The Caligula Effect 2

TL;DR: this game is good, BUT I would absolutely recommend playing the first one too. While I did like this game, personally I enjoyed the first one a LOT more, for these reasons: 1) Combat in this game is a joke compared to the first one, even on Extreme difficulty. 1.1) If you don't want to take damage, it's trivial to move your characters out of the way of pretty much ALL enemy attacks. I found only 2 exceptions to this - one is in a fight that you are guaranteed to lose anyway for plot reasons, and another one from an enemy that you'd just target immediately and take out early. So defence and dodge stats are completely useless. 1.2) The "imaginary chain" is still called that, but it allows only one action at a time. ONE. First game let you chain up to THREE different actions together (and there was a tangible benefit to doing that, too - shortened startup time for chained actions)... but here it's a "chain" of ONE action. 1.3) The shield in this game became completely useless. It doesn't stun melee attackers like in the first game (so, extra benefit to using it), takes longer to activate (often there's enough time for dodging, but NOT enough time for this "emergency" shield) and costs more (50(!!!) SP compared to 10 SP in the first game). And again, there's just ONE attack in the entire game which cannot be avoided by just dashing instead. 1.4) All enemies in this game (except chapter bosses) look like blobs with a few different shapes. But the first game had elite enemies with those attachment things floating next to them which (IMO) just looked cooler than any enemy shape in this game. Also, those attachments could move and attack independently, and create overlapping attack patterns that could actually be tricky to dodge/counter - something that this game just doesn't have at all. 2) I personally liked the plot and characters in the first game more than in this one. 2.1) Plot in this game certainly wasn't bad or anything, but the [spoiler]Musician route[/spoiler] in the first game felt really special - to me, anyway. [spoiler]Getting to max out friendship with the enemy team, ambushing your own club buddies while they wonder who the new mystery Musician is - what's not to like?[/spoiler] This game just felt... kind of bland, after all that. 2.2) I really liked what they did with the characters in the first game - [spoiler]you had genuinely friendly faces on the Musician team, some of which quickly became my favorites, and in contrast, there was a monster in your very own Go-Home Club![/spoiler] In this game, you... can still learn backgrounds of your teammates and enemies, but it doesn't really feel like much of an impact compared to the first game (hell, in the first game, maxing out certain character bonds directly affects [spoiler]which character is killed off - whether it will be a good guy, a misguided guy who's a foil to the first one, or an absolute monster who actually deserves it[/spoiler]). Though it was kind of funny, on a meta level, how in the first game most opposing characters were [spoiler]sympathetic[/spoiler], while in this one they were just [spoiler]pathetic[/spoiler]. 3) First game actually made proper use of the mouse, unlike this one! Using scrolling to go through any menu entries (attacks, inventory) was MUCH faster than using only the keys in this game. Positioning your character for the dash action also used to to be possible with the mouse - so you could go through entire fights using JUST the mouse... well, not in this game. As for actual improvements over the first game, I can also think of a few: - More manageable side quest list - 100+ instead of 500+, and a few of those organized into actual quest lines - When starting new game+, there is no need to unlock the ultimate skills AGAIN for any character they were already unlocked for - There's a post-game totally optional dungeon (how optional? well, there's only one achievement tied to it, and that's just for entering it) for folks who enjoy that sort of thing. (First game only had those "world reward" bosses which were all separate and were a bit annoying to unlock even if you looked up the necessary codewords). So yeah, this game is definitely fun - but check out the first one, too, if you haven't yet.

6 years after the release of the first game on the PS vita, CE 2 feels like a real game with a real budget and team. While it traded the /qa/ speeches of the first game for zestier male party members, the game feels like a proper RPG with fully fleshed out mechanics and a plot that takes its time. Boss battles are so far the biggest upgrade as they're actually challenging now and their music tracks are S-tier. If you didn't play the first game, you can totally jump on it just fine. It's a sequel but it's own thing so it's chill.

