The Caligula Effect 2 Reviews

The walking and running animations made me blind in one eye. Highly recommend

Was looking for an RPG to play in VR and this is getting quite a lot of recommendations, both from JRPG fans and in terms of performance from the UEVR Discord. I'm a fan of Tadashi Satomi, who wrote the first three Persona games (which doesn't include P3, that's the fourth game in the series) and both of the Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner games. Satomi wrote the first Caligula game but people recommend skipping to the second game as it is a big improvement over the first one. I only found out around 40 hours into the game that Satomi did not return as a writer and only acted as a consultant for the setting. Now I want to play the first game as well, if only for the story. Regardless. the second game is really great (amazing even, if you consider the low budget Furyu published games are made on), the world, characters and gameplay really come together to draw you into a dense world, where the premise is that you know it is fake but populated by real people. Something I liked is, although you will spend most of the time fighting (it's a JRPG after all), that battles are not the center of gameplay. They're quite relaxed, you can mostly ignore the nuances the systems offers except for bosses and some more challenging (optional) opponents. Although if you're doing sidequests (which are the real core of the game I feel) even those will become pushovers and towards the end I felt that maybe I should have played on a higher difficulty than normal. You can do some neat things like juggles with the luxury of planning and previewing the effects of your actions in the turn based system. But most importantly, battles are quick and enemies don't respawn so the exploration feels really good and the environments are varied not just in looks but also in layouts. The writing is also quite good and delivering on the psycho analysis angle Satomi is known for and which the Caligula series producer, director and writer for this game, Takuya Yamanaka shares an interest in. So it has a really nice groove of advancing its plot with character development as you progress through the world, something which JRPG's are known and appreciated for.