You know what? Kendrick Lamar had a point when he eviscerated Drake several times in a row over the summer of 2024. Folks the world over bore witness to one of the most vicious rap battles in the history of modern music, and each song that Kendrick released kept getting better and better. Every time that predatory manchild Drake tried to spit some fake shit, Lamar came back swinging with the truth and just kept whaling on him. Honestly speaking? It was peak. If any of us learned anything from that whole debacle, it’s that you have got to be a hater for the right cause.
Depending on who or what context you ask in, I feel like the word “hater” has a weird rep. People hate haters if that hater hates something they like. Likewise, nobody likes a hater unless they hate the same things. Liking things is easy sometimes. Hating things gets the algorithm pumping, the conversation going. It’s popular to like the same things everyone else likes. Everyone likes to join the hater dogpile. People hate folks who love things they don’t care about. There’s some folks who hate people who like all the popular things. We really do live in a society.
If you ask me though, I think there’s nuance to being a hater. I maintain that you can’t just hate something for the sake of being a hater—that hate you hold deep in your heart needs a valid, legitimate reason to go beyond simple loathing. I’m talking about pure, unadulterated conviction. Like if you say that you hate eating brussel sprouts, is it personal distaste for them or do you dream of wiping them off the face of the planet? If you don’t like eating ranch dressing, would you go back in time and prevent it from ever existing so no one else can have it? If it’s the latter for either scenario then that’s a weird ass hill to die on and not at all the kind of hater energy I respect.
Anyways, you gotta fucking hate shit for a reason, one you can write an academic essay on with your whole entire ass. You gotta hate something worth hating the same way John Green hates tuberculosis. And, perhaps most importantly, you gotta love something worth loving with that same energy.
It’s been about 4 years, give or take, since I finished my first playthrough of The Caligula Effect 2 and started dedicating my life to The Guy of All Time™, Noto Gin. There’s really no game series like The Caligula Effect—there are pale imitations that pretend to be similar in theme and presentation perhaps, but they never stick the landing to the end. So what if you can’t see every single pimple and zit on the character’s skin? Didn’t we all love FFXIV’s low poly grapes anyway? It’s a shorter game with “worse graphics” made by people working with a limited budget and I’m not kidding. There’s a reason The Caligula Effect 2 is in my top 5 life-changing games of all time; the plot is actually dedicated to its central message, the depth of each member of its cast makes them unique and memorable, and its empathy for society’s undesirables is genuine. I haven’t even started on the amazing soundtrack and fun gameplay.
The Caligula Effect 2 also happens to be the catalyst that led to the divorce I had begging for in my previous marriage. That’s a story for another time, mayhaps, but I regard this as an unquestionably Good Thing.
It’s been about 8 years, give or take, since I poured over 100 hours into the absolute dogshit pile of piss known as Persona 5, only to ragequit halfway through the final dungeon. An unoriginal, if not well-crafted, RPG system wasted on a narrative dumpster fire that doesn’t fucking understand one thing about character development or narrative integrity. A sellout cashcow that’s invariably fucked up the overaching plot of its series.
The Caligula Effect 2 means a lot to me. Anyone who has interacted with me online for any significant amount of time knows that I ruined Noto Gin’s search results on Google once upon a time. I’ve maybe only poured 140 hours into it and the only reason I haven’t played it more is because I no longer own a PS4 and did not have a PC I could play the Steam version on for a while. Meanwhile, I regret the 400 hours combined I put into Persona 3-5.
I regret it the same way I cringe at the fact that I used to enjoy reading Harry Potter in my adolescence, because at the time I thought nothing better existed.
So I’ll say it here: I fucking hate Persona 3-5 with my full ass. I’m a hater of everything Katsura Hashino fucking touches. I fucking hate Persona 3-5 and wish these games and their spinoffs never fucking existed. If I could, I would discontinue distribution of those games on every single digital storefront and scrub them from the face of the internet.
“Hey BáiYù, are you sure you want to say this on your blog?” Yeah I’m fucking sure. Fuck your platitudes. Fuck your polite bigotry. Fuck your respectability politics. I’m a poor queer trans masc with zero ties to big money, so I’m never walking into any kind of board room with the nepo babies. I’ve had the carrot dangled in my face just to be whipped by the stick too many times to fall for that delusion again. I’m one big accident away from finding my ass on the streets and people have wanted me dead from the day I was born. So yeah, I fucking hate Persona 3-5 and wish I never let it lull me into a false sense of security by convincing me that a queerphobic society at large would accept me one day if I could just keep choking to death in the closet.
The rest of you poor queers need to wake the fuck up. Akihiko and Junpei acting aghast at the trans woman in a bikini was not funny. Chie becoming a cop was not praxis. There’s way too fucking much to unpack with Persona 5, but thinking that the same law enforcement that convicted you of a crime would save you is not it.
Your queer headcanons are a coping mechanism.
I’m begging you to get better taste.
You gotta fucking love yourself more.
Look, The Caligula Effect 2 isn’t morally perfect—getting 100% completion on the Causality Links involves you accidentally getting a homeroom teacher into a compromising situation with some of his students among other unsavory things—but at least it’s intentional about how a virtual world designed to let people run from their problems and trauma doesn’t actually solve the root cause of their suffering. It’s complicated. It’s nuanced. The narrative has some actual bite to it and Takuya Yamanaka actually has something to say, unlike that spineless fuckface Hashino who’s convinced that women never move into the countryside or commit crimes.
Oops, I just realized that I haven’t even talked about Noto Gin yet. This blog post is actually my birthday present to him this year because I don’t have the spoons to bake him a cake and the day is almost over. Just know that I love him with my full ass, the same ass that I hate racism, capitalism, queerphobia, cops, Trump, generative AI, Israel, and all that other bullshit with because he helped me realize that I deserve better. That people could love someone like me even if we’re not sure who we are. That I can support folks and get that support back in the right environment. I owe Gin my life and dedicate everything I do for my community to him and his glory.
So yeah, happy birthday Noto Gin. If the Puriteens ruin Pride again this year, it’s gonna be Noto Gin Birthday Month again for the third year in a row.
That’s what I call praxis, baby.
You can buy a copy of The Caligula Effect 2 on Nintendo Switch, PS4 & PS5, Steam, and Epic Games Store.