十分给八分，剧情前期挺白开水的，中期有爆点，后期有点神人。伙伴们都很不错，人设也很讨喜，但是主角存在感很低，没有和p系列那种恋爱的剧情或者和其他角色有深刻的羁绊剧情。 这游戏最大的优点有两个，音乐和战斗系统，音乐很好听和一代的水准差不多，另一个优点是战斗，通过未来视战斗很有意思，可以提前看到敌人的出招，然后用特定的技能打反制，可玩性还是很不错的。这两个优点结合在一起就更爽了，听着每个boss的专属音乐打boss战非常有感觉。

The game seems fine but I just want to post this before I forget: There is an achievement you get immediately upon starting a new game, and 90% of players have that achievement. Following this, you watch a 20-minute series of cutscenes with no actual gameplay, and at the end you get a second achievement for "completing" the prologue. 84% of players have this achievement. So I'd like to use this platform to recognize the 6% of players who started the game, made it about 10 minutes into the blandest Store Brand Persona nonsense imaginable, and decided to move on with their lives. Whatever merits this game has as a GAME rather than in the story wrapped around it - and this is par for the course with Furyu - I believe you made the right decision. EDIT: Well, now I am three hours in and am still in the first dungeon, a subway that seems to want me to think I'm in a mad dash to escape while I trudge through the over-long, samey environments and enemies, with a grating single-verse J-rock track on loop for an hour that my Spirit Waifu assures me is narratively significant so I can look forward to a lot more of that. So, look. I'm sure this game has a lot of merit. I'm sure it does clever things with the JRPG genre and I'm not out here to yuck anybody's yum. But are you, the person reading this, really so hard up for video games to play in the year of our Lord two-thousand and twenty-six that you have to spend your time here, in this dumb subway dungeon? In this 20-minute prologue in which I challenge anyone to identify anything remotely interesting happening? Mechanically it might build on the Persona subgenre in interesting ways, but Persona itself is a pretty thin formula that spends enormous capital on presentation and engagement to keep you from being bored. That's good! That's good game design! And it's maybe a tragedy that FuRyu could never hope to match that budget and this isn't exactly their fault, but you, dear reader, are under no obligation to make that your problem. There are more video games out there right now than you could experience if you spent every waking moment of the rest of your life playing them. That in itself is a problem bordering on the existential, but I simply do not accept that you cannot find a better way to spend your time than this. I have clocked thousands of hours in World of Warcraft over twenty years - a game that even the most ardent defenders will admit has spent distressingly long periods steeped in mediocrity - and as I sit here I struggle to think of three that felt like more of a boring waste than the three I spent with The Caligula Effect 2.

Alright, so I am going to start by listing some weak points of the game, because I would tend to think the good REALLY outweighs the bad here. Firstly, some of the game's visuals lack polish. It's not all too bad though considering this was a Switch (and PS4, admittedly) release first but I do believe the game could have used some animations not rendered in engine. Such as The Choice, for example. I will not say where or when exactly to keep this spoilers free, but it will become obvious if you do play the game. Secondly, and really my only other gripe, the game is easy. Really easy. Just by doing the side content I consistently had about 5 to 10 levels on the enemies at any given point, hell I even only got to see the gimmick of half the bosses in NG+ with them having about 40 levels on me thanks to the level slider. Then, the good parts. The writing, as a whole. Really, I don't have much to say other than the story being generally a really good point, all the characters on our side have parallels on the other side, but more than that, the group is cohesive enough that it just wouldn't work so well if anyone was any different. I also really enjoy the designs, especially in battle, since they give a really good idea as to what any character is like, and if you know a bit about flower language, it becomes really fun since everyone features a different flower in their design (most noticeable in the Catharsis Effect, so in battle) Finally, as another really great point, the OST. It would be a shame in a game where the main antagonist force are called *musicians* if the OST was anything less than great, so it might be expected, but it's really good. I appreciate seeing the MV that would go with the music in battle, also. It really gives the dungeons some life. Also, unrelated to my opinion of the game, but as a warning if you don't want to be the butt of a twisted joke from the devs (though I found it really funny), save your lottery tickets and get as much as you can if you go for the 100%. EDIT: Addendum, despite being a sequel, the game stands on its own two legs just fine. Some of the punch might be lost, or feel different at some points, but it does NOT make it any less enjoyable an experience.

音乐依旧在线，建模依旧拉了，立绘不如前作，结局拉了格局很小；玩着比前作舒服，没有乐士线也让整体流程变得紧凑些没那么坐牢，尤其是地图设计方面不像前作过分大量的素材复用和无效分支，且二周目不用再探一遍图，因果图表少了好多人更重要的是会标注npc出现的地点好评；必须等敌人尸体倒地才能战斗结算的设定太抽象了，眼睁睁看着敌人在天上转了N圈后才缓缓落地。