Cyberpunk for Flavor

Blood Dragon is a far cry from the others.

Cyberpunk is a genre that has a lot of cool aesthetics, fashions, toys, and themes. It is traditionally defined as dystopian science fiction emphasizing the role of technology as not necessarily a cure for social ills but another tool for oppression (but can also be used for resistance). However, one thing to note about cyberpunk is that it is also very cool and there's no reason not to incorporate elements of it into works not necessarily fitting into the genre as whole!

Cyberpunk for Flavor stories are not cyberpunk themselves but merrily mixes and matches tropes or setting elements to spruce up the world-building. They may be limited to an episode, a minor part of the setting, or even a character but they do exist.

If a work would fit in the cyberpunk genre (i.e. terrestrial sci-fi with an emphasis on cybernetics and electronics) except that it's not a Crapsack World, it should go under Post-Cyberpunk.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• One half of A Certain Magical Index is Urban Fantasy, the other half is high-tech technology and social conflict. It also involves some magic practitioners who try to have high technology destroyed. Though the mostly idealistic nature has it lean more towards Post-Cyberpunk.
• .hack//SIGN, and the franchise as a whole, depending on how much you know about C.C. Corp. The series is influenced by psychological and sociological subjects, such as anxiety, escapism and interpersonal relationships. The series focuses on a Wavemaster (magic user) named Tsukasa, a player character in a virtual reality massively multiplayer online role-playing game called The World. He wakes up to find himself in a dungeon in The World, but he suffers from short-term memory loss as he wonders where he is and how he got there.
• Den-noh Coil goes a fair way toward exploring the social impact that Augmented Reality has on the world, for good and ill, but it's all rather lighthearted, with some episodes diving into Magical Realism.
• Cowboy Bebop: Technology has improved enough to allow for inter-planetary travel, but it's not as if life and society in general has sunken to a level where the technology is casually abused and taken for granted.
• Blame! has monolithic megacorporations, The Government inept or out to get you, antiheroes, and transhumanism that creates as many problems as it solves. It takes the Cyberpunk genre to its extreme limits and ironically becomes less like traditional Cyberpunk as a result..
• Neon Genesis Evangelion has many of the classic tropes: corrupt government conspiracies planning to bring about The Singularity, cover-ups, "jacking in" (albeit into giant cyborgs), an Artificial Human who suffers from Clone Angst, pessimistic/miserable protagonists in a grimdark setting, existential questioning, and technology being used for very shady dealings. However, the series gradually becomes less tech-based and more mystical as it goes on.
• Interestingly, Puella Magi Madoka Magica has several of the trademarks of Cyberpunk, albeit with magic replacing technology. In spite of that, the show's themes of the Magical Girls being essentially Transhuman beings, complete with magic literally eating their souls, a shady scientific bureaucracy that manipulates them so that they can fulfil their energy production quotas, and a rebellious Anti-Hero, complete with a dark color motif, fighting against the higher ups are all very much Cyberpunk flavoured. However, since the world is much cleaner, and with the show's magic being used for good purposes in addition to the bad, it doesn't fully fit.
• Ninja Slayer, being a Parody of '80s and '90s anime as seen by Americans, has elements of Cyberpunk in the form of Neo Saitama. With its bright neon lights, police brutality, and ninja turf wars, as well as a few cybernetic limbs.
• Zegapain: Kyo Sogoru, a high school boy living in a city called Maihama, leads a normal life of school, romance, and the swim club. Kyo's life changes when he sees a beautiful girl, Shizuno Misaki, at the pool one day and discovers he is initially the only person who can see her. Agreeing to her request, Kyo is drawn into a world of fighting giant robots in a game-like world that he must save from Deutera Areas formed by aliens known as Gards-orm that threaten to destroy the earth. However, Kyo soon comes to realize that the world that he is living in might not even be real at all and begins to find that everything he is doing is strangely familiar.

