So was there a point to all this? [Spoilery]

[Wraith_Magus]

I suppose I should just state up front that this is a TL;DR thread about trying to find themes and meanings and other English Lit criticism stuff that if you don't like thinking about entertainment because "armchair film critics need to just shut up!", you can just move along, because this thread's not for you...

Also, I have to talk about the reveals of character arcs to really talk about them as characters, so spoilers, I guess.

That said, while I liked the ride this game went along, and enjoyed the many, many references, I'm stuck puzzled over what the actual meaning of this exercise was supposed to be.

That is, an action flick takes a few assumed themes it doesn't question too much, and then makes the whole story about building up to a Good Guy stopping a Bad Guy. A romance is about building up to a relationship being formed.

Things don't need to be about a traditional 3-act story arc by any means, they can be about exploring some sort of themes or just purely a worldbuilding exercise (which is what made Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell such icons)... but this game doesn't seem to do that, either, because it seems like the "main plot" was all about interpersonal character arcs. At the same time, the "main plot" involving Jill and Gaby was about 5% of the game, so you really need to see this more like an anthology story, and in those, you need to look to overarching themes to really understand the meaning and impact of the story... but I'm having real trouble finding anything that could be considered a main theme in this story.

I mean, the only thing that pops out at me is how aggressively pro-LGBT this game is (Alma is basically the only explicitly heterosexual character in a cast nearly entirely bi) to the point that having the mention of a social circle actually be opposed to a lesbian actually seems jarringly out of place. (Who are these people, and where did they come from in a world where someone declaring themselves a rough-and-tumble "man's man" is implicitnly understood to mean "I'm strictly gay"?)

The game opens up with talking about how this city is such a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and people constantly talk about police corruption and violence on the streets and evil megacorporations... but outside of the riot sequence (which was only indirectly caused by any of those things), you never actually see or feel any of that in-story. It's all tell, no show. In fact, the only in-game avatars of the evil megacorporation are the kind and generous Stella, and the corrupt police force is represented by the honest, upright, and self-sacrificing Sei and Tim, completely cutting that angle's message to ribbons. You could make the argument that this game actually tries to argue Sei's angle that you shouldn't judge people by the groups they associate with at face value... but no other story arc outside theirs actually backs that idea up.

The game isn't a♥♥♥♥♥♥take deconstruction on the whole notion of the cyberpunk story cliche because it tends to like the tropes too much to take them down. (In fact, the earlier demo was a better example of this, making all the more stereotyped stock cyberpunk characters in a supposed middle-of-nowhere dive bar having all accidentally tripped over one another in a cascade of coincidences and cliches.)

Beyond that, character drama anthologies work when all exploring different concepts along a theme... but it's kind of hard to grasp what theme might unify such diverse characters. (I mean, I'm going to assume Streaming-chan, as hilarious as that parody is, is just a gag and not meant to be part of the main thematic take.)

The story tends to lean on an optimistic note on the interpersonal dramas, and even in a worldbuilding sense with the Lilim being generally progressive optimistic look on transhumanism... but that means listening to the shown themes of the interpersonal character arcs but ignoring the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ told themes of the horrible dystopian future where crime is rampant and people are constantly starving from food shortages.

You could go with a theme of famly being important and not necessarily denoted by blood, but that only really applies to Jill, Alma, and Dorothy's story arcs (and that's if you presume Anna actually interacting with Dorothy going forward far more than is actually shown), along with maybe counting Stella and Sei's arc as a kinda-sorta family if you're generous... but that still makes you wonder what *Kira* Miki, Donovan, Kim, Taylor, Ingram, Jamie, Gil, and the rest are supposed to be adding to that story. Likewise, it begs the question, "why did this have to be a cyberpunk game to tell a story about sulky young adults not being honest about their feelings, since that could have taken place in literally any setting with sentient humanoids?"

Likewise, I'm not sure if Anna's supposed to just be a joke or not. Her status as a glitch in the system was somewhat hinted at with the whole transhumanist brain uploading thing... but then she's just hit by a truck instead of being someone who died experimenting with digitizing brains and was assumed a failure but secretly wasn't. So she really is just a normal ghost, she just has glitchy effects and pops out of TVs because... she's a science ghost somehow? I dunno, the game doesn't know, and apparently doesn't care!

It feels like it was set in the future, but doesn't actually make up its mind about having anything to say about the future, other than that robots are cool, and it'd be nice if gays could have equal rights, already.

