I've finished my skim of Cyberpunk 2020 and it makes RED the same goddamn rulebook albeit with less information. That's still strange to me, since the jumpstart kit was very colourful and despite reusing the odd entry (and setting the deceased Metal Warriors in 2045, which is baffling - when does this gang become Maelstrom?), while RED is simply a set of slight rephrasings of the previous edition. This is really bad. It's responsible for many of the incoherences about the worldbuilding. For example, the Uniform Criminal Justice Code is reprinted verbatim, while also lodged into the balkanized police system, so there's no infrastructure for prisons but then also prisoners are subject to Junji Ito Long Dreams via braindance. Where are we putting these bois? Where do the bois go? Where does NCPD (or the contractors under the brand that is NCPD) put the bois?

And I wouldn't say the information omitted is all that helpful, or that the information reproduced should have been done so word-for-word.

Some of they stuff R. Talsorian copy-pasted they reworded to meet modern tastes, albeit crudely and without knowing what modern tastes are, making me wonder the utility of the old draft. For example, RED insists the Tyger Claws represent the Night City Asian community at large, and I assume that's supposed to be some kind of meaningful turn if they weren't explicitly coded Japanese and remain so with a bunch of nonsense signifiers thrown in 2077. Some of the stuff they outright omitted is pretty gross and for the better for not including. I don't want to hear what 2020 thinks about boostergangs ever again; I'm glad you simply learn through osmosis in RED.

Others are pernicious but not terrible. Many illustrations that could head questions on the R. Talsorian discord off at the pass are in 2020 but not in Red (like an airhypo has a very particular look, but is this anything? Nah). 2020 makes a lot of fiddly delineations with cyberware that RED no longer cares about (I've never ran into problems with that outside of confrontations with purists who can cope and seethe that given the circumstances there's new fans for this setting at all).

Some I wish they didn't copy into RED because they're horribly incongruent. I tell my players to fucking avoid the "Welcome to the Dark Future" chapter because it reproduces a lot of offensive nonsense verbatim. I want to shoot whoever wrote "...the United States was in trouble. Most social norms had dissolved under an all-engulfing wave of competing special interest groups, media-fueled fads, and an overall "me first" worldview." What the fuck does that even mean? Why do these conservative ravings remain the inciting incident for the world's history? Are you sure Dirty Harry was not the prime text by which this setting was constituted? Why is Great Britain written as worse off for high immigration? I do not care for the contradictions this book is obsessed with because it seems to hate people with a flaming passion.

All and all I have read this book and gained nothing. I do not wish to be told to read it again. I will let a hundred people say their sandevistan is a steel spine over this, because that constitutes something in their imaginary about the setting that's more interesting than what Mike is giving me. I am not going to talk about the GM directions and advice, either. Cool this was a thing, but just like how the rest of the book conflates "punk" with "buttrock," Mike's advice conflates adversarial GMing with a new and bold practice that was never tried at all in that "safe and happy elf game" he keeps complaining about. The GM is always meant to be a step ahead of the PCs in some kind of dominance struggle. Tactics is prized, but camaraderie isn't. Statements of what it is are fewer than statements chiding the reader as if they had made a misconception to then assert what it isn't (RED has this problem, too, by saying it isn't post apocalyptic and poo-pooing "road warrior" aesthetics while leaning on postapocalyptic imagery and showing the same road warrior aesthetics in the art.) I am glad that the fucking obnoxious quotes by Morgan Blackhand are gone from RED because I can get that kind of smarm on an internet forum by an engineer or someone who goes to a firing range on weekends. I can tell he's Mikes' player character because he thinks everyone's a stupid idiot. This is a silly little self-important book by silly little self-important men.