Early on into my playthrough of The Caligula Effect: Overdose?the new PS4 remake of the Atlus published Vita game released in 2017? I approached a character to strike up a conversation. The character yelled at me, informing me that he hated being accosted. A tooltip popped up, telling me that certain characters would only warm up to me after I had ingratiated myself with a close friend of theirs. There was even a map in the menu where I could see how these relationships linked up.
Cool enough idea, I thought, but the map was incomprehensible; a seemingly endless web of character relationships, stretching out to display a staggering number of NPCs. I closed it almost instantly, hoping that as I got to know the characters that populated Overdose?s world, this constellation of friendships would begin to make sense. But, after talking to a half-dozen more characters, I quickly realized that the game had roughly three or four lines of dialogue that it had recycled endlessly, giving them new homes in the mouths of thousands of NPCs. There was no reason to study the map; these weren?t characters at all. Despite the aesthetic trappings designed to make them look like students in a Japanese high school, I quickly realized that these people were nothing more than cells in a near-endless spreadsheet.
And almost everything in this FuRyu-developed JRPG functions in basically the same way. The Caligula Effect: Overdose has many, many ideas and they?re almost universally as half-baked a...