What a shame - my next run will be as a katana only street kid.
Are you familiar with Cyberpunk? I'm more of a Shadowrun guy myself and in SR there is a hypercapitalist society but even despite the elves and dragons and whatnot it's still closer to our world than CP.
The corporate reach in the 2077 setting seems all over the place: on one hand, corps can start wars with each other as if they were countries but on the other hand Journalists are trusted by the public and can influence events. Maybe I haven't played enough but is there an alternative to corpoland? The nomads seem to be so but who is producing anything in this world? Corps own the farms and the industry but they still rely on labor contracts - why not make serfs out of their employees (SR had that covered already).
Also space travel is something that happens regularly but it's barely mentioned - is space that big of a deal? in the CP setting are there people signing up to travel the stars like the old timey pilgrims?
in the books what is the tone supposed to be? is the 2077 alternate history world completelly alien to the average 2020 resident or is it like our world but everyone dresses like a tosser? Some of the things are comical but they don't hold up to scrutiny.
For example, one of the cyberpsycho quests has you stop a guy that snapped and started shooting at the corpos that wanted to evict him from his workshop. When you dig around you'll see that Zetatech sold him the building but not the tools so he took another loan and then he inherited the debt of the previous owner etc, etc. But this transaction was between ZT and a small business owner, the zaibatsu gained pennies and it just showed how evil they are. My question would be - how the hell are there still small business owners in the CP world if the corps will smash you just to show how big their balls are? why would you even think of taking a loan since it's impossible to win against a corpo? in the source books are there any examples of wins against Arasaka or Zetatech by using the system?
In ShadowRun you have your megacorps, for example, Fuchi owns Stuffer Shack (a McDonald's type joint) and the branch manager gets to decide what deep frier to buy. Fuchi makes these deep friers but if a B corp makes the same deep friers at a fraction of the cost, the branch manager will make 10/10 times the call to swap equipment. The suits won't care but I feel that if this story were to be done in CP, that manager's house would receive an orbital bombardment. The corpo needs to show how evil they are after all.
Tl;dr - it feels that every single character has cyberpsychosis but we just don't know it.
First, I wish there were more swords than just katanas, but alas, no nice things.
Second... a bit. I've been interested on-and-off with the setting for a while, but there's a lot to cover with your wall of text. First, as part of cyberpunk, corporations have a lot less control over the Net than IRL, so its easy for a journalist to livestream and catch an audience. Have to move around a lot and have bodyguards and know how to defend themselves for obvious reasons, but they can reach an audience. As to the setting... unlike Shadowrun CP focuses almost entirely on Night City, which is basically a grimdark version of the Bay Area. Seriously, its actual location on the coast is just south of San Jose. So yes, you go to pretty much anywhere else and the corpo influence is a lot more limited. As to the serfdom, its because there's an actual federal government (well two, technically), but the corps are not extraterritorial, unlike SR. They are still bound by the laws of the land... and the fact the Second Amendment was ruled to cover armored vehicles and ATGM's. There's an actual lore-based reason why you can just walk up to a storefront and walk out no questions asked with an LMG over your shoulder, after all. So their reach is restricted to legal dodges and the fact there's more guns per capita in the USA in Cyberpunk than there is now.
The actual tone of the books is edgy late 80's crime, grit, and resource shortages with a lot in common with the Judge Dredd movies, and as usual they've done a terrible job "updating" that to Current Year. It actually is the year 2077 in the 2020 setting, and there's Cyberpunk RED as a 2050's RPG book to link the two. Unlike Shadowrun it really hasn't kept up with the times though, so there's a lot less fun bioware and it comes across as a mix between really dated and blatant Current Year Wakanda-ism.
As to the system... well, why would you play the corpo's game like that? They have endless lawyers and can write you into just about any contract they want if you don't read the fine print. So just open up a stall somewhere and if the cops hassle you... well, a few eddies will get you a business license on the spot. Just gotta renew it every so often, you know?
As to the cyberpsychosis... well, yeah. Cyberpsychosis is your psyche rebelling against the utterly inhuman state of things. Humans absolutely were not meant to live in a cyberpunk dystopia, and so everyone's constantly on edge, and when you start putting things into your body, directly attacking your entire sense of self... you see the end result../ISPOILER]
