewhere.

And then the game does things like walk back whether Sweet-P is actually transgender and maybe she's really just a middle-aged man who likes cute things, which could be fine if not for the fact it feels more like the writer got cold feet. I mean, that earlier scene in the sauna where Sweet-P is approached by Ayana felt like serious transgender fear of being attacked for not having the right body type and not the fear of a man being caught in the wrong bath.

My one consolation is that if the player wants to do her character scenarios, they have to be supportive, as expressing disgust or hate towards her gender results in the player being locked out of her stories. So even if the rest of the party behaves poorly, the player is encouraged not to.

Characters aside, Caligula suffers a lot from the same new enemy, new dungeon scenario that Persona 5 does. The Go-Home Club needs to get to μ to force her to let them go home, and μ is working with the Musicians to keep Mobius running, so each dungeon is basically "Hey, we're chasing down another Musician!" culminating in a fight with said Musician, and after a few dungeons the formula starts to get stale. That Overdose actually adds another two dungeons does not help.

What Overdose does add that kind of works is allowing the player to join the Musicians as a covert operative, unlocking the Musician character scenarios, so the characters are not as flat as they were in the original game, and allowing the player character to unlock another ending.

This addition is not all that clean, and in fact results in even more dungeon running as you now revisit dungeons with Musician party members and fight the Go-Home Club, but if you're going to play anyway, it's worth it for the character scenarios. It's not for the added plot.

Ostensibly Thorn is trying to convince the player as the Go-Home Club president to side with the Musicians by seeing the story from their side, but ultimately she ends up brainwashing most of the Musicians to force them to continue fighting for Mobius, and she doesn't do this with the player protagonist. Obviously this is because removing player control would be bad, but this could have been handled with an ultimatum where the player stays or leaves when faced with the brainwashing, so at least Thorn would know that an unbrainwashed player agreed with her. It doesn't seem right that she would have let the player do as they please as a loose cannon.

Thorn as the lead villain is all right. Her ultimate goal is completely insane, destroying the world because her deceased friend no longer exists in it, but that's fine given that this is the game for characters with issues. What I disliked about her was actually added in the Overdose route.

The whole reason the Musicians are fighting the Go-Home club instead of kicking out the people who want to go home anyway, is that denying Mobius's reality as authentic actually causes Mobius to become unstable. The Musicians are trying to preserve the status quo, and for many of them, going back to the real world would be unbearable. Even for someone as unpleasant as Mirei, staying in Mobius means spending time with a loved one who is dying and otherwise confined to a bed. For Kuchinashi, it means living with the family she lost to an arson fire.

But in the Musician route, Thorn oddly threatens the Musicians with sending them back home to keep them in line, which completely contradicts why the Go-Home Club is a problem to begin with. There's no reason to keep this a secret as sending them home would solve everyone's problems and be a win-win for all around. Even if Thorn was keeping this secret on purpose to keep Shogo around for torment, the other Musicians should have said something.

Sadly, this feels par for the course for this game. It's got a lot of interesting ideas, fits and starts of something cool, but it just can't pull it together into the exceptional experience it could have been. I liked the bits I found, and seriously, if the character traumas had been given the proper room to breathe this could have been a highly memorable cast, but this is a case of where the parts are better than the whole.