It seems kind of ironic to criticize 2077 for being too political given that one of its core issues, as rusty_shackleford has also mentioned, is it that it is way too politically bland - almost to the point of being apolitical - for a Cyberpunk game (an inherently political genre). It really does feel like the new Deus Exs in the way that it sets up a handful of political themes but then refuses to comment on them (to a further degree than "bad things are bad"). Even Johnny Silverhand, the game's eponymous superhero terrorist anti-corper, rarely says anything other than lines to the effect of "corps are bad", he doesn't elaborate as to why, describe at length his political ideals or anything of that sort. The same goes for the wider game itself - it almost never makes concrete comments about the politics of its world. There are three long, entire quest lines in a game with very few of them in general that revolve around Night City's mayoral issues, during which you help solve political coups and unveil political conspiracies.
Guess what: literally at no point do actual politics get involved in motivations, dicussions or backdrop. Politicians are described in terms of their job and their character - not their ideas.
So what you're left with is a game whose entire setting screams politics, and where two of the three starting backgrounds for your character have deep roots in this political make-up, but where the game almost entirely focuses on all these aspects as cultural phenomena.
It's the exact same thing with identity politics. You have a game where you can literally put a cock on your female character and that CONSTANTLY explores the huge posibility space for sexuality in a world where you can heavily modify your own body by having entire factions and a huuuuge swath of locations built around that concept, but besides the cultural and aesthetic expressions of it, it doesn't really go into any thematic discussions or storytelling related to those things. So sexuality is something the game throws into your face at every turn, but it's just there as dressing.
For instance, there's a quest where a guy suspects his wife of cheating, and it turns out she didn't: she was just doing doctor check-ups because she made herself prettier with implants before she met her husband and didn't tell him. Boring. You could have done so much with that - somone completely, physically altering themselves and their partner realizing this and coming to terms with whether he or she is fine with that or can't let it go that beneath the chrome is someone else. But no, she essentially just underwent plastic surgery before meeting him. What if she had been someone else entirely before their meeting instead?
Cyberpunk 2077 almost reduces politics to aesthetics in the way it refuses to engage with it.
It really is quite bizarre.
Guess what: literally at no point do actual politics get involved in motivations, dicussions or backdrop. Politicians are described in terms of their job and their character - not their ideas.
So what you're left with is a game whose entire setting screams politics, and where two of the three starting backgrounds for your character have deep roots in this political make-up, but where the game almost entirely focuses on all these aspects as cultural phenomena.
It's the exact same thing with identity politics. You have a game where you can literally put a cock on your female character and that CONSTANTLY explores the huge posibility space for sexuality in a world where you can heavily modify your own body by having entire factions and a huuuuge swath of locations built around that concept, but besides the cultural and aesthetic expressions of it, it doesn't really go into any thematic discussions or storytelling related to those things. So sexuality is something the game throws into your face at every turn, but it's just there as dressing.
For instance, there's a quest where a guy suspects his wife of cheating, and it turns out she didn't: she was just doing doctor check-ups because she made herself prettier with implants before she met her husband and didn't tell him. Boring. You could have done so much with that - somone completely, physically altering themselves and their partner realizing this and coming to terms with whether he or she is fine with that or can't let it go that beneath the chrome is someone else. But no, she essentially just underwent plastic surgery before meeting him. What if she had been someone else entirely before their meeting instead?
Cyberpunk 2077 almost reduces politics to aesthetics in the way it refuses to engage with it.
It really is quite bizarre.
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