To quote the Simpsons:
Lisa: "Maybe there is no moral, Mom?"
Homer: "Exactly! It's just a bunch of stuff that happened."

Is there anything I'm missing that actually gives this game some sort of unifying theme?

[MaltyPop]

Interpersonal growth.

[Wraith_Magus]

Originally posted by Arisulane:

Interpersonal growth.

A) That would describe literally any form of character drama, and is so vague as to lack meaning. Everyone grows and changes all the time. If you aren't going to have some sort of theme or meaning behind that growth, it just amounts to "a bunch of stuff happened". That's why I'm asking if anyone can see some sort of unifying theme behind these disperate stories and a set of worldbuilding concepts that are directly at odds with one another.

B) That again begs the question of why bother making it cyberpunk if you don't have anything to actually say about the setting. (I mean, replace "nanomachine rejection" with "polio", and you can basically set the main plot in the Great Depression. Helll, you could bring FDR hiding his polio in on it, and actually have it tie into real world events and have some actual things to say about the real world that way while you were at it! )

[RIQ]

Maybe escapism? We have a lot of people telling their problems in a bar and also the protagonist having to come to terms with something that they're trying to ignore.

[Wraith_Magus]

Originally posted by RIQ:

Maybe escapism? We have a lot of people telling their problems in a bar and also the protagonist having to come to terms with something that they're trying to ignore.

While there is some merit to that, it's also not supported by a majority of the stories. Stella isn't running from anything, she just likes the atmosphere. Tim (and to an extent Gil) is running, but it's not from their own emotional demons, but from people literally wanting to kill them, and Tim only stops when his pursuers are disbanded, so his actions were perfectly justified and he doesn't have any reason to face some emotional blockage the way that Jill or even to a lesser extent Alma does.

I should also point out that "escapism" as a theme usually doesn't mean "don't run away from your problems", but rather "escapist fantasy". For example, how Harry Potter is all about a little orphan boy who escapes from his miserable mundane life where he's nobody to a world of magic where he's the specialest Chosen One EVAR, he learns magic, lives in an awesome magic castle, becomes friends with a giant that raises pet monsters, becomes a sports star, saves the world, and gets married to his childhood sweetheart. Escapist fantasy is about how things would be awesome if you could just have superpowers.

That's kind of why the cyberpunk future setting is a little strange: Cyberpunk is a dark future, the narration about the world is all about how the city shouldn't even exist, it's starkly class-divided, and the working class are literally starving to death. It's second only to post-apocalyptic desert planet Mad Max-style future in bleakness as an actual inhabitable future (Terminator machine war future was only good for being something to avoid, not actually telling stories within). Normally, cyberpunk can be escpaist by making the character so ludicrously overpowered with cyber crap (I.E. Ghost in the Shell or Deus Ex) that they can indulge in escapist fantasy even though it demands at least some countenancing the plight of the poor in these settings.

Jill, however, is a working class schlub that's just barely managing to keep paying her electric bill. This is practically the same setting as Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor... and in fact, that's a perfect game to contrast this one against. Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is a cyberpunky future where it's obvious that all those escapist fantasy heroes are living their lives somewhere out of sight, but you're not invited to it because you're just a janitor and you'll never be that cool. Instead, you get to scavenge the garbage the great heroes toss out during their refueling stops between saving space princesses to see if you can sell any of it for scrap to feed yourself. Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor take a genre setting and deconstructs it by changing what sort of character you play to send a really deliberate, unmistakable message about the people that society leaves behind.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/436500/Diaries_of_a_Spaceport_Janitor/

This is where I get confused by VA-11 Hall-A, because making a cyberpunk future where you're just a bartender who serves drinks to the cyborg assassins, master hackers with body augments, robot people hookers and idols straight from 80's pulp, along with the mandatory film noir detective who just happens to overhear all these ludicrously overwrought plots without having any power and being shut out in the gutter barely scraping by as these people shred machinery worth enough to feed all the poor in the city for a month just to have a big explosive setpiece finale.

That's a perfect setup for social commentary, but once it sets that up, VA-11 Hall-A doesn't seem to know what it wants to say. The future is bleak, but we're supposed to be optimistic anyway because YAY, Power of Friendship! The world is being ruined by corporate greed, but then one of the unblemished good guys of the work in Stella says it's fine so long as the employment numbers stay good, and nobody can seem to argue with that. (I know a bajillion environmental movies that have an answer to the idea that ruining the planet is fine so long as you avoid short-term unemployment issues, and the answer doesn't even HINT at wage disparity...) Nobody seems to say anything that another character doesn't counteract.

