I finished the Panam questline, and my only comment on it was: Yeah, that was fun. There’s nothing I can say that wouldn’t either be surface level or failing to interrogate the text all that closely. Cars sure did go brrr and people dropped the word “family” more than a shitpost thread for Fast and Furious. Nomads are very interesting as a concept, though they’re the one place where Cyberpunk has a bit of a genre shift. For that reason I changed up how I played V and let her be a bit more generous while easing off on the money talk.

This felt like the right way to get along with Panam, maybe too well. The way the stage direction and voicelines went, it felt like there was chemistry between her and V. That’s when I reached a critical juncture that got cut off based on playing a female V. I think Noah Gervais commented on it, though he centred this on River Ward. They really have the characters warm up to each other and then pump the breaks harder than when I’m grappling with the game’s shitty driving mechanics.

This and the session before is where I’m noticing strict level gating with content. Last time it was Santo-Domingo being overtuned. A random quest marker showed a suit being harassed by NCPD officers, and they must have been MaxTac agents in disguise because beating them took upwards of twenty reloads as well as all my flashbangs. This time it was a cyberpsycho with a mech suit who I could not simply stunlock with my fists (it took that as a prompt to augment them when I next get the chance).

The cyberpsycho encounters still grind my gears, however fun they are from a strictly mechanical or environmental storytelling perspective. In that longpost I wrote wishing they had the resources to create dialogue sequences, some monkey’s paw furled because there is one that’s got voicework… For a bystander hiding in a shipping container. He’s being aggressed by a Mox and explained that he was the problem by how he tried to avoid explaining he was the problem. I swore when this happened. The one npc during these quests you can talk to, and it’s another way to infodump after the fact.

I did some Delamain car wrangling, which was the highlight of my sessions. Save for the one lifting lines from Portal, they’re all diamonds. I am not done, but memory serves I worked the one that must drive slow and the one who makes the ominous speech about belonging beyond the Blackwall. Love and care went into this one. It’s a rogue AI plot and instead of choosing one direction you get a slice of each.

Though speaking of the Blackwall, I experienced Never Fade Away and the reunion with Alt. The latter left me cackling in a morbid way. There’s something about Johnny encountering a twenty foot tall floating hologram of his ex and the first thing he says is “We’re cool, right?”

The former proved something I was curious about. During the Silverhand segments, enemies die in one hit and your health rebounds almost instantly after getting hit. From a gameplay perspective it’s sound scripting. Johnny didn’t die in these sequences, so why make that easy? On the flipside it turns these stints into the stuff of self parody, especially when you’re backed up by legends like Rogue and Santiago. I saw Rogue fire off a burst from her assault rifle and the damage was piddly. What gives! She’s a Solo, a human death machine.

A thought started stirring as I one-shotted the twelfth Arasaka assassin with Johnny’s pistol: Is this shit happening because of the fabled stopping power of Johnny’s Malorian Arms 3516, or is Johnny fibbing himself. The answer is yes. Alt says the moment where Johnny disconnects Alt is a biased recreation, and we can safely interpolate that to the rest of the sequence.

Also Johnny behaves like a douche to Kerry again. All of these start with Kerry saying “Johnny please don’t do this weird unhinged thing,” and you getting a choice of dialogue options that are all insults which seem harsh in the selector but are polite compared to the full line read. There’s a really good move they make with Kerry’s face and outfit as a way to track the times. Everything’s good about Kerry. Today’s response is Johnny telling Kerry that he’s the sole auteur at the centre of Samurai and his unhinged hatred of Arasaka is the glue that holds everything together.

I concluded this session after I took Takemura off read to check out this cool set of walkways where some floats beautifying Yorinobu Arasaka are going to pass. There’s a lot wrong with Arasaka, and there’s even a lot wrong with Takemura, but whoever was responsible for Takemura’s text messages redeemed him as a character. It’s like calling one of your parents or a really bad prof. He even has a different texting rhythm where he vomits out whole paragraphs without a pause to type animation. The man is just weird. His unmarked van is tuned into the classical news station.

I have no intention of realizing the Arasaka ending, but I’m forced to help Takemura because the game’s sold him to me so well. I want to at least get him back on the inside because he exudes sympathy out of every pore.

That’s basically it. I need to fall into bed. As always I think the abstract points don’t work very well (I love Takemura for the reasons given above but I swear to god sometimes the writers forget he’s a down on his luck James Bond type and write him like a Klingon), but the minutiae does (again, grandpa texts).