Comic Books

• Many 2000 AD strips, most notably Judge Dredd have cyberpunk themes, even before Neuromancer came out. Judge Dredd, for example, has many of the social satire elements as well as technology run amuck with no improvement to society as a whole. Its protagonist is a fascist (Depending on the Writer), however, and the focus is primarily on the law versus technology.
• Dark Horse has Barb Wire from the Comics' Greatest World imprint. Although occurred in The '90s, the city of Steel Harbor looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland as seen in Mad Max and Hokuto no Ken in which the strongest survive, and the eponymous Barb Wire is an Action Girl who's also a Bounty Hunter. Also one of her allies, The Machine, is a transhuman with mechanical parts.
• Last Man Standing has a bit of Cyber-punkism with the evil MegaCorp known as Armtech, but some of its fantastical elements make it not quite a clear cut case.
• A chapter in Pugad Baboy portrays some elements of Cyberpunk when some of the characters get transported to a 2078 Manila in a portal. The Chinese-Filipino community has a greater influence than the native Filipinos with parts of the city under poor conditions.

Film

• Avatar: The inhabitants of the Pandora can connect to a natural/organic version of the internet via neural connection fibers, who are being threatened by a mining corporation. Earth in Avatar is overpopulated and has technology and adverts everywhere, and looks a little like Los Angeles from Blade Runner.
• In The Circle (2017), the eponymous circle is a MegaCorp with aspirations of manipulating elections, has a hand in the impeachment of a sitting senator, and whose goal is essentially the surveillance of everybody. Technically, the monitor watches worn by Circle employees could be considered cybernetics, as some of them are even fitted with tracking chips inside their bodies that work in conjunction with it. Fittingly, the film's soundtrack sounds very much like a cyberpunk-style synthesizer.
• Cloud Atlas: Neo Seoul is a Crapsaccharine World where androids work as abused slaves at a fast food restaraunt that punishes disbodience with death. The fact the androids are overly sexualized and abused in such a meaningless job as well as considered enemies of the state fully invokes the work.
• Mute (2018) is a mystery thriller set in a dystopic, cyberpunk Berlin. However, its storyline, about a mute bartender trying to find his missing girlfriend, plays out much more like a traditional noir than anything else. Indeed, it's easy to wonder why the film has a cyberpunk setting at all, given how little bearing it has on the plot — sure, there's mega corps, gangsters, and lots of tech, but the story ultimately boils down to a girl caught between the man she loves and her psycho ex-husband.
• Demolition Man presents a society that, although oppressive and totalitarian (featuring technological elements such as mandatory tracking implants and brainwashing of criminals), is primarily portrayed in a benign Political Overcorrectness way rather than violent suppression of thought and action.
• A good chunk of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) is set on a space station/city called "Knowhere", made of a dead Celestial's head. It's very much a gritty, cyberpunk location, with a seedy underworld and neon signs. A significant action scene also occurs here as well.
• The Girl From Monday has a future US ruled by a huge corporation that constantly spies on the citizens, harshly punishes any dissent, actively tries to brainwash youths, and seeks to commodify everything. There's a plucky underdog resistance against it, with the protagonist being a jaded man who aided the state of affairs coming to pass but who now deeply regrets this. However, most new technology is only mentioned or briefly seen without it playing much of a role in the story. There's also less of the stereotyped atmosphere, and the change is more implied or mentioned than shown.
• Many parts of Idiocracy can be described as cyberpunk Played for Laughs, with an emphasis on the "low life" half of the equation taken to Lower-Class Lout levels. Technology more advanced than what we have in the present day does exist, but it's all falling apart because the Stupid Future People who make up the world have forgotten how to maintain it, and much of it has been directed towards enabling human laziness and creating an Advert-Overloaded Future. In short, it's the aesthetics of cyberpunk applied to trailer parks, with all of the attendant stereotypes, instead of urban slums.
• Inception: The film's certainly more noir but the dream-sharing technology (and its illegal uses) are pretty cyber, while the general theme of Corporate Espionage is very punk. Also considered Post Cyber Punk.
• Pacific Rim's Bone Slums are overcrowded, impoverished, and technologically advanced with a constant threat of kaiju attack making their lives even more miserable.
• The French CG/live-action film Immortal has cyberpunk elements in addition to a wild number of other genre influences. It is the year 2095, New York City is a dystopian metropolis ruled by corrupt politicians controlled by the powerful Eugenics Corporation. The population consists of mutants, aliens and cybernetically/genetically enchanced humans, who are segregated by levels (with the humans on top).
• Outland is a science fiction Space Western taking place on a moon of Jupiter where the locals are frequently committing suicide due to their overreliance on a Fantastic Drug that the corporation is feeding them. The protagonist swiftly finds that no one actually cares and the system benefits from the feed.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera is a cyberpunk themed musical. In the Dystopian future, the most important thing you can mortgage is your organs and the people who loan to you not at all unhappy to take them as collateral.
• The Christian film series Superkids is about a group of children working against a MegaCorp called N.M.E (pronounced "enemy"), which put out Darker and Edgier children's shows, by operating a pirate broadcast station. And occasionally fighting off giant robots.
• Total Recall (2012) takes place in a Crapsack World in a grimy underbelly of society and the heroes go against a government conspiracy? Yes.
• WarGames is one of the earliest present day examples as our Playful Hacker unwittingly helps start the countdown to World War 3 due to his casual interaction with a very stupid AI.

