The second chance

 Sweet dreams are made of these...

"You only get one chance to make a first impression"; that's how the saying goes, doesn't it? One shot to seize everything you ever wanted and all of that nonsense, implying you know what it is that you wanted beforehand, which is an expression that just exemplifies the absolute rarity of this concept that we call 'Second Chances'. Ask your daily person walking the street and they'll probably tell you, if they're speaking from the heart and not just trying to be straight shooter, that second chances don't exist and cannot in the world as we made it. A world of 'self empowerment' and 'seize what you want' revolves around us, with little pity for those that don't slide into that hyper-specific model; you make a mistake and that world just moves on past you and doesn't so much as blink as you slip between the cracks. And that is exactly what Cyberpunk did when it launched, it slipped between the cracks... after scouring a stupid amount of initial sales but still, it should have been more.

The Cyberpunk we were sold was a literal shoe in for 'game of the year'; people were joking about how relieved every game within the same year as their initial announcement must have been when CDPR first delayed the release date, knowing that would be the only way their marketing money wouldn't go to total waste and they might even get an award. I feel physical and spiritual pain whenever I think about the oodles of artists from all walks that we got to see express their exuberance about being involved in the project, to think how it all panned out just makes my heart sink. There's nothing more depressing than that feeling of hope before the disappointment. And even today it sort of feels like their vast efforts were squandered. But not, it would seem, at the cost of Cyberpunk's life. Because lookie there; Cyberpunk has seen a massive resurgence in popularity to purely ridiculous levels just as it was approaching the end of it's support cycle thanks to Edgerunners.

The Edgerunners Anime was announced all the way back during the lead-up to the main game, but by then the thing was so early in development it was clear we shouldn't really be bating our breath for something we might not have seen for months to years yet. (It turned out to be years.) The buzz was very real for the show even in that first reveal, however, which is probably indicative of the huge cross over between fans of games like Cyberpunk, high action punky Role Playing style games, and Shonen Anime lovers. An intersection which has influenced gaming before, I might add, such as inspiring the whole conceptual style of 'Star Wars: The Force Unleashed'. (Yep, Starkiller is an Anime protagonist. Makes sense when you think about it.) Personally I was just in it for the game and anything outside of that was a non-entity to my tunnel-vision; which makes oh so deliciously ironic that now, in 2022; that Anime might just be the most consistently quality thing to come out of the 2077 franchise.

I say 'might' because currently I'm only three episodes in, but people say the series doesn't get any worse from here and I'm inclined to believe them. The visual style of the animation is just delightful, being able to actually place a lot of the scenes geographically thanks to familiarity with the world adds a layer of tangibility to connect the scene with the audience and the side characters are just golden. I mean, one of the reasons I wasn't initially interested even when the promos started showing was because David came across as your prototypical Anime kid with a chip on his shoulder and Alice looked like your punky pixie dream girl. And... yeah, that's pretty much how the show is characterising them so far, but they weave in the tapestry of this fallen and disgraced dystopia so well that you accept their clichés for what they are.

The clichés hardly hurt anything when the Anime looks so beautiful in motion, Good lord you can tell the amount of love and sweat that went into capturing that frenetic energy in every cell of action keeping things feeling fast and loose without losing those solid lines needed to hold the show down for slower and more sombre moments. I also adore the dialogue writing. Not so much in it's content, but in it's style. In dripping in that eighties Cyberpunk lingo which is so distinct from modern language that it's garish, but when provided with such confident consistency you come to buy it as this alternate period's colloquialisms. That can really make a world like this come to life in front of you, just from the use of words like 'Eddies', 'Choom' 'Flatlining' and all that wonderfully colourful intercultural mash-up dialogue. I love it. And apparently my feelings aren't exactly unique considering the near-universal praise that the anime has received.

And with that praise came something very special; a renewal of Interest from the Internet public that good-old CDPR could never have predicted. Cyberpunk 2077 started flying off shelves again and scoring player count numbers in the millions (As in 'over a single million concurrent players' to be precise) as people turned around and finally came around to explore the game they missed because it wasn't worth the asking price. (Okay, maybe that's a little mean. It was probably worth it's asking price but not just to the crowd they originally tried to pawn it to.) Now again, I have been following Cyberpunk very closely and it's still not really the vision we were promised, but it's at least increadibly playable in the modern age, and that has to be worth something. Again Cyberpunk has always been a game that is good, maybe even great in it's best parts, and an 8/10 ain't nothing to scoff at.

This all came so very suddenly that one has to wonder whether or not CDPR has taken to heart the sudden change in fortunes to revise their plan to essentially kill Cyberpunk support before their original vision can be reached. No I don't mean the original pipe dream they sold us on, that game is probably half a decade away and going to be made by a completely different studio who will spend way too much on it and go bankrupt as a result; I'm talking about the quiet promise of matching The Witcher 3's two DLCs. One good and the other game changing. We're getting the allotted 'good' DLC, but the game changer has been put on ice. Although maybe now that Cyberpunk is on the rise again? Unfortunately video game Journalist Paul Tassi has already weighed in on this with his annoying 'logic' and 'facts' to remind us all that games under companies like this are planned out extensively in advance, and CDPR already resigned themselves to moving on so hard that they're literally leaving their proprietary game engine behind after the release of this upcoming DLC. There's not really any coming back from that unfortunately. (Again, unless they totally remake Cyberpunk 2077 from the ground-up in the new engine just to start creating content for it again on that engine.. Which I find doubtful...)

But regardless, it's just nice to see that Cyberpunk 2077 won't quite be going down and out with that totally bitter taste in the gums that it has maintained for quite so long now. Through update after update of 'It's still not quite there yet', and 'its nice but...'  There's a certain level of relief we can all take solace in from the rush of actual goodwill the game is amassing before it sails off into the sunset. At least this means that CDPR will have some recourse to make a Cyberpunk sequel in the future, even if not much of one after all of this mess. I hope they get the chance to come back and bring that multiplayer metagame to life and everything their crazy dreams once bred in their heads; because I've said it before and I'll say it again: that game they thought they had made sounds like a real banger.