3.5/5 ★ – adelkander's review of The Caligula Effect: Overdose.

Quite an underrated gem of a jrpg that tackles a pretty uncommon theme in a game like this: "how a trauma defines a character and their overall personality", and this game really does a good job not only making the player curious and want to know more about a character but also allow them to make the player care and feel their struggle. In addition, the game has this "grey" mentality from the beginning, where while you're trying to go away from all this, many others don't and the game does a great job giving a perspective of both sides, thanks to the Ostinato Route. With the Ostinato Route, you can get a glimpse of the other side and see why they're fighting and what they're fighting for, letting the player get a grip of the whole situation with a new look. And lastly, the music is probably one of the best and most well done in a while and you'll most likely enjoy some of it or all of it! Sadly the game's biggest issue is...well, everything else: the gameplay is tactical turn-based but tends to become repetitive really quick and it's not very uncommon to just want to skip battles. The graphics are really bad and blurry, which would make sense since it was a Vita game remade for a new system but maybe some more effort would've been better. The dungeons are very maze-like and kind of boring to look at, and the enemies...well pretty much anything is recycled: the enemies, the students, even the bosses have recycled animations from someone. More variety would've really helped! Overall, the game is okay but really feels unpolished, and despite its interesting plot and characters, it's really hard to ignore the flaws. Recommended if you can look over the faulty technical and gameplay problems, or else maybe skip it.