Cyberpunk 2077: Arasaka Corporation Explained
Not all of Night City’s morally disinterested corporate giants are built the same. Here’s Cyberpunk 2077’s Arasaka Corporation explained.
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Explaining the Arasaka Corporation in Cyberpunk 2077 can be a difficult task, as the company has existed within the game’s universe since 1915 and undergone a series of significant changes. The corporation V grows increasingly familiar with as Cyberpunk 2077’s story progresses didn’t start out as the world-altering, power-hungry conglomerate it has become by 2077. Instead, Arasaka Corporation began as a manufacturer until Saburo Arasaka, still head of the company at the beginning of Cyberpunk 2077, first took over in 1960.
After Saburo’s rise to power, Arasaka Corporation slowly grew into an international powerhouse. Saburo focused on information – gathering it, using it against enemies and potential partners, and monopolizing it so that his company could begin innovating, or at least stealing, the tech others had breakthroughs on. To do that, Saburo created the company’s security division, Arasaka Security, which would eventually allow them to become more powerful and acquire clients at the upper echelons of every industry in the world. Arasaka was a participant in the Fourth Corporate War, and following the fallout, came to control Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City, which was established as an independent city-state.
That’s what leads to Arasaka Corporation in Cyberpunk 2077 being so visible everywhere – the company literally owns the city. Arasaka Corporation’s ongoing internal affairs, however, are a completely different story, and what players uncover during Cyberpunk 2077’s main campaign illustrates how the company’s concerns have become even more insidious than simply manipulating and controlling information: It now wants to control people’s very minds and souls, too.
What Arasaka Corporation Is Doing In Cyberpunk 2077
In Cyberpunk 2077, Arasaka Corporation has transcended the struggle of remaining relevant in the corporate wars and now seeks to extend its control as far as possible across the globe, largely ignoring the ‘smaller’ problems in Night City. When V gets tangled up in the mess surrounding Arasaka’s experimental biochip, they become embedded in the most prominent project the company has going – the development of the Soulkiller program and its uses in storing people’s minds on a massive mainframe server called Mikoshi. Essentially, from the moment Alt Cunningham, a famous netrunner and the developer of the earliest versions of Soulkiller, had the program stolen from her by Arasaka, the company has been refining it.
Soulkiller is designed to rip a person’s mind out of their body, creating a digital copy that, in theory, can then be transferred into another body. By the time V begins understanding the implications of Arasaka Corporations involvement in Cyberpunk 2077’s story, the company has been storing digital versions of people for decades, essentially keeping them imprisoned in a digital server without bodies. Of course, all of this is hidden from the general public, and very few know about Arasaka’s involvement in this troubling technology.
From a more public-facing perspective, Arasaka Corporation undergoes dramatic changes at the beginning of Cyberpunk 2077. Yorinobu Arasaka, following Act 1, becomes the acting leader of Arasaka Corporation, and his influence pushes the company even further towards pure malignance towards the general population. While Cyberpunk 2077 is pretty clear about its messaging in all corporations being bad, Arasaka Corporation is even worse than most – and it becomes obvious that the company needs to be stopped, just like Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Silverhand tried to do over 50 years prior to the game’s main campaign with an earth-shattering nuke and an anti-corporate agenda.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/cyberpunk-2077-arasaka-corporation-explained/