It just winds up seeming scared to actually take a stand on anything other than gay rights and a vague optimism in technology that I wonder if either the writing was done by people of totally different minds on the subject or an author that changed their mind constantly, or did a South Park and was just scared of actually saying anything so they tried to make every side sound extreme.

[Null Moon]

It's a slice of life. Have you seen Patterson? There is no theme in that one too. Just life happening. You're trying to find meaning in this game, but you're getting bogged down by basic cliches. Main themes, at least to me are growth, friendship and your irrelevance on a global scale.

how aggressively pro-LGBT this game is (Alma is basically the only explicitly heterosexual character)

Really? Donovan, Ingram, Kim, Jamie, John-face, Kira Miki, Art, Tim, Deal are hetero until proven otherwise.

people constantly talk about police corruption and violence on the streets and evil megacorporations

I'm sure people in your country are talking about those things too... But do they impact you at any point in your life? Do you in your day to day life think about destroying Coca-cola, nestle or google? Is your friend who works at the bank, or in big corporation a literal villain or just a fun guy to hang out with and have a beer or two? Again, the point is, you as individual don't matter. Sei would never change attitude towards white knites, Stella with all her money will never turn Zaibatsu into an ethical corporation. All you can do is live and help those around you.
The whole point

I'm going to assume Streaming-chan, as hilarious as that parody is, is just a gag

Why? "Streaming-chans" are walking our streets right now. Why wouldn't it be a thing in 206x? She is, just like any other person that walked into a bar, a weird customer that came in one day never to be seen again. A fun story to remember.

themes of the horrible dystopian future where crime is rampant and people are constantly starving from food shortages.

Is it a dystopian future though? This game was being made in the same conditions that it portrays sans the catgirls and brains in a jar of course.

"why did this have to be a cyberpunk game to tell a story about sulky young adults not being honest about their feelings, since that could have taken place in literally any setting with sentient humanoids?"

Why not? Is there a rule what story can be told in a cyberpunk setting? If you can tell a story about police unit in a absurd fantasy town, why can't you tell a story about a life of a bartenter in a cyberpunk setting?
Yeah, they could probably make it happen in our time, but wouldn't it be too much on the nose? Too real to laugh about it?

[Wraith_Magus]

Originally posted by Null Moon:

It's a slice of life. Have you seen Patterson? There is no theme in that one too. Just life happening. You're trying to find meaning in this game, but you're getting bogged down by basic cliches. Main themes, at least to me are growth, friendship and your irrelevance on a global scale.

The quick answer is "no, I haven't seen Patterson", however, a quick Googling shows that Roger Ebert managed to fill a page and a half with discussion of its themes and meanings[www.rogerebert.com], so obviously, it had some. Just because someone doesn't come out and tell you the moral of the story doesn't mean that there isn't any sort of consistent themes at work, even as an implicit assumption of the writers or directors or authors or developers of the media. Gone With the Wind wasn't explicitly written for the sole purpose of saying that the Confederacy and slavery and institutional racism were awesome, but that's a pretty damn obvious theme to any conscious observer.

Slice-of-Life is a genre, not a purpose or statement, nor a replacement for one. Slice-of-Life/SitComs/whatever have themes and some sort of point they try to make with their various characters. Simply saying that because it's from a specific genre means it has nothing to say is not an answer.

Originally posted by Null Moon:

Really? Donovan, Ingram, Kim, Jamie, John-face, Kira Miki, Art, Tim, Deal are hetero until proven otherwise.

Why? You're just taking "hetero until proven otherwise" into this game as your own bias. ( For that matter, was the gender of *Kira* Miki's producer even specified?)

Nearly all those characters simply do not state any kind of sexual preference, or at least never make any statement that would negate the idea that they are bi in the case of Donovan or Gil. Deal, Ingram, Jamie, Art, Tim, and Kim have no statements implicating their sexuality at all... so obvoiusly they're straight when basically every other character that talks about their sexuality is gay or bi?

Since nearly everyone who has any preference at all is gay or bi, wouldn't the rational assumption be that someone is bisexual until proven otherwise?

