X: The Caligula Effect 2

Recommended by: my metamour Val

I knew two things about The Caligula Effect 2 before booting it a month or so ago (it was saved for the slot of "the last non-VR game on the list" because it's also the longest game on this by a decent margin): first, that it is not "The Caligula 2 Effect" despite my brain's insistance that the logo should be read that way, and 2, that it's a game that Val describes as one of the biggest turnarounds that she's ever seen, because she absolutely hated the version of the first game that she played. I went in genuinely curious as to how that could work, because she had kinda only described it as "they fired the guy who wrote for Persona and the writing stopped being awful" (this is only barely a paraphrase).

Caligula 2 opens with the moral equivalent of someone hitting "select all" on a website full of nouns and shipping that: within a couple of scenes, the silent protagonist's day at school is interrupted by a monster attack, from which you're rescued by a "Virtuadoll" (a vocaloid by any other name) named χ, whose vocaloid-mom was named μ; μ created a virtual reality program called Mobius (the setting of the first game), but you're trapped in Redo, a virtual world created by a different Virtuadoll named Regret, who leads The Musicians, who use the power of vocaloid music to turn the inhabitants of Redo into the monsters attacking the school, which are either called Digiheads or Puppetheads depending on how and why they transform, and that χ has the power to awaken The Catharsis Effect in people who have dreams, because no one in Redo dreams unless they've become aware that they're living in not-the-Matrix, and that you should find the other people at your school who can have their Catharsis Effect awakened so you can start working on a way to find the Musicians, discover a way to defeat Regret, and collapse Redo to allow everyone to return to the real world.

The 203-word sentence that is the entirety of the previous paragraph is written the way that it is in a nod to the fact that all of this exposition takes...fifteen minutes? Maybe twenty? Persona 4 this is not; Caligula 2 is much more interested in blasting the worldbuilding out of a cannon directly at the player and then filling in all of the details and character building and subtleties later. You're handed the names and general vibes of every Musician immediately, and in some cases this is thirty hours before the protagonist's crew will ever interact with them, but it's important for the game to just full send everything immediately so the implications can sink in. If this is a virtual world inside our real world, how do people end up here? Who puts them there? Who are all of "the good guys" and "the bad guys" IRL? What of what you know do you actually know? We've handed you 98% of the text immediately such that all that remains is subtext and foreshadowing. Will we fill it in at some point? Maybe. Keep playing to find out~

(As a brief digression: despite the early shotgunning of Nouns? They never stop. Sidequests are done through the Causality Link, which is split into Group Quests and Solo Quests, and you don't have equipment but rather Stigmata, which are split into Attack Impulses, Defense Instincts, and Amplifications. You can give χ 6500 yen for the Anamorphosis Stigma, which teaches you Savant's Illusionism, which enhances Trompe L'Oeil I so that it triggers God Does Not Play Dice if you evade an attack while it's active. The attacks called Eat Shit! and Mega Yeet! can be upgraded to Eat Shit!+ and Mega Yeet!+ with the right Attack Impulses, of course. One could easily believe that I made up any or all of the things in the previous sentences. I did not.)

The blessing and the curse of text-cannoning is that the reveal of the remaining bits of text, when/if it comes, there's a lot of room to whiff the reveals that come at the end of stewing in subtext. Fortunately, Caligula 2 mostly really "works" here? You spend much of the game just making guesses from subtext: the party's tank uses technology like a boomer, and talks a lot about how she'd be completely unafraid to die if it saved someone else; this guy over here is the head of the school disciplinary committee and is utterly inflexible about any rules at all because it's better to be rigid than to invite ambiguity, the team's archer has...a Catharsis Effect that gives him high heels...and a bow named Dysphoria...eh I'm sure it's nothing. The drip feed of "the truth" largely pays off with solid-to-excellent writing: at best, you're getting a AA game from a country not exactly known for progressive gender politics with a more nuanced trans character than I possibly could have imagined going in (I spent much of my playtime being like, yeah, they're trans, when is this going to get gross despite also knowing that Val, a trans woman, wouldn't have recommended my a transphobic RPG :p), and at worst, other than a couple of last-minute ass-pulls from The Musicians that don't really make much sense, you're getting "the foreshadowing resolved the way I thought it would". Yes, the character you think is a boomer IRL is a million years old and that's why she's willing to throw her life away to save someone much younger. Yes, the guy who acts like a cop is a cop IRL.