Literature

• The Cassandra Kresnov series is essentially a Post-Cyberpunk storyline nested inside a Military Science Fiction setting. Sandy is a female Ridiculously Human Robot built as a Super-Soldier, questing to make a life for herself in an urban cityscape after the Great Offscreen War ended. Government conspiracies and Hollywood Hacking are very prominent, with Callay's planetary government ultimately taking Sandy's side against the Federation Intelligence Agency trying to capture her.
• Isaac Asimov's novel The Caves of Steel anticipates the dystopian urban decay and the bland foods made from yeast. As seen in one scene in Lije's home it's a luxury to eat actual chicken with your family, let alone eat it in the comfort of your own home.
• Large swathes of the Doctor Who New Adventures embrace Cyberpunk concepts. Like, a lot. To the point where some of the books might as well just have "This was published in The '90s" printed on every page. Some particularly straight examples include the War trilogy (Warhead, Warlock, and Warchild) and Transit. Generally the Doctor would visit worlds controlled by megacorporations, possessed of advanced technology, and banally evil in addition to epic monster threats like the Cthulhu Mythos.
• Beat writer William S. Burroughs wrote several books that would later have an influence on the genesis of cyberpunk fiction, despite Burroughs not really being thought of as part of the science-fiction canon of writers. His sci-fi work like Nova Express, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket that Exploded are poems that decried the merger of technology and society.
• Vernor Vinge's 1981 novella "True Names" anticipated most of the technical elements that became the hallmarks of Cyberpunk, including the shadowy hackers, Cyberspace, and the Digital Avatar. Just about the only things missing were the tone and the urban decay. The protagonist, Mr. Slippery, is pure cyberpunk, as are characters like DON.MAC and the elusive and mysterious character known only as The Mailman. All a year before Gibson finally published "Burning Chrome".
• The John Golden books from Ragnarok Publications: John is a corporate mercenary who kills fairies possessing networks.
• Robert Reed's novels and short stories often include elements of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk genres. His second novel, The Hormone Jungle is the most clear-cut, taking place in a futuristic Divided States of America, where the protagonist — an exile from the pseudo-Luddite nation of Yellowknife — is hired to protect an android sexbot and is aided by a dead detective from within a server mainframe. The cover of the second edition even features a not-Arnold Schwarzenegger with a Blade Runner-esque skyline.
• The Instrumentality of Man stories of Cordwainer Smith include light-based and biologically-based computers, robot copies of dead people, robot police, the elimination of unhappiness by measures escalating to putting the terminally unhappy to death, an underclass of animal-people who are without rights, the immortality drug stroon, ornithopters, telepathic computer interfaces, and other proto-Space Opera and proto-cyberpunk tropes. The Instrumentality itself has several cyberpunk aspects in that it is a non-state body with the motto, "Watch, but do not govern; stop war, but do not wage it; protect, but do not control; and first, survive!"
• Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju, despite being set twenty years in the past from time of writing, includes many cyberpunk elements as fitting a "weird millennial Japan" setting. One of the main characters is an amoral hacker with a robot arm, while a Virtual Ghost based on Brian O'Blivion from Videodrome makes an appearance as a Mad Prophet.
• The Expanse novels, especially the first and second one, have a dystopian interplanetary setting where the Belters are exploited by the Earth and Martian governments, while the majority of people on Earth aren't living very well themselves. The primary villain in the first two novels is a corporation that conducts lobotomies on their scientific workers in order to make sure they don't have any ethical complaints about what they do.

