Caligula Serie

[Argenta Sugden]

Last summer, we were treated to what I would call a love letter to the Shin Megami Tensei series in the from of NIS America title, The Lost Child. It was an obvious clone of the Atlus property, but it had enough charm and satisfying dungeon crawling that you could easily look past the unoriginality and just enjoy it for what it was. I cannot, however, say the same for the latest clone from NIS to make its way to the Switch. The gap in quality between The Caligula Effect and the Persona series is as wide as the Grand Canyon, and really the only reason to even consider picking up this game is a new and entertaining combat mechanic that has been added to this Switch port.

The imaginary chain combat mechanic is an addition to the Overdose edition released on Switch and provides the most compelling reason to play. Each party member has unique techniques, ranging from powerful attacks to more strategic modifiers. Their attacks can be chained together to devastating effect, and a real time preview shows the end result, assuming all the attacks land. I had loads of fun launching enemies into the air with one character and chaining in a crushing aerial attack from another. The preview system shows how the chain will connect and the reactions of the enemies, which allows you to adjust the timing to ensure maximum damage. That said, your perfectly plan could be all for not if an important attack is avoided, so you cannot fully trust the proposed results.

As someone who thinks Persona 5 is massively overrated, I have my fair share of fun with Caligula. It's a smaller scale High School JRPG with big improvements to the original. So, all the "Persona 5 Clone" reviews are getting tiresome. Guess this comes from people who never played another Persona than 5 and not even know that with Tadashi Satomi one of the original Persona Writer was responsible for the story in Caligula. It's not a groundbreaking story but above the average High School JRPG weirdness like Tokyo Xanadu.

The complains from the review is a blueprint for every High School JRPG. Even for the mighty Persona 5.

But that's all a matter of taste, I, for myself, think that The Lost Child was one mess of a game.

The only complaint what's really weird is that this review points out the music while even the most pessimistic reviews credited the soundtrack for being excellent. That's what I think so too. Kinda strange read the review. The score don't match the harsh words you have for the game. It seems more like you are a way too biased for the Persona series.

Hurt originally declined the role. He only agreed after being invited to a pre-production party and was impressed by the array of talent involved. Hurt has mentioned in interviews that he had to dig very deep inside himself to find this character.

Arguably the most famous scene in the series is when Caligula orders his Uncle Claudius and his brothers-in-law to the palace in the middle of the night. Waiting in the darkness, certain they are about to be executed, they are instead confronted with a Caligula in full drag, performing a dance as the goddess of dawn.

excellent essay/well done/ just watching the series again at the moment and what strikes me about the cast is that they were all veterans of the British stage. The quality of acting is unsurpassable, as is the writing and the direction. Different times. You could never assemble a cast like that today.

In the play, Caligula confronts the apparent meaningless of living in a series of problematic ways. He takes this realization to the extreme by adopting a nihilistic perspective. Caligula does not entertain the possibility that one may fashion himself in a way such that meaning can be not only found but also created in our belief in our projects and possibilities. He seeks to become beyond even the gods, his irrationality extends to dressing as a woman goddess, and demanding to be praised accordingly.

He becomes obsessive over the treasury, pedantic about respect, and excessively concerned with berating people with lessons on the futility of existence. He begins to employ logic, but only by extending it to its limit, so as to prove its inability to totalize reality. He does by creating double binds within situations to prove that logic can always be applied as a justification for any act. He employs a murderous logic himself. This is shown when he tries to poison one of the Plebeians, he then chastises them thinking they are taking an anecdote. He puts them in a double bind by indicating that the person either a) thought poorly and wrongly of his emperor and thus disrespected his will or b) the emperor was trying to poison him and he should have simply accepted it, respecting it as the will of the emperor.

The Plebeians charge Caligula with turning philosophy into corpses; this accusation seems apt. He views fear as a noble emotion because it is simple and self-sufficient, if this were true why does he not act in typically fearful ways? Or upon his realization that even he is insecure is he admitting that all of his actions were always based out of fear? Does this realization then further mean that his initial valuation of fear as being noble has changed? These interlocking valuations seem to point to a belief in our ability to possess and control our emotive responses to actions. That the passions are not blind automated responses to events but something fashioned by our will, albeit in a pre-reflective mode.

Caligula has the desire to become God. While everyone around him is constantly trying to find the human qualities which deem him a subject, he flees their attempts through the ultimate reification of his objectivity. He places himself as a God demanding to be worshipped, treated as nothing but an idol, stale and thing like. This is where the ultimate fear of God originates from.

