Well, they are, but it’s a story and a very cerebral one. Of course it has a lesson to learn from.
At least it wasn’t being woke or preaching about the end times of a 2000 year old prediction. It really does become an issue when the aesop anvil doesn’t need to be dropped.
See the difference is that morality has almost completely broken down in CP2077. What did V have to do between the prolog and tutorial to get a nice apartment and a reliable car? Those assholes at the meat packing plant where you get the robot sure don’t look like they have any qualms even if V does.
Also, we still have an ecosystem and efficient oceanic transport. Climate change and a rogue AI that controls a global oceanic swarm of self replicating sea mines mean that the pizza is gross because pigs are extinct (they use tuna) and all overseas cargo is transported by air.
People still care about their friends, but that’s it. Even if internet in CP2077 was global and filled with punks and not just a NetWatch-policed glorified municipal Teletext, do you think anyone would give a shit about the world they live in on a chat site?
It’s also heavily implied that successful cyberpunks are vastly outnumbered by idiots who were in over their heads from the start and it cost those amateurs their lives. Those that succeed and become even slightly known, including V, are often exceptionally skilled individuals.
Why? They have dump trucks and dams in Africa, you know. Or did you think this was before Africa became the world’s fastest-growing and biggest market for cell phones?
Unless they have a reason to lock him up to protect their own interests, the Supreme Court is probably not going to do shit. That’s WHY Trump picked them, as an “insurance measure”, and unfortunately it seems to be working.
Digimon World 2003. I never owned a PlayStation (was a Nintendo-only fanboy for years until I bought a PS2 in the mid-00s a year before the Xbox 360 was announced) and tried to run an emulator of it for over a decade before it was fully supported. I also had trouble because I found out the only English version that didn’t have that stupid “once you start fighting the final boss, you can’t explore the game world anymore” thing they used to do in JRPGs was the European version. Now I can actually play it, even using gameshark codes, easily… if I could only find the time to play it!
Maniac (2023) is a series you might like. Despite the name, its more of a cassette futurism cyberpunk world with a scary amount of dystopian parallels to our own.