Live-Action TV

• Battlestar Galactica (2003) is mostly a Darker and Edgier Space Opera Deconstructor Fleet, but it openly is inspired by Blade Runner and other cyberpunk. Unlike its Space Opera tropes, which it loves to subvert or deconstruct, these tropes are usually played very, very (sometimes painfully) straight. Much of the setting is driven by the questions of how human the robots are, whether they have free will, and how much humans drove them to rebel with their greed.
• Black Mirror is a sci-fi Genre Anthology series that focuses on the potentially negative uses of new technologies.
  • "Fifteen Million Merits" is set in an arcology-like environment where the masses work menial jobs for an unseen elite and pleasure themselves with high-tech frivolities in a virtual world, all while hoping for a chance to compete on a talent show.
  • The ending of "The Waldo Moment" has the eponymous cartoon bear Waldo being used as a mascot and mouthpiece by a Chinese-dominated corporate plutocracy, all while his now-destitute creator looks on in horror and fury at what his publicity stunt has turned into.
  • Even episodes that lack the "punk" elements, such as the pseudo-Crapsaccharine World of "Hang the DJ" or the modern-day-set "Shut Up and Dance", tend to lean heavily on the themes and motifs of the genre.
• Dead at 21: An MTV series from 1994 in which a college student finds out he was implanted with a chip that makes him extremely intelligent but will kill him by the time he turns 21.
• In Firefly, the Alliance Inner Worlds is a technological corporate-run dystopia in contrast to the Space Western outer planets. This is most seen in "Ariel" and "Trash" where we see the unethical but wealthy hospital system as well as the super-rich living in luxury to contrast against the incredibly poor.
• The X-Files: The episode "Kill Switch" revolves around a gang of literal cyberpunks (computer geeks with a bad attitude and certain tastes in clothing) trying to stop a government spy satellite that became self-aware. Said satellite can manipulate the entire Internet for its own purpose and kill anyone it deems dangerous with inescapable laser-driven wrath from above. This episode was actually written by no less than William Gibson.

Music

• My Chemical Romance's Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys is set in the not-so-far-off year of 2019 following a nuclear apocalypse and the unexplained disappearance of the island of Australia.
• Vaporwave takes the inspiration from the aesthetics of famous cyberpunk works, and combines it with '80s to '90s corporate muzak and remixes into ambient music... or not.

