Tsutomu Nihei is a Japanese manga artist. His cyberpunk-influenced artwork has gained a strong cult following. At first he studied architecture and later this influence has shown up in his manga works in his depiction of huge structures. This has become one of the general themes that make his manga unique. His serialized works include Blame! - Nihei’s first work, Abara, Biomega and Knights of Sidonia.
is… is this supposed to be the plot? “universal basic income is bad”? what?
its not even “people struggle to find work” its “people dont need to work anymore and can spend their time as they choose” like that’s the polar opposite of a problem how do you miss the point of cyberpunk that bad
cyberpunk has gradually become so style over substance theres now going to literally be a cyberpunk game that goes completely against the ideals of the genre, amazinng
“Cyberpunk games are rarely about cool losers. They’re usually about cool cops.
Take the heroes of the Deus Ex series. JC Denton is an augmented agent who works for a UN anti-terrorist organization. Alex D is an augmented agent-in-training at the Tarsus Academy with a bright future in the WTO, and Adam Jensen is the augmented chief of security for a biotech corporation. All of these characters go through learning experiences that show their employers are untrustworthy and their world is more complex than they thought it was, but they all start on the privileged side of the fence.
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The streets and their inhabitants are central to cyberpunk. It’s the powerless who suffer most in the kind of authoritarian regimes cyberpunk fiction depicts, and games could do with getting back to the idea that the rebels, misfits, vandals, and people who can’t afford a plate of spaghetti matter.”
Cyberpunk: themes of postmodernism, the horrors of neoliberalism, the limits of consciousness.
Steampunk: “what if I could wear an ugly hat”
Horrors, yes /also ecstasies, as anyone reading Machinery of Freedom right before Snow Crash would attest/. But consider the optimism of 1980s cyberpunk: No international communism!
[engages w/ a genre entirely founded upon the excesses of capitalism laid bare and exaggerated, in which the protagonist, regardless of their individual position within their society as a whole, is almost always forced to confront and rebel against the meaningless nihilistic cruelty of The Market and those who seek to control it] good thing there’s no communism in this setting :^)
Cyberpunk, as a genre: a commentary on the relationship between corporations and government in capitalist society, particularly in regards to corruption, oppression, control of media, manipulation of public opinion through propaganda, etc
Some chungus white boy: hell yea dude, fight the system. check out my cyberpunk game where the sjws have taken over and ruined society by paying everyone enough money to afford to survive
I think the biggest (non-political) problem I have with The Last Night is how the cyberpunk aesthetic doesn’t work in a post-scarcity world. If everyone can make a comfortable living without having to lift a finger, why does so much of the world seem to be built from slums? Or the garish, sharp, in-your-face neon advertising which is virtually a constant in the cyberpunk genre on the basis that the corporations’ attempts to sell you stuff is everywhere and never lets up, even amongst the destitute and disenfranchised; how does that work if people aren’t being motivated by money? And if machines are doing all of the work, way better than humans could, then why aren’t they cleaning up this perpetual grime?
If you want to make a dystopian sci-fi setting that doesn’t fit the normal cyberpunk conventions, fine, but you can’t just use the exact same aesthetic that was created around very specific socio-political ideas.
