Note: This article contains spoilers for the end of act 1 (and a bit of act 2) of Ciberpunk 2077.
Takes Ciberpunk 2077 about eight hours to introduce you to his main character. It can seem misleading. After all, the first thing you do in the ambitious, misguided, massive, controversial, and ultimately unfathomable new CD Projekt Red action RPG is design the person you’ll play, the rookie mercenary V. But, while you can customize the V look, your skill set, and even with rough strokes, your background, with what you can’t do Cyberpunk‘s creator of characters obsessed with the memory of the rooster is to establish who you really are they are. And the reason is very simple: they are nobody.
Not just “anyone” in the sense that V is, at the start of the game, an unproven entity in the ecosystem of the various Night City assassins, contracted guns, and overly aggressive used car dealers. (Seriously, Mr. Hands, no one wants to buy your old Hyundai.) What I mean is that V is no one; as a character, they are fundamentally indescribable. Whether you choose a Corpo, Nomad or Street Kid background, the character itself remains an encryption, an elegant robot formed from dialogue options that can activate a dime from psychopathic aggression to saccharin, according to the whims of a player. Viewed in first person only (or is already in play) infamous buggy mirrors), V exists in the game as little more than a pair of hands that allow players to shoot or hack their hordes of largely faceless enemies.
And even this basic level of identification is constantly interrupted by the haphazard nature of the game’s spoken dialogue, which is just as likely to make you think, “Christ, this boy is so poignant” as the root of his success. (All of these impressions come courtesy of a game with the male introductory voice provided by Gavin Drea, FYI.) Want to get off the grid and explore the game’s massive map or its myriad of endless side questions? Don’t expect V to say anything interesting. In fact, don’t expect V to ever say anything interesting. For a game that apparently deals with the horrors of losing one’s identity, more on that in a second,Cyberpunk he does his best to make his “protagonist” almost impossible to identify with.
The absurdity of this disconnect is that it comes after The Wizard 3, the main source of the masses of advertising that surrounds the latest CDPR news, and Geralt de Rivia of which is one of the best examples of a protagonist of games that somehow functions as a person of his own and as an expression robust of the player’s will. It is likely that no two geralts will open through the company’s famous 2015 epic to make the same decisions at every moment of its extensive plot, but they will all come out on top. as recognizable versions of the same man. Part of that goes to voice actor Doug Cockle, who never makes Geralt sound like anything less than him, even in the most extreme circumstances. But it is also a testament to how well CD Projekt Red wrote the character; you can make Geralt choose totally contradictory answers to any of the various moral puzzles in the game, and writing will always do its best to justify its stance, because Geralt is a firmly defined character with his own desires, needs, and fears, and everything he does The Wizard 3 it reflects it. For a more recent example of this, see Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla: Eivor Wolf-Kissed might be a cipher, but at least they feel like a cipher with a consistent point of view.
V has no point of view. (Or hair, every time I try to look in the mirror while wearing a baseball cap, which makes it non-existent, but that’s neither here nor there.) Instead, Ciberpunk 2077 pawns facing a much more banking star: the digital ghost Johnny Silverhand, played with undeniable charisma by film star Keanu Reeves, in good faith and without deception. After the high-tech theft that serves as the focus of the first act of the game, it inevitably comes in the form of a pear (this is a cyberpunk story, after all), Johnny’s mind ends up getting right into V’s head, starting a push and pull between the two that is A) the only interesting thing that happens to Ciberpunk 2077 in my more or less twenty-one buggy, plagued hours and B) was written quite aggressively with the excerpt “Joker is your imaginary friend now” from the 2015s Batman: Arkham Knight. And it’s interesting not only because, hey: Free Brain Keanu. No, it works because Johnny is real character. He has constant opinions, he has goals that he tries to achieve and the things he does always make sense as part of the whole. Sure, he’s an asshole on most of these things and needs you to do all the work, but at least he’s an asshole with an ethos.
Even once V and Johnny establish an awkward truce with each other, negotiating invisible jokes and friends copying things Cyberpunk he continually raises Silverhand’s unstoppable overwriting of V’s mind as a terrible thing. But why? Really, what is really lost? Any random scams? My skill choices in the (certainly robust and fascinating) character development system of the game? My terrible taste for armored basketball shorts? As I said, make a backup at the top, the moment you try to make you worry about the continued existence of V, Cyberpunk he has already fundamentally forked his duties as a main character; Intentional or not, V is simply the platform that allows Johnny to move forward on the most interesting aspects of his story. Johnny is the one who has the connection to the characters that matter. Johnny is the one in the resources you are taking advantage of to get things done. Johnny is the one who cares about what happens beyond the lowest momentum of survival. Johnny is the main character. V is just meat.
If all this were intentional, it would be tremendously subversive. If a game has to do with the decay of the human spirit, it infuses Night City, from its penetrating stench Grand Theft Auto-the cultural satire of level, to its ubiquitous publicity, to the inescapable reminders of how many hours of real life of programmer and artist were sacrificed to do everything. sort of work: he devoted his time to convincing the player to surrender so that a more glamorous digital avatar could live, this would be an impressive execution of the basic themes of the game. But Cyberpunk it feels much more like it believes on the side of humanity, even though the emptiness that is its central “protagonist” threatens to drag the whole subject into the abyss. Weapons and genitals don’t help us identify with the characters – the options do. I Cyberpunk‘s V always chooses to be inert.