Tabletop Games

• The Chronicles of Darkness has incorporated a number of cyberpunk elements mixed with Magi Tech into its universe, creating a setting that's an Urban Fantasy equivalent of Cyberpunk:
  • The God-Machine is an entity that runs reality and is described as a computer, and it creates angels that are sentient programs to carry out tasks. Demons are renegades against the system, have a techno-organic aesthetic, and their powers are literal hacks in the rules that govern reality. The game also plays up spy tropes.
  • Deviants are people who have been experimented on by various conspiracies, and the default characters, Renegades, are those Deviants who want to get back at the system that created them. One of the major character splats, Invasives, can be literal cyborgs (though they don't have to be).
  • The Cheiron Group from Hunter: The Vigil is a thoroughly low-ethics mega-corporation that strips monsters down for parts to sell, Taskforce: VALKRYRIE is a secret government monster hit squad using bleeding-edge tech in their hunts, Null Mysteriis want to study the supernatrual to find rational explanations, and Network Zero are radical activists who want to expose the supernatural to the masses.
  • Android: Shadow of the Beanstalk is a spinoff RPG based off both that uses the Fantasy Flight House System, Genesys.
• GURPS has guidelines on how to make a cyberpunk campaign with options for both realistic hacking and cinematic cyberspace, as well as the (now out-of-print) horror crossover GURPS Cthulhupunk. It also received an unusual bit of "reality testing" when the U.S. Secret Service carried off the original ''GURPS Cyberpunk'' manuscript in a raid.
• The art, style, and language of Misspent Youth by Robert Bohl are full of cyberpunk tropes. It's a game where you play teenage punks in a sci-fi Dystopia, out to smash the Man. The system includes group world creation, so a cyberpunk game is not always guaranteed, but the game is designed to address all the same themes of technology as oppression. In fact, in the world creation step, you make Systems of Control ? sci-fi-based social or technological ways The Authority (the GM-like role and group-generated in-fiction antagonist) has to oppress and ruin the lives of the Youthful Offenders; the "player character" role.
• While earlier edition mixed it with American Old West themes, Necromunda is one of the better examples of the cyberpunk aesthetic, with gangs of stimm-altered thugs, cyborgs and maniacs fighting each other to expand the business opportunities of their House, in the ruined industrial depths of a Mega City. It does lack many of the Cyber Space elements of the genre, however.
• Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution has government conspiracies controlling the media, being able to hack computers using psionic powers, and cybernetic implants.
• Infinity has major cyberpunk elements. Much of the Human Sphere is dominated by Master Computer ALEPH, which engages in regular manipulations; the Nomads reject this, especially those on the ships Tunguska (which has the "mercenary hacker" elements in spades) and Bakunin (which is an ideological riot containing every belief system that rejects ALEPH). Part of the reason the Combined Army was such a rude shock was that everyone was used to running around in cyberpunk info-wars conflicts against other human powers in a struggle for the top spot, and then suddenly they ran into an alien superpower in possession of vastly superior technology which had never signed the Geneva Convention equivalent for taking care of Cubes.
• The World of Darkness:
  • Vampire: The Masquerade was originally influenced by Cyberpunk 2020, with Mark Rein•Hagen believing that "Gothic Punk" (the ostensible genre of the first editions) would center on the conflict of the all-powerful, MegaCorp-like Elders (early-generation vampires) and elites against the scrappy Anarchs ("gothic-punks", so to speak), where magic would substitute for technology as the primary tool of oppression and resistance. However, the game quickly evolved in different directions with subsequent editions.
  • In Mage: The Ascension, the Virtual Adepts are the tradition who tend the Sphere of Correspondence (space, essentially) and largely adopt the aesthetics and rhetoric of the cyberpunk movement. They're also opposed to cyberpunk-esque villains in the Technocracy's Syndicate. The Digital Web supplement even adds Cyberspace to the setting.
  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse has a bleak setting, corporate conspiracies, and ominous cities. The primary villain, Pentex, is also a evil corporation that is unwittingly (or wittingly depending on the executive) helping the Wyrm destroy the world.

