Cyberpunk 2077

 Yeah, I'm late to the party.

But I guess my algorithm started showing me videos of Mike Pondsmith talking about the process of turning his TTRPG into a video game.

I've always felt a strange kind of disconnect from Cyberpunk as a genre. I've never read Neuromancer or Snow Crash, and I think the aesthetics of the genre aren't really my go-to vision of the future, even a dystopian one.

Futuristic sci-fi does, of course, often comment on the present, and the fact that Cyberpunk as a genre came out in an era in which American leadership grinningly dismantled the New Deal welfare state to empower massive corporations is not, you know, coincidental. Technology was also on a stratospheric rise, and people didn't really know where things would go.

It's a strange thing, because I feel like Cyberpunk got some things really spot-on (the growing power of corporations, the unsustainable privatization and commercialization of everything leading to profound wealth inequality and unaffordability) and some things quite off (Japan entrenching itself as the dominant global cultural force, everyone and their mother getting cybernetic implants).

There's a sequence in Cyberpunk 2077 that gives us a glimpse of 2023, but it's an alternate history version of it (to be fair, the game came out in 2022, so it was technically the "near future" at the time) that conforms to the established lore of the TTRPG - back in the 80s, 2023 seemed like a really long time off. This game, as the name implies, takes place 54 years later. Now, if I play my cards right and manage my health well, I could pretty plausibly live to see 2077. I doubt it'll look like this game does, but then, it's staying true to the genre more than trying to accurately depict the future.

I've just made it to "Act Two" of the game's main story, with Act One's conclusion leading to a real series of twists and turns. The game is an open-world, but the main story still impacts pretty hard. What I don't know is if I've failed to explore some of the game systems, or if they've been holding out on really pushing me toward them until we get a bit of that story underway.

Going pretty hard into Intelligence as a stat, my most powerful weapon is hacking, which I've been using to overheat foes I'm fighting. My stealth abilities aren't amazing, and I'm not sure if that's a skill issue or a matter of stats and character builds. But combat, at least so far (I'm on the normal/standard difficulty) is forgiving enough that I haven't had too many problems (I struggled a bit with a Cyberpsycho, who I kind of wound up cheesing, but I think those are supposed to be the optional, super-difficulty foes).

I'm curious to see to what extent different backgrounds make for different experiences. I've gone Street Rat, as that seems the most classic protagonist archetype for the genre.

I appreciate the ways in which the game doesn't seem to need you to micromanage things. You have a healing item that recharges over time, and your health regenerates out of combat. This isn't a game about carefully managing long-term damage, letting you be a bit more reckless in combat.

Anyway, I finally have enough money (Eddies, or "Eurodollars," the imagined merged currency) to buy some new gear, but I don't yet really know what I should get. I think probably I'll want to invest in cybernetics (and whatever gear governs my hacking abilities). But so far, I haven't really gotten any tutorials on crafting, so I think I wasted some resources making a gun that I thought I'd be able to deconstruct to get said resources.

As a note, I've also been checking out The Ghost in the Shell, a new anime adaptation of, you know, Ghost in the Shell. When I was in college, I watched Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (probably first seeing it on Adult Swim.) This show, and the 1995 movie, were very serious in tone, but evidently the new show is more in keeping with the manga it's based on, with moments of real cartoony silliness, a staple of anime/manga that was always kind of startling to me when watching such things (like Trigun, which can be deadly serious and then have Vash the Stampede have a cat face when he's acting cute).

Like Cyberpunk, I'm not really an "anime guy," but I do enjoy the occasional work of the medium. I liked how deeply philosophical Ghost in the Shell got, and I think that's there in the new show, but with a lot of that weird silliness in there as well.