Originally posted by Null Moon:

I'm sure people in your country are talking about those things too... But do they impact you at any point in your life? Do you in your day to day life think about destroying Coca-cola, nestle or google? Is your friend who works at the bank, or in big corporation a literal villain or just a fun guy to hang out with and have a beer or two? Again, the point is, you as individual don't matter. Sei would never change attitude towards white knites, Stella with all her money will never turn Zaibatsu into an ethical corporation. All you can do is live and help those around you.
The whole point

My life (or any life, even a very dramatic one), sans editing, would be a really boring story. Who wants to sit in a theater watching 8 hours of a famous person sleeping?

You're talking about willful violations of the concept of Conservation of Detail[tvtropes.org], which is just terrible writing.

Dialogue can have tangential purpose, to be sure; Reservoir Dogs famously replaced its character introductions with a protracted conversation about tipping, and Pulp Fiction did the same with discussing quarter pounders with cheese. The tip or burger wasn't important later in the film, but the scenes served to establish the characters, their relationships, and create an overall tone that allowed the extreme violence that would follow to contrast with the banality of the previous scenes.

Again, I have to ask, WHY is this a cyberpunk game at all? The "main" plot can be rewritten to have taken place in the Great Depression without missing a beat.

Or, if we want to go back to comparisons to existing genres, let's say someone wanted to make a romance story in a medieval fantasy setting with wizards and dragons, but the actual story takes place between mundane peasants and nobody casts a single spell or sees a single monster. Why would you even bother setting that in a fantasy when it serves literally no narrative purpose, and telling people that there may be some interesting magic stuff happening elsewhere, but you're not going to see it is a waste of text and the reader's time?

The only plots that really require a futuristic setting are Jamie's generic cyborg assassin (who was demoted to near-walldressing and has no real story, here), and the ones with Lilim, but that doesn't require a cyberpunk setting. In fact, the Lilim practically beg not to be in a cyberpunk setting considering how optimistic they generally are about a technological future... which is the absolute opposite of the default themes of a severely pessimistic cyberpunk setting whose whole existence as a genre is about how technological advances will be terrible for the vast majority of people.

It seems like the author/dev came up with the idea of cyberpunk before having any idea what to say about it, and then proceeded to write out a plot for a utopian Star Trek future where The Federation mass-produced Data, instead.

Originally posted by Null Moon:

Why? "Streaming-chans" are walking our streets right now. Why wouldn't it be a thing in 206x? She is, just like any other person that walked into a bar, a weird customer that came in one day never to be seen again. A fun story to remember.

... You DO get that I'm talking about themes, right?

Yes, I'm saying she's JUST someone thrown in as a meme to take a potshot at a thing today to be "a fun story to remember", and that's all, as opposed to a character added in to make some sort of meaning or further a theme in the rest of the story.

Originally posted by Null Moon:

Is it a dystopian future though? This game was being made in the same conditions that it portrays sans the catgirls and brains in a jar of course.

[...]

Why not? Is there a rule what story can be told in a cyberpunk setting? If you can tell a story about police unit in a absurd fantasy town, why can't you tell a story about a life of a bartenter in a cyberpunk setting?
Yeah, they could probably make it happen in our time, but wouldn't it be too much on the nose? Too real to laugh about it?

The fact that you openly question whether it's dystopian while trying to defend it kind of proves my point that the cyberpunk setting was not at all the setting the devs actually wanted or should have used.

Again, it's like having no magic present in the story in a fantasy setting - why did you make it a fantasy setting at all if you weren't going to have any fantasy? Cyberpunk is an inherently dystopian future genre; that's what makes it cyberpunk, just like elves or wizards or dragons make fantasies fantasy.

And yes, there is a rule against that sort of nonsense, that being the Law of Conservation of Detail, as previously mentioned. You're boring and frustrating the audience with unnecessary infodumps talking about crap that doesn't matter to the story. Good writers don't do that.

And for the record, I'm not saying that the developers had no idea what they're doing and that this story absolutely could have been in some other setting, but that if there's some sort of concept that they wanted to explore in a cyberpunk setting, I'm not actually seeing it in the text.

[RIQ]

Yeah, sorry. I wanted to talk about the act of running from your problems so I used "escapism" because I always thought it just meant that. And even if I was using a more correct term that's not all that I think there is to it so let me try to express myself better.

