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This review is based on roughly 150 hours of gameplay time. I actually beat this game a few years ago, but just decided now to write my review. I have beaten the game on the hardest difficulty, Extreme and completed all character episodes, though there are still a few optional things I have left to do.

Storyline:
The Caligula Effect is a turn-based JRPG that takes place in a virtual world, Mobius, where people can escape from their real world problems by reliving their highschool years. You play as a group of students that have joined together to form the Go-Home Club. Their purpose is to escape Mobius and return to the real world, but they find out the creator of Mobius, the virtual doll Mu, is not allowing people to escape for some unknown reason. Furthermore, there is another group of individuals, the Ostinato Musicians, that want Mobius to exist and will fight anyone trying to interfere. You will also encounter digiheads, people who have grown so dependent on Mobius that will fight anyone that causes a disturbance.
The characters and the storyline left a strong impression on me. They definitely rank up as some of the best in the many rpgs I have played. The game does a great job of drawing the player into the world and making them care about each of the characters. They all have different reasons for wanting to leave or stay in Mobius and many of the characters are also not what they appear to be on the surface, but that's all I'm going to say on that. Try to avoid spoilers when playing this game, if possible. The events of the storyline definitely surprised me on more than one occasion.

Battle System:
The battle system is one of the strongest points about this game. The game is turn-based, but actions have startup time, active time and recovery time. For every character turn, you can chain up to three actions. A particularly interesting aspect of the battle system is what the game refers to as the "imaginary chain". When you select an action, the game will play a preview of all actions that have been selected or were already playing out, including the enemy actions. If you don't like the outcome, you can select a different action instead or even modify the current action to changing the targets, positioning and even adding a delay. This allows you to plan things out in advance before committing to the actions, but there is one important thing to consider. The imaginary chain assumes that all actions have a 100% accuracy, but your actual actions when committed to, will not. As a result, if one of your actions do miss, then the outcome of all the actions you have queued up for your characters will be very different than what the imaginary chain had projected they will be.
As for the kinds of actions available, there are a wide variety, which vary based on number hits, startup time and recovery times. Some actions can have additional effects such as launching or knocking down the enemy, guarding attacks, breaking guards, causing status effects and inflicting buffs and debuffs. Some actions are available automatically for all characters, such as the dashing and emergency barrier. Others are learned in the form of skills, which require skill points to be unlocked.

Difficulty:
The game offers 4 difficulty levels - easy, normal, hard and extreme. Hovering over extreme difficulty gives the following warning: "Do not select this. You will immediately die in battle if you aren't paying attention". While I agree that it is very hard, the problem is that the difference in difficulty between hard and extreme is massive. For even an average gamer, hard mode will feel relatively easy. Since I'm a gamer that prefers to play games on the highest difficulty, I decided to beat the game from start to finish on extreme. It was definitely a massive struggle at first but became manageable once I became familiar with the mechanics. Just be warned that boss battles are especially difficult on extreme and will feel like a massive roadblock, since you can't progress the story without beating them.

Causality Link:
This game has a social links system that somewhat resembles the Persona games. By completing a character's "episodes" when they have an exclamation mark over their head, you can increase your relationship with them and uncover their backstory. It is advised to complete these episodes the moment they are available, or they will be missed. It is also important to know that if you respond to the choices provided incorrectly, you can lock yourself out of the character's remaining episodes. Luckily, the game tells you immediately when this happens, so it is best to save right before doing a character episode and then reload if you mess up your responses. I highly recommend reading the walkthrough on Gamefaqs by the user MaySarton, following it exactly will ensure that you don't miss maxing out these character relationships. This guide also does a good job of not spoiling the events of the story.
There is another aspect of the social link system, called the Causality Link, that probably deserves the most criticism. There are over 500 students that you can find and befriend. Not all of them can be befriended right away, as you may need to become friends with their friends in order to talk to them. Each is suffering from a psychological trauma and once you've become their friend, the game will tell you what needs to be done in order to cure that trauma and receive a reward. The problem is that many of the interactions and dialogues of these students are copy and pasted. For example, there may be 5 different students with the Imaginary Friend Syndrome. Each one of them, say exactly the same thing, word for word. It is clear that no effort was put into this aspect of the game. With that said, 500 students each with their own problems to resolve, can become tedious and repetitive, though at least this part of the game is completely optional. The rewards are equippable passives (for all characters) and permanent stats for the main character. While they may seem minor at first, the stat growths for the main character do stack, and help greatly with overcoming the game on extreme difficulty.

Audio and Visuals:
The soundtrack is high quality in my opinion. Each musician character in the game, has their own unique song that really captures the essence of that character.
Regarding visuals, the character model quality is average at best. A lot of the models are also reused, particularly for the students and the digihead enemies which you will be encountering constantly throughout the game. While the character models aren't that great, the art for the character portraits and their poses in the status screen are very well done. For me, the visuals didn't really have any impact when it came to evaluating this game.

Conclusion:
This is an amazing game if you enjoy action/turn based rpgs. While there are definitely valid criticisms regarding certain aspects of the game, especially the Caustality Link system, I think they are greatly outweighed by it's strengths, which are the battle system and unique storyline. Unfortunately, I feel like the review scores this game receives on Steam, as well as review sites such as Metacritic, are lower than the game deserves.