The Caligula Effect: Overdose Review (iriyap)
This game is hard to recommend. It's just so low budget, and worse yet, very padded with dungeons going on forever and the combat system, while being a fun idea in concept, boiling down to mindless skill spam. I'd honestly recommend playing the sequel first as it does virtually everything much better, and then coming back to Overdose, if you still want more. Strangely enough, Overdose spoils a major plot twist of the sequel (Marie), while the sequel doesn't spoil any parts of Overdose's story, so that's another reason to start with the sequel.
With that disclaimer out of the way, Caligula Effect: Overdose is a niche JRPG made by some of the Persona 2 staff (such as Tadashi Satomi). The premise is very similar to the Matrix movie. People are abducted into a virtual world without realizing it, someone redpills you, and now your job is to assemble a group of like minded individuals and find a way back to the real world. The setting is themed around music and songs, and the antagonists are musicians. The game has an excellent soundtrack, with each dungeon theme having both instrumental and vocal tracks, which the game seamlessly transitions between when battling enemies. Seriously, it can't be understated how good the soundtrack is, just give it a listen: Distorted†Happiness, Onboro, Peter Pan Syndrome.
Apart from music, the other thing the game does very well is the characters. The gimmick here is that everyone's virtual avatars are idealized versions of themselves and can differ greatly from their real life selves. Some of the characters are fat or anorexic in real life, some are short or ugly people, some are much older than they pretend to be, yet others can even be the opposite sex. And many of them are mentally unwell individuals with issues ranging from self-harm and suicidal thoughts to sexual deviance and sociopathy. Exploring each character's backstory, while entirely optional, is a major part of the experience, and these character episodes are all very engaging. And unlike the sequel, you can also befriend the bad guys (the musicians), for a total of 19 (!) party members, each of them with 9 fully voiced episodes, for a total of 19 x 9 = 171 character episodes.
The main story is nothing special (yes, you go back home when you beat all musicians, no major twists here), but the characters really carry the game. It's a bit like Danganronpa, you get a large and colorful cast of unhinged and sometimes edgy characters, and that's what you're really here for, the story is just an excuse to get them all together.
This game could've been an easy recommendation, but make no mistake, the dungeons are absolutely awful, each of them has half a dozen huge labyrinthine floors consisting of nothing but hallways and square rooms, filled to the brim with essentially just one enemy type. The combat system is very flawed with accuracy being tied to level difference. Attempting to take on enemies above your level will make you miss most of your attacks. But fighting lower level enemies is a snoozefest as they can't fight back. Every difficulty setting up to Hard is mindless, while Extreme is just tedious as your accuracy is nerfed even more. There's so much garbage loot you'll completely stop looking at your inventory half way through. And the most baffling part is 500 (!) copypasted sidequests, although these are thankfully entirely optional, even if you're an achievement hunter you need to complete "only" 100.
Are the colorful characters and the banging soundtrack worth the slog? A playthrough with all character episodes will take around 40 hours. If you're not sure, just play the sequel first, it's a much smoother experience, and if it gets you hooked on the series, you can always come back to Overdose.