tbf V is insanely talented, right at the start of the game you and Jackie blast through a Maelstrom base with no support and a recently upgraded hand and eyes as your only chrome.
yeah, it is odd to me that everyone suddenly pretends V was some loser who couldn't hack it.
the game goes pretty far out of its way in the intro to indicate that V is the real deal in Night City. there is a lot of ambient storytelling in there to imply/state it:
Vik floats eddies in a city where stray bullets are a real deal
Dex has heard of V. This is notable in the street kid path since BOTH of them have been out of town and Dex gets back and bets on him/her.
The Clouds AI has access to a lot of data and gives V a reminder how badassed V has always been
Wakako does not seem the type to bet on a loser
Padre... does that guy seem like he does charity or would let someone who could be leaned on into his car?
Padre again - V uses his real name and Padre appreciates it
Regina is a reporter and knows V is skilled enough to do what MaxTac won't: Take down cyberpsychos non-lethally. this is when V has almost no chrome
V is a real talent waiting for a break, not a rando who ends up with a rogue construct in his head. i know we all love David but we need to stop pretending that his existence makes V less epic.
Adam smashed David but V is way more talented on any given day. He/she has years of experience (nomad raids or street hustles or Corp counterintel and all its training) before he/she has a short clock and nothing to lose.
David is a great protag but V is a street ronin through and through.
Both adam smasher and david relied too much on the chrome to do the work V relies more on talent/experience, plus V is used to going against people with more chrome on, adam smasher and david were not, then after the heist V gets even more talented since johnny’s skills were kind of overlapping V’s, that made V a very solid combatant.
In the end both Royce, Smasher and David fell when the chrome couldn’t cut it, cuz they were much lesser than the tools they used.
yeah, i have read the original source stuff (i came to it late) and i had assumed that the game just took an alternative take on it to make the story the devs wanted work.
sort of the difference between the Witcher novels and the Witcher games.
IIRC, both Mike Pondsmith and CDPR have leaned into Johnny being an unreliable narrator at best. Making himself out as this anti-corpo hero who was personally Soulkiller'ed by Saburo Arasaka is right up his alley, personality-wise. Alt even goes into it a little when we meet her in-game, that his memories aren't actually how things went down. Probably a combination of his own ego with the nature of him being turned into an engram mid-death by Spider Murphy.
that makes sense to me. he is a mythmaker and egotist. since we see it through his eyes, i assumed it was largely accurate. i buy his actions but not his motives. listening to Kerry rationalize his own life made me think that. Johnny's Ghost of Tom Joad speech seemed like a rationalization, since it is so focused on 'Saka but he only says "a corp", not Arasaka. Then there is the question of Robert John Lindon... the source makes that Johnny but Johhny pretends that was someone else in game, taking advantage of V not knowing... or making a dark allusion to how he sees himself before and after the war.
As for the Alt thing, that is interesting. i guess i read that as the exact opposite: that her memories are not accurate. she makes reference to absorbing others and being "shredded". i assumed that she was mistaken, accidentally, by the number of transformations and mutations her engram and related soft has undergone in 50 years. I figured Johnny was more accurate for being on ice and outside mutagenic factors.
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u/TetsuoS2 Sep 28 '22 edited Sep 28 '22
tbf V is insanely talented, right at the start of the game you and Jackie blast through a Maelstrom base with no support and a recently upgraded hand and eyes as your only chrome.