The rest of the crowd seemed at least entertained by Caligula, but at times so was I. The guy was very expressive and the most magnetizing of the performers, so the majority of the visible audience reactions were in response to his funnier parts. Beyond this, I am unsure what thoughts they had of the character.

For both, I like your descriptions of the foreboding weather. I know you both liked the undifferentiated lighting of the Romeo & Juliet performed in the Union Theater. Did you find, though, that being outdoors inhibits the kind of focusing / attention-defining that a stage with selective lighting allows?

I think it was both. Some level of flamboyance was required by the text, and some seemed to overreach.
The play definitely does, in my opinion, make Caligula a somewhat ridiculous and unbelievable figure. A good example is the obviously flawed logic about the treasury fund and money.

Blatantly untrue. Defenders of supply side economics, despite whether or not you think they have ulterior motives, defend it within in the context of bettering human life (IE, supply side economics trickle down to the poor, leading to overall increase in quality of life). Caligula tries to increase the size of the treasury because it increases the amount of money, while not calculating the value of human life into his calculations. Even if you think that supply side economics results in that sort of denigration, the way they rationalize it is much more rational and sensible than the way Caligula rationalizes it.

This remind us that he does not care about life of human beings mainly if they are immigrants or Kurds.
Engaging a war would make him engage his responsibility,We heard lot of times him say ; I did nothing wrong

It all began with Gore Vidal writing a screenplay about the life of the infamous Roman Emperor Caligula, based on an unproduced television mini-series by Roberto Rossellini. Though Vidal and Franco Rossellini (Roberto's nephew) originally only intended for it to be a modestly-budgeted historical drama, they were unable to attain funding for it and sought help from none other than the founder of Penthouse magazine, Bob Guccione. And it's actually not his first film, either; Guccione previously produced Chinatown. Yes, really.

Guccione agreed to finance Caligula on two conditions: 1) that it would be tarted up into a lavish, flamboyant spectacle akin to the Sword and Sandal epics of the 50s; and 2) that sex would be incorporated to promote the magazine. During the rewrites, Vidal's screenplay was rewritten to tone down the homosexual content, at Guccione's insistence.

Federico Fellini's art director Danilo Donati was hired to build expensive and complex sets and costumes. Renowned acting talent, including Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, and Sir John Gielgud, was cast. Maria Schneider was originally cast as Caligula's doomed sister Drusilla, but she later dropped out and was replaced by Teresa Ann Savoy. After Guccione was unable to come to an agreement with more established directors John Huston and Lina Wertmuller, Tinto Brass, a relatively young Italian director who directed an artsy big budget progenitor to the Nazisploitation genre called Salon Kitty that Guccione had taken a shine to, was made the head instead. Shooting commenced in September 1976 in Dear Studios, Rome with plans for a 1977 release.

From the start, Caligula was plagued by difficulties. According to Guccione in a 1980 Penthouse magazine interview, Vidal (whom Guccione called a "prodigious talent") started trouble with a Time magazine interview in which he called directors parasites living off writers and that the director need only follow the directions as provided by the author of the screenplay. According to Guccione, an enraged Brass responded to Vidal's comments by throwing Vidal out of the studio. Guccione was forced to side with Brass (whom he called "a megalomaniac") because "Gore's work was basically done and Tinto's work was about to begin."

Casting and logistical issues were problems. Uncomfortable with the sex and nudity in the script, the female lead Schneider quickly resigned from the film, to be replaced with Teresa, as said earlier. It was soon apparent to the filmmakers that the aggressive shooting schedule developed by the inexperienced Rossellini and Guccione was unrealistic for a film of such scope. Donati had to scrap some of his more elaborate original ideas for the sets and replace them with such surreal imagery as bizarre matte paintings, blacked-out areas, silk backdrops, and curtains. This resulted in significant script changes, with Brass and the actors improvising scenes written to take place in entirely different locations, and sometimes shooting entirely new scenes (such as the frolicking scene that opens the film) in order to show progress while the incomplete or redone sets were unavailable. The production was plagued by delays due to disagreements between Brass and Donati over Brass not using Donati's completed sets as well as Brass and Guccione disagreeing over the sexual content of the film. McDowell's and Brass's rewrites of the script changed the tone from a more factually based historical drama to a more surreal Black Comedy satire based on the premise that "absolute power corrupts absolutely"; Brass depicted Caligula as a man who becomes a tyrant after gaining absolute power, then after realizing what he had become, uses his political power to disrupt the political elite to the benefit of the poor citizens of Rome, leading the wealthy Romans to assassinate him.

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