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 my personal pet thoery
I think CDPR didn’t realize how popular Keanu would be, and so when they revealed him at E3 they had to panic and rewrite the game
Until recent patches, the game clearly indicated that Keanu was supposed to show up later and was shoehorned into quests. The first quest you’re likely to do after being attacked by Silverhand in your apartment is to go get your car, which is crashed into. Until a very recent update, you and Keanu were buddy-buddy during that quest even if he just tried to kill you minutes before. In another instance, a character who you’re shown working for during the 6 month timeskip acts as if they’ve never met you when you enter their territory for the first time
The fact there’s about an hour long unskippable, barely interruptible segment between the No-Tell Motel and V getting turned loose on the open world, with a fakeout ending halfway through, really points to the heist being an end of act 2 shocking finale and all the Silverhand stuff would’ve been a late game act 3
There’s also the early demo footage showing that you’d get to choose one of three people who were your “personal hero” or something. Johnny was one, Morgan Blackhand was another, but I forget the third (maybe Rache Bartmoss?).
The actual CEO of Orientalism Inc., Saburo Arasaka, was the third one
The whole celebrity worship angle is another thing that seems really weird and offputting. I’ve never encountered a cyberpunk story where the protagonists want to become famous shadowrunners, become renowned and well known, make a lot of noise and attract a lot of attention. It seems completely orthogonal to the entire genre. You’re little people. Low life, high tech remember? If you make noise someone who matters will step on you. The motivation is usually extremely personal - Get enough money to get out of the life, buy new cyberkidneys for your mom, use your skills to convince the corporation not to kill your brother who fucked up, pay off an old debt to your body, stop some awful corporate villainy that’s going to fuck over everyone you know. A lot of the time it’s just “Survive to the next paycheck, buy some booze and drugs, pay rent, and get back to the grind”.
“Become a celebrity and die in a blaze of glory” seems so weirdly empty and indulgent. It’s just a bizarre motivation for anyone who isn’t an athlete or a prize fighter or I guess a rock star. And even for a rock star it’s a pretty outdated notion (dad rock Gen X poser Johnny). For a street level mercenary and troubleshooter it’s just weird. Why is Jackie so reverent to the DMPCs? What’s so legendary about them? They didn’t retire in comfort, they didn’t get out of the life, buy their mom a nice house in a heavily defended corporate enclave, send their niblings to good schools. They just killed a bunch of people and died. It’s extremely weird to me, both because it doesn’t make any sense to me, and because it’s not something I’d ever encountered in the genre before.
I was very explicitly whining that kind of semi-interactive visual novel sequence is only cute when Kojima does it. I was so annoyed near the end. Like it took me several minutes to figure out you’re not allowed to shoot the Arasaka cyborg assassins, you’re only allowed to shoot their bikes.
“He is starting to suspect Terry Pratchett fucked him over personally with his narrative causality theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Plot Structure. Instead of building suspension of disbelief, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous story.”
Nah, that’d be too stupid even for CDPR. The game definitely suffered from tons of rewrites but there’s no way these didn’t happen way earlier when they realized they had to get the game out of the door at some point. Cutting the two other personal heroes from the game and focusing more on Keanu seems like an obvious choice, Keanu being popular was probably just a happy coincidence.