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Anonymous · 3y

When you say Caligula Effect 2 has the most accurate portrayal of Vocaloid (producer/utaite/whatever) culture you've ever seen in a video game, could you expound? I, like a few followers, don't really have the experience or background with the community to really know how so.

Vocaloid culture has been in a lot of things now, and I'm really happy for that -- I'm not going to call any portrayal or parody of it "bad" as long as it's not disrespectful or misleading -- but I think the majority of portrayals I've seen focus more on the "synthesized robotic-sounding voice" part or the "virtual idol" part more than it focuses on the "indie community of creators" part. So for instance, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE's "Singaloid TiKi" still has an indie producer high school girl, but one of Tiki's songs is run through a vocoder to make her sound as "computerized" as possible when in reality only a very small percentage of producers would tune (or not tune) like that, and Tiki's story is more about herself than it is about any kind of producer culture. It's not inaccurate, and it's also understandable because the game itself is about the mainstream industry, but it's more "Tiki as a parody of Miku" than it talks about the actual culture.

Caligula and Caligula 2 are more about the producers themselves, and the virtual idol's performance and expression changes to represent the producer's own thoughts, feelings, and presentation. The "idol" is more of a way to indirectly express yourself, and the plot itself revolves around the idea of the virtual idol having to express the producer's feelings on their behalf by effectively channeling them. I think this is a pretty accurate description of how most producers feel about making music through a vocalsynth software, and the way "Doll-Ps" are respected and given attention as masters of their own unique craft is something I really appreciate.

I think the only other thing that I've felt felt accurately portrayed the indie-creator collaborative meta atmosphere this community has would be Re:CREATORS, which is funny because it doesn't have a virtual idol at all, but the "anything can be canon and everyone creates this character's canon together" is accurate to how things are seen here. There are some things that require suspension of disbelief, because it mixes Vocaloid culture with Black★Rock Shooter's origin story, and the latter is not actually considered to be free-for-all canon, but I think it mostly nailed the gist of the concept.

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