The Caligula Effect: Overdose Review (Yero)
I kinda got what I was expecting when I first started this game.
Upon launch you immediately notice this isn't a very high budget production, so it's definitely something to keep in mind during the game. However, a lot of the issues this game has have little to do with budget.
The story goes literally nowhere for 90% of the game. It's just: Complete a dungeon -> Get a new teammate -> The person we were searching for isn't here -> Repeat.
They dive a little bit into each teammate with the dungeons but it's very vague and not worth hours of grinding, which gets me to my next point.
I can't stress enough how slow and grindy the gameplay and exploration are, it gets tiring after the first or second dungeon, and there are 10 of them! This paired with the uninteresting story should already be a deal breaker for most people. You also need to backtrack A LOT, but this doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable at times, the battle system they proposed is very interesting although it feels somewhat incomplete. The boss battles at max difficulty are very fun and require a lot of strategy to complete, but if you maintain the difficulty for every normal battle you'll end up needing 100 hours to complete the game, so I played switching between easy for dungeons and Extreme for bosses, but even then, it was a slog to get through a whole dungeon.
The sidequest system is very disorganized and feels like it was made half-assedly.
You talk to one of the 500+ NPCs 3 times skipping all the flavor text (there was literally no reason to make so many sidequests when they're so meaningless), you receive a sidequest (which range from equipping an item, to talking to another NPC which could very well be in the middle of a dungeon, and they're not marked in any way so you just have to remember), and then you receive a worthless reward like boosting a stat +1 when your stats are in the thousands for starters.
Not to mention you can only accept 1 side quest at a time and there are NPCs which you can't talk to until you become friends with another NPC, which could also be anywhere in the map without any way to locate them.
On the positive side, the character design (for the villains), the voice acting and the music are godly, they carry hard the tedious experience.
The main characters' side scenarios, although just a few minutes long, are pretty engaging for the most part and it's pretty cool to see how their stories are linked, also to see they're not cardboard cutouts with a default anime personality like they're presented in the main story.
The best part of the game is definitely joining the bad guys and the evil ending, (Although this also means you have to run through the same dungeons you did in the main story for a second time) it genuinely made me feel like a piece of trash and I think the villains are the better written characters.
In conclusion, I'd have considered recommending this game if it wasn't for its price. After the regional price change it's close to 35 USD in my country (even more expensive than the 2nd game which is infinitely better for what I've been told), and I don't consider it's worth that much for the clear major flaws it has.