For the first time in my life, a game has me feeling burnout. A break’s in order, and failing that I at least need to forget the fixer missions. I thought I was preserving a sense of precarity by avoiding the police scanner shit, and it seems that’s not enough. These systems are barely holding together, and mastery is just me eking out slightly better numbers.

After what felt like hours of grinding, my stealth repertoire is complete. My perk spread is also garbage, but the game doesn’t want nor need you to minmax (to an extent). I’ve upgraded Yorinobu’s pistol until it can finally neutralize enemies at a reliable distance (sometimes), and my camouflage is now slightly longer. A series of other upgrades to V’s body stat has me being able to more efficiently do takedowns and dispose of the results. She’s got legs that can do a super jump, which does horrible things to the game’s sequencing but makes traversing around the city a lot more fun.

I spoke too soon about completing the Panam quest line, because I think there’s more. Let’s put a pin in that. I also went as far into Takemura as building bridges with Hanako. That one was exciting, and by exciting I mean I reloaded a lot because the stealth is fun but also physically killing me. I bummed around with other sidequests, including letting some guy put a BD wreath on my head to perform a guided meditation, and getting started on the River Ward questline. That one’s really good. He’s a fun character, your archetypal good cop doomed from the start.

There’s some more I can add, for example the second I had the Bakeneko conversation with Takemura I made note of it on my phone, but I think that’s my saturation point. There’s some things that need space to breathe and they deserve bespoke posts if I can get to them. All and all this has been a pretty slapdash endeavour, but I hope these posts have been as fun to read as I’ve been having fun freewriting it.