And it’s good! I am on the Watson chapter, so I expect things to start falling apart once the experience opens up and the game starts having an identity crisis. As-is the identity is a walking sim with dialogue options and some gunplay, which I mean as a compliment. These scenes are maximalist and decadent, but still well paced.
However, there’s still a non zero amount of bugs forcing me to reload a save. An elevator in V’s housing block decided it wouldn’t work until I jumped off a balcony and rebooted the timeline to one when it’s willing to bring me down to street level; I’m seeing some npcs holding items weird. These are ricochets off the hull that is my Good Time Hat, and I hope that’s all they remain as.
I picked Corpo V, which was important to me since I heard it can be the most incongruous. Arasaka’s Calfornian office is a more diverse workspace than I anticipated while being just as nightmarish as I hoped. I liked being on edge that my boss might turn me into a statistic. I doubly liked making a bad call with an undercover agent just because I felt like I was going under and needed to create some problems on my way out.
That being said, bigger brains than me have talked about how Arasaka is this jagged orientalist holdover from the genre’s infancy, and they’re most definitely right. When it works it’s a weird little supervillain base filled with goblin brained nightmare people. When it doesn’t I’m seeing three dudes in robes with visors for eyes meditating on a bend in a brutalist hallway, and I’m not sure what the affect is. I know it’s supposed to be some kind of menace, but it’s so silly I’m forced to imagine it’s some dudes rock thing in the diegesis. I want to think they’re doing it because they have a higher net worth than me and can get away with it. This is not a headcanon to the game’s credit.
The aerodyne ride from HQ to the bar was what really got me. I think someone knew it was going to be a jarring transition from Corpo V’s world to Jackie’s, and they did the right thing by leaning on the class divide. You get to watch in real time as the city takes on a different character from the vistas whizzing by on your car-jet.
The montage with Jackie proved to me that video games need more montages, but also that the game might be overcooked from a narrative standpoint. There’s a whole game’s worth of action in that montage, and the game already sells your friendship with Jackie in medias res through the lifepath segment (really well, even as Corpo V I could feel like Jackie was her lifeline). Give me that action! Give me gameplay that what could have been there.
Obviously they can’t. The tutorial against the Scavengers was pretty bespoke, and the guards were just static enough for Jackie to competently execute his scripting. What it does do is sandpaper the incongruences from the origins as they transition into the meat of the game. The background specific dialogues are a nice touch which further that. Generally all the dialogue options are a nice touch.
My current feelings are positive. With the two quests leading up to the heist segment and all the good things I’ve heard about them, I’m doubly optimistic. What I sense is an impending change in the air pressure. The game cannot remain this bespoke all the way through. It’s too ambitious for its own good.