I don't think that every character has a heavy emotional baggage that they have to deal with. I just think it ends up being mainly about how they all use the bar to de-stress in their own ways. Or not even necessarily to de-stress but just to get out of their routines and do something different that doesn't have to do with the big bad world outside. I mean, it's even referred to as an oasis.

I don't think the cyberpunk world and everything that's happening outside was ever meant to be anything other than secondary. I just think they needed a world that could be ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up and stressful both to juxtapose the peaceful bar setting and also to give something for everyone to gossip about.

Other than that I just think it was a matter of personal choice (maybe a setup for future projects?).

[Fenkhir]

You should not forget that the game has been made by a small team in Venezuala. On one side, they are very few people (who describes themselves as otaku/weaboos) and they didn't really expect such a success with this game; it was more an experiment they were trying to make (character development, gameplay, etc...) so in a way, their goal was to put everything they liked into some sort of thing that happens to be a visual novel. They had a goal: A slice of life game lived through dialogs and a couple cutscenes; but they were experimenting on a model that didn't necesserely work before.
Also, they're fully aware that most people wouldn't like the game (anime cyberpunk visual novel; the lgtb subject brought many times, the humor not everyone likes)

On the other side, as I said, they poured a love and subjects they wanted to talk about in this game, and the second subject in their life in Venezuela. Basically they have a lot of problems, shortage of food is not uncommon, they can't afford good quality of life, etc... And it really transpires through the game. People have problems, but people also have to live their lifes. Corruption (in Venezuela and Glitch City) may be everywhere, you still have to go out and buy groceries. Then a policeman may confiscate your vegetables, it happens. Tough life, but people can't be unhappy forever, so they try to smile, see positives things in an ugly world.

Honestly I found much more meaning in this game when I learned about the Devs' situation (it was through their twitter and blog I think), and i hope you do too now. It really is but a representation, Venezuela through Glitch City, and other subjects in the mix.

(English is not my first language so I'd understand if you don't fully understand me)

[Wraith_Magus]

Originally posted by 626th:

You should not forget that the game has been made by a small team in Venezuala. On one side, they are very few people (who describes themselves as otaku/weaboos) and they didn't really expect such a success with this game; it was more an experiment they were trying to make (character development, gameplay, etc...) so in a way, their goal was to put everything they liked into some sort of thing that happens to be a visual novel. They had a goal: A slice of life game lived through dialogs and a couple cutscenes; but they were experimenting on a model that didn't necesserely work before.
Also, they're fully aware that most people wouldn't like the game (anime cyberpunk visual novel; the lgtb subject brought many times, the humor not everyone likes)

On the other side, as I said, they poured a love and subjects they wanted to talk about in this game, and the second subject in their life in Venezuela. Basically they have a lot of problems, shortage of food is not uncommon, they can't afford good quality of life, etc... And it really transpires through the game. People have problems, but people also have to live their lifes. Corruption (in Venezuela and Glitch City) may be everywhere, you still have to go out and buy groceries. Then a policeman may confiscate your vegetables, it happens. Tough life, but people can't be unhappy forever, so they try to smile, see positives things in an ugly world.

Honestly I found much more meaning in this game when I learned about the Devs' situation (it was through their twitter and blog I think), and i hope you do too now. It really is but a representation, Venezuela through Glitch City, and other subjects in the mix.

(English is not my first language so I'd understand if you don't fully understand me)

Well, none of those things are really reasons why there wouldn't be a focused message in the narrative. In fact, smaller projects with smaller numbers of people often focus much more upon a small set of ideas.

Saying Glitch City is Venezuela makes it make more sense, as it means it's just modern real-life with a coat of fiction paint over it rather than trying to talk about how they fear the future will be... but there are still things they didn't quite manage to convey very well.

For example, you read about cops stealing groceries only in a message board post. It's never a part of the main focus of the game. Jill never has trouble with cops. There's corruption you read about, but you never see it. In fact, all the evil, corrupt White Knights you meet are actually good guys, the only member of the wealthy elite is humanitarian Stella, and the closest to a class confrontation is Art griping over a beer before conceding the point. There's terrorist attacks and Sei goes through hell, but you only hear about it second-hand. You could go through the whole game thinking it's not real, it won't happen to you, you know?

Hence, it's hard to see it as a main theme of the game.

