Did they fire the original writing staff and hire some dudes from reddit to write this? Not that the base game had the best writing, but after an hour of playing the DLC there have been multiple instances of lines that seem to be terminally infected by the Gamer Mind Virus. Hearing V say "amazeballs" made me want to die.
Also, fuck having to save the president. Lame mission tbh.
Yeah but even from the "everything's fucked" perspective you can write more critically. It's barely critical at all.
Yeah, his idea is that you can only save yourself, which neatly slots into liberal individualism, and the game sure delivered.
The issue as I see it is that the game is just... Not really that critical of society. It's not that awful looking, there's far more COOOOL CYBERPUNKKKKK than there is horrible-awful-society.
The problem here is that with a director's lens in the anime, (and being a bunch of commies) they could put all the focus and eye of the audience on the hellish things. The director keeps you focused on how awful this society is and NOT on the cool parts. The game on the other hand has none of this intent, the developers never force you the player to be focused on what a hell this is really, at all, and they let you uncritically work with cops without even the slightest indication that the cops of this society are bad other than news reels.
The directorial difference between one and the other makes the same content appear incredibly differently. If cdpr recognised this at any point and put more focus upon seeing the hell that this place is then the result would end up closer to what Trigger achieved.
Havent watched the anime, but that does sound a lot more appealing for sure.
The combination of turbo-libbery and anti-communist poles relegated all the "critical" looks into society into the sidecontent that you can do. Like there's a gig where you kill a bunch of strikebreakers, you would never know this if you didnt read some of the environmental storytelling notes. Then there's another gig where you're supposed to kidnap the strikebreaker in-chief from his pinkerton office building. The game naturally shits on you if you just murder everyone in there, so not even the sidecontent is allowed to be critical all the time.
It's a damn shame, honestly.
The anime is basically what happens when you get some communists to not make something to agitate, but instead to make something that is 100% indulging the
that lives inside every leftist. They do a very good job from that angle. There is no hope, there is no adventure, there is only a train and it has only one destination and it can't change tracks.
I recommend it.