Cyberpunk 2077 has arrived at long last, and the game’s lengthy prologue concludes with an explosive finish as Johnny Silverhand sets off a nuke in Arasaka’s corporate headquarters. And that particular plot point begs an unlikely comparison with another of 2020’s biggest releases: Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
Terrorists are usually bad guys in video games. Like Nazis, zombies, and most aliens, they are employed as guilt-free fodder for the heroes to mow down and hew in half. But both Remake and Cyberpunk 2077 put players in the driver’s seat of bombers with a grudge against hyper-capitalistic mega-corporations.
While it is hardly uncommon for games to make players second-guess their avatars’ morality, it is rare for a title to open on such a note, where idyllic intentions justify catastrophic collateral damage. Even though Remake and Cyberpunk do not have morality systems to mechanically gauge and gate player choices, the stories they tell invite players to reflect on their protagonist’s actions, and force players to deal with the consequences that ensue.
The Bombing of Mako Reactor 1
Of the two video game bombings, Final Fantasy 7 Remake has more cut and dried morality. Even though Avalanche is willing to inflict collateral damage, including the wholesale slaughter of Shinra goons, the game makes it clear, early on, that Shinra is undeniably evil. Their activities are bleeding the planet’s literal life force dry and perpetuating a system of negligent governance that results in tremendous economic inequality.
To further drive home the point that Avalanche are the good guys, Final Fantasy 7 Remake makes a point of having Jesse try to limit civilian collateral damage. Meanwhile, Shinra deliberately destroys their own reactor in a more violent way to make the attack more volatile than intended.
The irony though, is that in both Remake and the original Final Fantasy 7, the incident paints Cloud as a less relatable character, who is more culpable in the Shinra bombing than Cyberpunk’s V is in Arasaka’s bombing. He’s also less noble than the other members of Avalanche. While Barrett’s people are out to save the planet, Cloud repeatedly makes it clear that he is there to earn a paycheck by any means necessary, and doesn’t give a damn about the ideals behind the operation. This is mostly supposed to serve as a jumping off point for character growth, but there is no question that Cloud is willing to pull a trigger that endangers thousands of lives.
While both the original Final Fantasy 7 and Remake start with the same note, and Remake tries to tone down Avalanche’s inherently violent nature, the game still forces players to walk through the aftermath of the bombing and focuses on Tifa’s ambivalent participation in Avalanche with greater depth and nuance. Remake also uses more NPC dialogue and in-game media to condemn Avalanche as violent terrorists rather than noble freedom fighters. One gets the distinct sense that players are ultimately supposed to come down on the side of Avalanche, but the game at least wants people to reflect on whether their actions are justified.
Cyber Attacks and Mini-Nukes
No matter which of Cyberpunk 2077’s three origin stories players choose, nomads, street kids, and corpo-rats all end up in the same place at the end the game’s lengthy prologue: re-living the final memories of a rockstar-famous terrorist. Johnny Silverhand and his crew storm the Night City headquarters of the Arasaka Corporation, and level the building with a miniature nuclear warhead. Players are forced to carry out the operation from Silverhand’s perspective regardless of what choices their avatar, V, made previously. And depending on your background, Arasaka may seem like an unknown quantity at first.
Players who select the corporate background have a little more insight, however. That particular background begins with V as an upper-middle corporate fixer for Arasaka, dealing with the direct aftermath of a job that has just gone to hell. The exact details are murky, but V’s boss resolves the crisis by cybernetically assassinating the members of a summit in Frankfurt—another drastic act of terrorism that does not actually solve Arasaka’s problem, but manages to buy the corporation some time for further scheming. This scene clearly illustrates the morality of multinational mega-corporations in Cyberpunk, and Arasaka in particular: if you are out to make an omelet, you had best be prepared to break a lot of eggs.
This means that corpo-rats will likely feel less ambivalent about Silverhand destroying the company’s flagship building, but regardless of background, V repeatedly refers to Silverhand as a terrorist with a great deal of derision. It is worth noting that depending on the choices players make, V can be just as ruthless as Silverhand. But they are not directly responsible for the bombing, and possibly unwilling to take similar measures. Both games place a buffer between players, and the atrocities their avatars commit.
Mega Corps in Mega Cities
While Cyberpunk gradually reveals Silverhand’s character and his motivations for the bombing, it is worth noting that it has another commonality with Final Fantasy 7 Remake: the target of both bombings are corporations with the power and influence of governments, but none of the oversight. Shinra is a nation-state as much as it is a corporate interest, controlling every aspect of it’s flagship city, Midgar. And in Cyberpunk, one quickly comes to understand the police force, and the rest of Night City’s “government” are almost entirely beholden to corporate interests. In both cases, the terrorists are not total anarchists or religious zealots, but rebels.
In both games, the big bad that serves as a justifiable terror target is corporations run amok; systems where those in power practice neglect rather than governance. And the perfect metaphor for those narratives, the staple that makes punk stories hang together, is the concept of the mega city. Both Midgar and Night City are metropolises where the street is forced to finds its own uses for things, establishing its own tenuous ecosystem of order while corporate heads lounge in ivory towers, sipping champagne.
It would be inaccurate to refer to Midgar as a cyberpunk world, given the lack of emphasis on networked technology, but there are unmistakable touches of that genre in the city’s design. The architecture has clear shades of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles, and Barrett Wallace technically qualifies as an augmented human, switching out weaponized arm attachments like Cyberpunk’s runners “swap chrome” for different jobs.
The unifying factor between both games is punk as a philosophy, with heroes rebelling against capitalist anti-utopias. Midgar simply substitutes cyberware with magic.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available for PC, PlayStation 4, Stadia, and Xbox One, with PS5 and Xbox Series X versions also in development.