When this game had a proof of concept from the Kickstarter, and it was just a single day, it actually had a much tighter and more cohesive narrative, since all the characters (besides Anna) seemed to actually know each other and had run into each other, creating a sort of "small, crazy world" theme where all their lives were always interconnected no matter how strange it would seem.

In the final game, however, a lot of it doesn't seem to connect together. Mario, for example, doesn't seem to have anything to do with any main plot or themes.

[xX_Shadow Wizzard_Xx]

yeah they really over did it with the lgbt ♥♥♥♥. You can talk about characters and how they develop but i dont really care about that. All i got from the game was a beautiful pixel art style some funny jokes and a nice fiting soundtrack and that was overall good enogh for me(wasnt expecting a masterpice anywa)

[IDiivil]

I felt really unsatisfied by the story as well. It's a shame because the world building and character arcs seemed so interesting, but nothing paid off by the end.

Like... here are just a few of my frustrations with it all:

What's the deal with Gillian? Why are we left to only be satisfied with, "He gets a girl and the end." It sounded like he had such serious, crazy stuff to deal with, and the fact a simple romance fixes that out of the blue is odd to me.

What was this whole random arc of Dana being stuck in things? It was ultimately never answered. Granted, none of her stuff was really ever addressed.

On that note, why didn't a Dana x Jill happen? I don't NEED a 'ship to occur, but I find it odd how casual Dana was about Jill's obvious interest in her. It sounded almost stalkerish to some degree (such as when Alma hacked Jill's phone and pointed out all the photos of Dana, including her dozing off at her desk).

What were the explosions/gunshots/heavy metal sounds the characters heard?

Who or what was Alice_Rabbit?

What was the point of so many of the side characters? You met Ingram, who was likely Dorothy's client, but he didn't really contribute anything. Jamie was useless. Taylor/Brain was a random addition. I don't get Mario's purpose. Lexi? TOMCAT? I could go on, but you get my point.

Also, considering Anna was Dorothy's arc, why was Anna haunting Jill? How did that even come about? She opened the game as the narrator, for God's sake! I thought Anna would be WAY more important.

~

I understand the game is about character development, being satisfied with the non-answers in life, and focusing on family/friends... but I just find it unacceptable on the AMOUNT that we were distracted with. Was it for length? I don't get why the creators decided to add so much of this for nothing. It felt like a lot of investment required on the players' part (time, anyways) for zero purpose, and that isn't OK writing to me.

[Wintermute]

I think the point was to be a cyberpunk bartender. You don't get to hear full story of every client that passes by.

It did good job on world-building.
It did good job on character development. Extra points for actually developing protagonist as well.

And finally, it made amazing job not pushing any ideas up your throat. Instead of "YOU ARE A HORRIBLE HORRIBLE PERSON BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE HOMOSEXUALS AND DON'T THINK WOMAN ARE OPPRESSED" (looking at you, Red Strings Club), it went "Hey, pour me a drink. Oh, it just so happens I'm gay/lesbian, but let's not focus on this too much". It's not about ideas. Neither it's about those mega-plots cyberpunk loves so much. It's about specific people. Which is always a mark of a good story.

[Wraith_Magus]

Originally posted by Wintermute:

I think the point was to be a cyberpunk bartender. You don't get to hear full story of every client that passes by.

It did good job on world-building.
It did good job on character development. Extra points for actually developing protagonist as well.

And finally, it made amazing job not pushing any ideas up your throat. Instead of "YOU ARE A HORRIBLE HORRIBLE PERSON BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE HOMOSEXUALS AND DON'T THINK WOMAN ARE OPPRESSED" (looking at you, Red Strings Club), it went "Hey, pour me a drink. Oh, it just so happens I'm gay/lesbian, but let's not focus on this too much". It's not about ideas. Neither it's about those mega-plots cyberpunk loves so much. It's about specific people. Which is always a mark of a good story.

Here's the thing, though: You don't have to hear the full story to understand the themes of that story. You can have a war story about a nurse who tries to treat injured soldiers, and only hear scraps of their life stories and see bits and mementos of their friends and family, but if all you really hear all throughout the game is cries of pain and the total senselessness of violence, and a general futility as soldiers either die or get patched up then injured again and come straight back to you, you can probably make out that the story being told isn't really giving a "Rah-rah" pro-war message, now can't you?

