The Caligula Effect: Overdose Review (Burrynter)
While this is a recommendation, it's a rather careful one.
Admittedly, the game is not that good. The low(er) budget is painfully obvious, the dungeons consist of rather bland corridors, basically no characters outside of the main two groups exist, the Causality Link quest system is a nice idea implemented poorly, the equipment system makes no sense and feels almost pointless, there is almost no meaningful mechanical progression outside from a handful of unlockable skills, and the combat eventually starts getting frustratingly repetitive.
Why is this a recommendation then? Predominantly for the story. Sure, the setting and premise are rather generic, but it really lets its characters shine. Most of them, while undeniably tropey, are written very well and have some really satisfying development both in the main story and in the optional character events. This goes both for the heroes of the story and the antagonists. And it's elevated greatly by the very emotional, sometimes even raw-feeling, voice acting. In part this has to do with the voice direction being strong too, I'd say.
While the combat does get repetitive in frequent encounters, when it works it works very well. The unusual battle system was part of the reason I checked the game out in the first place and ultimately it did not disappoint. The main mechanic is a "prediction" system that allows you to see what the enemies intend to do in the near future and the effects any attacks would have, and plan ahead up to 3 actions per character. It suits boss fights and scripted encounters well, but the battle system being more involved means that the chaff encounters get rather annoying. You can skip most regular enemies given that they will only "notice" you and initiate the fight if they're at your level or higher (and even then you can dodge most of them or run from battle), but you really don't want to fall behind on XP since being underleveled incurs rather big accuracy penalties.
The music certainly deserves a mention as well, every dungeon has a unique theme seamlessly switching between the vocal and instrumental versions when going in and out of combat, capping off with a remix of it during the boss fight, and pretty much all of the tracks are quite good.
Ultimately, if you can handle some jank and slogginess (honestly I wouldn't mind the game being 10-20 hours shorter, though the long playtime is mostly on me here), it's a unique and somewhat fresh-feeling JRPG that's worth checking out on sale.