The flathead quest and the bd editing sequence were quite fun. I’ll have more thoughts on them later, because I need to recover from making a bad choice. That choice was trying to exhaust my side quests in Watson before meeting Dexter DeShawn.

Not the NCPD scanner missions. I refuse those. They’d drive me insane from the repetition. My true arch nemesis is my Regina Jones grindset, and my fall comes from hubris. I over ate on Regina’s jobs. They’re a blur now. I can’t tell them apart. The gameplay is twitchy and satisfying, but the numeric curve on all the gear is intensive. The RPG elements make the combat feel loose and unpleasant in ways I haven’t felt since E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy.

I try stealth to replace the combat with something else, and I find a lot of fun in the stealth, but there’s a precise way to go about it. That way isn’t my character build. I learned I made a mistake playing a stealth character with two int with all the hacking I have to do to distract guards (eschewing netrunning was a deliberate choice after seeing Tim Rogers ruin the game for himself with damaging quick hacks).

The xp triggers on Ninjutsu, which I believe govern stealth, are perverse. Tyger Claw goes into dumpster; Number go up; Maelstrom goes into dumpster; Number go up. Die and reload; die and reload. There are very good bits of narrative, the kind that would make an interesting session for the tabletop source material, but I can’t recall them because the Regina Jones grindset has goblinized my playthrough.

If I was a smart girl, I would reach a saturation point and go, “Yes, Regina. I am finished. I now have biz with big boy business boy Dexter DeShawn. Please have someone else get into an ethically dubious fistfight with a cyberpsycho.” However, I have two weeks off and I plan to waste them to their fullest. Allons-y.