You just said it, you can clearly get the message that both this game and Red Strings Club (which I haven't played myself, by the way), are very pro-LGBT. You aren't even asked in VA11-Hall-A, you just ARE playing a bisexual, and nearly all your friends are, too. Sexuality IS definitely a theme in this game... it's just not really a unifying one. Whether or not you feel that the topic was forced too ham-handedly in one game doesn't mean that anything less than ham-handed forcing of a topic means it's not a theme, nor that making something a theme of a work means it has to be blatant and annoying. If anything, VA11-Hall-A is pushing that message far harder, since Red Strings, from what I have just been told of it, at least acknowledges not liking gays as a possibility. In VA11-Hall-A, hating gays is like believing the world is flat, it's instantly dismissed as something primitive and barbaric that just isn't done in modern society. Hell, if Mario serves any purpose at all, it's to underline that fact by making the only person uncomfortable with their sexuality someone worried that they're not Hard Gay enough and have a bit of Camp Gay in them.

I'm all for character-focused drama, or even simple "sitcom"/"slice-of-life" storytelling, but even those have themes, or something to unify the characters. Azumanga Daioh, still one of my favorites, definitely has a cohesive themes based around the friendship of the main cast, the acceptingness of the quirks of the oddballs in their clique, and the general sense of high school as a period of growth and maturity. (All of which can be best highlighted when, near the end of the series, as the girls are all preparing to graduate, "Osaka" (the space-case), is unsure of what she wants to do with her life, and Chiyo (the grade-skipping genius precocious little girl), suggests becoming a teacher because she'd be good at "giving people other ways to look at the world." In response to which, Yukari (the notably childish teacher and supposed figure of mature authority), gets angry and starts demanding of Chiyo whether she thinks being a teacher is easy or that she's dumb (because while Chiyo sees 'Osaka' as capable of some cutting insights between her delusions, Yukari always just dismissed her as an idiot). When I watch Azumanga Daioh, I definitely understand why the characters are there, and what it's building up to, even if I wished it could have gone on longer.

The thing is, there's a lot of stuff in this game that just isn't that clearly serving any real purpose and make the game as a whole much less cohesive.

Likewise, is this game really good at worldbuilding? As I said before, the things that this game says in its introduction and in the newsfeeds that Jill reads is completely at odds with the world she actually sees and lives in. The game intro says that it's a city that shouldn't exist and is made of pure crime and corporate greed... so clearly, the only faces of the corporations we see is charitable and a woman of the people. The police force is purely corrupt and steals from the people on the streets, so the only ones we see are friendly people who believe in self-sacrifice for the concept of justice. It's a world where the poor are suffering constant food shortages, but everyone you meet is perfectly capable of splurging on the "big" upgrades to fancy drinks largely without comment with the sole exception of the guy who's a detective with really wealthy clients... which doesn't make as much sense as someone like delivery boy Mario being the example of blue-collar struggle. (Or hell, how about the museum janitor being poor instead of splurging on whatever comes back after an incomprehensible order?!) How about the riots that are so bad with bullets flying all across the street so thick that Jill has to take Sunday off and enjoy it in the open air drinking beers perfectly safe in the middle of the supposed roaring gunfight?

Again, the problem is that what this game has to say about its world is rather inconsistent, outside of being rather pro-LGBT.

Furthermore, worldbuilding in and of itself isn't really laudible. Just to give an example, one of the major complaints about the prequel Star Wars trilogy was that George Lucas spent all his time worrying about worldbuilding making Naboo have a hollow core you could sail a submarine through and underwater shield cities and such, yet didn't actually use of any of that to make any kind of point or tell any cohesive story. What purpose does this worldbuilding serve? Worldbuilding can serve to create a mystery about a world that can lead to a big payoff. Haibane Renmei, to use another anime example, is an anime entirely about worldbuilding who these kinda-sorta angel creatures are and what they are doing in this strange floating island world, as well as the character drama of its individual inhabitants... and it builds up to a climax that both is the point of the two most important characters, as well as pretty heavily implies what the world really is and gives strong clues as to how it works. You could also do worldbuilding just to set up another game that pays off all these plot threads this game throws out, as someone else mentioned... but where's this game that pays all these plot threads off? This game's set in the world of another game that was released by another company, and which has no sequel, and only has a couple cameo appearances that don't really impact the main story of this game at all except being a sort of cross-promotional thing.