(The "child prodigy" character, Ryuto, though? Fuck Ryuto lmao. Nothing about the way he's written makes me anything other than grumbly, and even the places where the game tries use him as a mouthpiece for politics or opinions that I agree with, he's so absolutely insufferable that I found myself rolling my eyes at most scenes that he was involved in. For a game with party members who are "a literal cop" and "my entire personality for half of the game is that I hit on anything with a pulse", the fact that "woke child prodigy" is the one that makes me dislike them as much as I do should tell you something about how much I dislike Ryuto specifically.)

I've spent most of this talking about the writing, because like...it's a JRPG, I wouldn't be investing 40 hours if the writing couldn't keep me interested, but the game is legitimately also quite fun, if obviously middle-budget in places. The battle system is fairly typically cooldown-driven turn based stuff, but you can look up to fifteen seconds into the future whenever it's your turn, and then line up where your actions actually happen as long as it's within that fifteen seconds. Want everyone to line up their attacks at the same time to completely delete an enemy? Need to see if that status effect is going to come out in time to stop whatever bad thing is about to happen? Need to know if you have time to scoot out of the way of a big AOE? Want to move someone being targeted by something out of the way of everyone else so only they get blown up? You can just...check if it's going to work, and then commit to your strategy one turn at a time, after which there are no takebacks. (This is, somewhat amusingly, not dissimilar to how I would describe Tactical Breach Wizards :p) Of course, the endgame of having this much flexibility is that you can absolutely delete things if you use every tool in your toolkit; the bosses of chapters 4-7 did not take a single turn, and one of the bosses of the final chapter took one, which it used to do an attack that I countered before it went off. I was on the hardest difficulty, so I think the game is just kinda imbalanced in this way, but also, I really like when RPGs reward me for mastering a ton of fiddly intersecting systems.

As a game about an evil gang of vocaloid producers trapping humanity in cyberspace, it probably goes without saying that the music in CE2 absolutely slaps, though it does suffer from being very limited in a lot of places. In a logical extension of the game's tendency to full-send everything, every area has diagetic music from the in-universe Musician controlling that area; this serves as the framing device for "why is everyone turning into monsters" (because they can hear The Song That Turns People Into Monsters Because They Get Too Hype playing), but also means that every single area has one song that you'll hear for the multiple hours you're there, and then a remix of the same song for the actual boss fight. Fortunately, knowing this, the composers (each area's song is from a different real-world vocaloid producer, which is honestly a really cool touch) generally just went excessively hard without regard for tonal consistency. In the game's own form of "Tim, it was just Pictionary", I have no idea what you think "tutorial dungeon set in a subway" should sound like, but it almost certainly isn't this Chunithm-ass absolute scorcher. This reaches its peak, imo, for the dungeon that is just a shopping center, but every single song on this soundtrack goes excessively hard for no other reason than "it's a game about Not Vocaloids so what else were we going to do?". The care here extends to track transitions: vocals during fights, instrumentals when just walking around, entering a fight is a clean loading-screen-less transition into the vocal version at exactly wherever you were in the track, clean transition back to the instrumental when you win. They cared about the music here a lot, and it really shows.

So, yeah. Great game. I really enjoyed my time with it despite the plot getting really out of control in the final chapter. I'll probably even go do a quick run of the postgame boss refights tomorrow, since that's what unlocks the last bits of their real-world backstory. And then, I will move on from 12-in-12 until I get a computer that can actually run those two VR games, which should happen soon. It's been real~