Man this fucking game. I ran out of mods to install, then made some mods of my own, then hit him skill ceiling, so now I guess I gotta play it? This is all going to be 100% spoilers for this game
Hmm. Jackie and I are a couple of assholes who rolled in with the wind six months ago. This guy wants us to hit *checks notes* The LLC super power orientalist mega badass corporation. In fact he wants us to walk in to the son of god’s hotel room and nick his boxers. Nope, fuck that, I’m out. Walking away from… oh. Oh the walking away from an obvious disaster button is disabled. Fuck.
Hmm. Jackie’s dead and I barely made it out. Everyone else is dead or has already burned us. Dex just told me to go in to the bathroom, which has no windows, and wash up. Okay, so as soon as the door shuts I’m going to kick it back open, put half a clip in the sky by way of his bodyguard’s chin, unload whatever’s left in to dex, and book it for the badlands before the cast of Hulu’s Shogun in robot drag shows up to vivisect me… Wait shit no that button is disabled too.
And then they take me to doctor guy that everyone knows I’m buddies with, who hangs out with the ex-girlfriend of the guy that I shot up Arasaka’s shit with. And they know who I am, because everyone in the damned hotel got a good look at me shooting my way out. So obviously, at some point, Arasaka security forces are going to follow this giant very obvious trail of stupidity, kick the door in, shoot misty, shoot vic, and then drag me off to an arasaka lab where they’re going to vivisect me? Huh… I guess their “Do the extremely obvious narratively appropriate thing” button is disabled too.
Well, now Misty is taking me back to my apartment, which is probably registered in my name, and as soon as she wheels me in the walls are going to shimmer as 50 Arasaka security guys turn off their thermoptic camo, shoot misty in the head, and drag me off to an Arasaka lab to vivisect me…?
What now? Oh, I’ll just walk over to a diner with to meet the ex-bodyguard of the ex-CEO or Orientalism Inc, and we’ll just talk about the murder of the most important man in the world when we’re both known and wanted for that man’s murder.
O.O
I honestly don’t know what to make of this. This isn’t how you right a cyberpunk story - The characters immediately piss off, not just people above their weight class, but people in the highest weight class. God and his angels. A nuclear armed corporate state. And then kinda just walks away, goes home, hangs out with her friends?
There’s nothing about frantically burning all her ID cards and bank accounts, DoD formatting her phone and running in through a shredder, grabbing the wad of cash and the 3d printed glock she keeps under her pillow, and driving hard for Philadephia, or possibly the phillipines. No mention of getting her face, eyes, and fingerprints replaced while a doc cuts an inch off her height to fuck with gait analysis.
Just nothing. None of the shit a protagonist does when they realize how massively they have fucked up by stealing something important from real people who actually matter and have resources. It’s weird. This is a pretty well established thing, the “burn your life and go to the matresses” part of the story, and they just didn’t. Didn’t think about it, didn’t talk about it, didn’t acknowledge it. V is just wandering around, wearing her own face, driviung her own car, using her own credit accounts, hanging out with her own friends, like nothing happened. This is not how you tell a “heist gone wrong” story. It violates every law of narrative causality, and I don’t think they’re trying to do anythign clever with it, they just… didn’t? Fucking bizarre. Maybe they’res a great new twist coming around the corner but I kinda doubt it.
Also, dad-rock Gen X rebel without a clue showed up. Pro-tip, asshole. If you just go blowing things up with no working class movement and no theory of revolution you’re just an asshole. Fuck off to the digital 
you poser shit!
This is supposed to be “style over substance” but it’s neither stylish nor substantial. Just vaguely perplexing. Written by committee? Just plain bad writing? Corporate meddling with the writer’s room? Who knows?
This is one of the biggest issues with the game as an open-world FPS power fantasy. They want you to feel powerful, which goes directly against the core of cyberpunk. Yes it is just bad writing. No it does not get better.
Also lol while I was more willing to go along with the ride in general, I had that exact same reaction to the scene with Dex.
word. It’s exactly the wrong genre for that. You can be a hyper-competent violence person, but there always has to be someone much bigger than you, who maybe doesn’t even really understand you exist, who can make one phone call and crush you.
Right? It’s so goddamn obvious! That scene, where the guy rips the towel rack off the wall and beats the living shit out of whoever told him to go to the restroom, is in every badass action movie. The character is wiping their ass or washing their face, then the scene cuts to the people outside, with the door in frame. And the people outside all have their guns ready. The people say something like “He’s been in there a while”, and there’s a beat, and then the door explodes and the guy comes out and just starts wrecking people.
Like, protagonist picks up the idiot ball so the plot can advance, fine, you have to have a plot. But the whole first act was just idiot ball after idiot ball after idiot ball to the point it became really grating. This is my reward for reading massive amounts of sci fi and doing media analysis my whole life. i can’t enjoy things anymore.