Likewise, the world it builds tends to be directly at odds with what themes it does seem to try to have (sometimes...), such as the cyberpunk setting being relentlessly bleak and filled with antisocial types that start riots and steal food from other starving citizens, while the actual character drama you directly deal with is pretty optimitistic about the future, because it's filled with cool robot idols who really, truly do love all their fans instead of being some cynical marketing gimmick, and people that live forever in the cyber cloud and reunite with their funny robot pseudo-sister, and even the broke-ass bartender generally gets along OK so long as you don't blow all your money on wallpaper and forget to save enough for the rent. Cyberpunk as a setting is about saying that class differences as a result of technology will inevitably get worse and lead to a ruling class of technological elites and their machines will make all other humans obsolete rats scurrying through the refuse left below the shining cities in the sky the elites will build... but there's none of that desperation in this game, everyone's still getting along OK, and the elite can have a friendly conversation with a rat and have him grudgingly admit that there's plenty of employment for the useless unemployable surplus rats. See how that doesn't really fit the theme?

It's a problem of incoherance. I can walk away from most stories knowing what it was that its creators valued, even if I can't point to a specific message it was trying to beat you over the head about. This game, however, seems to be conflicted as to what it's about.

[Wintermute]

I didn't see the sexuality as a "theme", that was my point. It was just there, without any accent - just a character trait. Honestly, would entire SJW croud be more like that, I would have been much more allright with them. Anyway:

If we go by the idea that Jill is the main protagonist, then the main theme would be the loss of a loved ones, associated regrets and what they do to people. Also, about freedom, choices and responsibility for them. Basically, just go over Jill's arc and take notes.

Now, let's go over characters that touch on those things and present them in different situations:

Ingram - loss of the daughter.
Sei and Stella - the incident with bank, and Sei's story of becoming a white knight
Kim - choosing to reject the life that was killing her
Dorothy - arc with her mother. Also, one can argue she as a character is a twist on entire "loving relationship" thing.
Alma - her arc with syster.
Art - his story with daughter and arc with assassin he was searching for
Norma - what little there is
Mario - getting trapped in life you don't belong in and all that
*Kira*Miki - life choices. She did went from jazz musitian to idol because she felt it was better.

Now, characters that reinforce stories of above-mentioned people:
Donovan - creating context for Kim. And he was too much of magnificent bastard to not show off anyway.
Virgillio - context for Sei.
That girl - syster of dead Ex, forgot the name. Obvious.
Boss - same.
Anna - didn't finish yet, but I suppose she is Dorothy's dead "syster"

I didn't close number of arcs yet, but so far useless for those themes seam to be:
Jamie and Gilliam - I honestly don't get those 2. They are good characters, but so far I don't see why are they there
Taylor - that one was especially weird
Streaming-Chan - joke I guess?
Rad Shiba and dogs - ok, this one is a joke for sure. And the raddest thing in the entire game

I didn't finish Betty and Deal arc yet, and so far have no idea where to put them.

So, not so misdirected when you put it this way, is it?

[Wintermute]

As for world building, for something told exclusively through passing talk and internet media, I got pretty good idea of what's the city like and how it works. To go over your points:

First, nothing is absolute. The fact that corporations and police are corrupt doesn't mean there are no good people left in them. It actually makes Stella and Sei that much better as characters - surviving as exactly opposite of what the system intends them to be.

Museum "janitor" is an ex-white knight on the run, by the way.

Mario is rich enough to own a motorcycle to begin with.

And to finish with "rich and poor" points, Jill herself is a bartender - not the most profitable job. Now look at amount of ♥♥♥♥ you can buy with that money.

Jill is enjoying said night in a company of her boss, who is not to be ♥♥♥♥♥♥ with. Also, my understanding is the entire district is pretty far from center and the overall mess. "Hell hole", "crackhouse" etc. It's the place Sei and Virgillio came to hide in, actually. And Jill lives not too far from there.

I'll stop here, as it's a bit hard to fish out your points from wall of text :P But as for entire "cyberpunk should be grimdark" thing - I personally think it would have been boring and cliche AF. It's the contrast of people surviving in such a place that makes the game so interesting for me. Also, quite a lot of them go through periods of fear and uncertainty. And keep in mind that when you talk to them they are of various degrees of drunk.

And to answer that one question somewhere from above, about Alice-rabbit - didn't you notice the emblem when Alma was hacking bartending station? Paired with her dismissive stance on the entire story, I'd guess she is at least one of "rabbits".