Video Games

• The modern day framing story of Assassin's Creed dabbles in underground assassin cells and hacker groups facing off against an evil mega-corporation.
• Astral Chain has a cyberpunk setting of humanity's last survivors on a specialized Arcology that have to deal with constant never-ending monster attacks using magic.
• The Borderlands franchise is set in a world where all the planets are now a Privately Owned Society and contains plenty of futuristic weapons, lasers, artificial limbs, and combat robots, but the game is more of a Space Western than anything else.
• While it is a space sim, Black Market shows a long list of Cyberpunk influences, from implants to megacorps.
• The MMORPG City of Heroes has very literal Cyber Punks in the Freakshow, a powerful gang of drug-fuelled cyborg punks who have to be seen to be believed. They are pretty much the main comic relief faction of the game, while still managing to be a considerable threat in their own right. Case in point from a bank robber: "I'm gonna buy a sports car, then weld it to me!"
• The DS version of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter has a quasi-Cyberpunk world called the Galactic Jungle. It features an authoritarian Council that make many unneeded rules, like no sneezing.
• The Fallout series is deeply rooted in atompunk, though it has some Cyberpunk influences, specially regarding the Institute and the Synths. Fallout: New Vegas also adds implants that boost the player character's capabilities. Fallout 4 outright includes an entire city ruling over a Ridiculously Human Robot slave caste.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VII continues the series' trend of introducing increasingly overt science fiction elemets and outright begins in Midgar, a dystopian mega-city that looks like something from a near-future science fiction. The cyberpunk influences become rather obvious when your bioengineered antihero protagonist battles an army of corporate thugs on a freeway, with a gigantic sword, on a motorcycle. His initial companions include a cyborg terrorist and a bruiser. However, the game tones it down after escaping Midgar, as you leave the City Noir and get to travel across the countryside, which is significantly poorer and less advanced and more or less Diesel Punk. Then cyberpunk bites back with its characteristic questions of identity, conflicts of Cyber Versus Eldritch, and of course, Humongous Mecha that really hate the depths humanity has sunk to.
  • Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus covers cyberpunk themes like virtual reality, consciousness transference, and is about a Noir-ish Anti-Hero battling a Transhuman who had put his mind into the Internet. It's much fluffier and more magically based than you would usually associate with cyberpunk, though, and never asks any really tricky questions about identity.
  • Final Fantasy VII Remake amps up the cyberpunk elements for Act I, giving more detail into a mega-corporation ruled city which pretends to enshrine progress for the sake of its customers, but starves the slums of useful and cutting-edge technology while seeking greater ambitions that will leave the whole city to rot.
• Flashback has you playing a government agent who must stop an alien invasion. New Washington is a delightfully dystopian Wretched Hive, and at one point you must compete in a televised deathmatch for money.
• Grand Theft Auto 2 is unique in the series for its 20 Minutes into the Future setting, which is distinctly influenced by cyberpunk and dystopian '70s/'80s sci-fi more broadly. The criminal organizations you encounter include the distinctly Japanese-flavored Zaibatsu Corporation and the Yakuza. Other elements of its retro-future style, however, diverge from cyberpunk into broader sci-fi influences, most notably how the cars are based on vehicle designs from the '40s and '50s rather than the '80s.
• Half-Life 2 take place in a dystopia controlled by a massive alien empire whose ranks and weaponry are made up of fusions of lifeform and machine.
• The House Flipper DLC Cyberpunk Flipper gives a new tool for cleaning trash, the flamethrower, and comes with a cyberpunk-inspired home to buy, the Hacker's Loft. It also added new options for player skins, the "Transhumanist" skins. Certainly not a coincidence that the DLC came out shortly before the release of Cyberpunk 2077.
• InfernoMOO has heavy cyberpunk influences, including all-powerful corporations, cybernetic implants, futuristic weaponry, laser weapons, and much more.
• killer7 gets into this in the target Alter Ego. Although it starts off being about a comic book author, by the end it's about underground gamers playing on the illegal private internet. One might surmise from this that killer7 in general might take place in a cyberpunk world even though the work itself only sometimes brushes with the genre.
• The Longest Journey, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, and Dreamfall Chapters feature Stark, the world of logic and technology, which functions as the typical cyberpunk dystopia, in stark contrast to Arcadia, which rely more off of magic and fairy tale tropes, and functions like a fantasy world.
• Mario Kart 7 features Neo Bowser City as a Star Cup track. The course has lots of futuristic skyscrapers crowded together, a plethora of neon lights and giant screens with Bowser's face plastered on them, lots of rain, and even Blade Runner style advertising blimps.
• Mass Effect is a Space Opera primarily influenced by works like Star Trek, but it also has a few locations inspired by cyberpunk. Most notable is Omega, the Wretched Hive Space Station from Mass Effect 2, whose gritty design (especially the skyline) and low quality of life wouldn't look out of place in Blade Runner. Noveria in Mass Effect and the Silversun Strip in Mass Effect 3 also have strong Cyberpunk influence; Noveria is a laissez-faire charter planet owned by a shady MegaCorp who lease out labs to other corporations so they can perform questionable scientific experiments, while the Silversun Strip is a neon drenched entertainment hub with connections to organized crime.
• The Mega Man Zero series is set in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi society that is covered by a thin veneer of utopia. The government, led by a tyrant modelled after the original Mega Man X, controls everything and attempts mass genocide of all Reploids (except for themselves). Technology is quite advanced and plays a large role in the story as a recurring theme. Also, the main character joins the rebellion to overthrow the shady government, which is quite the recurring theme in cyberpunk stories. Then, after the events of the first game, technology plays an even larger role, as the second game's story is based around preventing an evil artifact that can control all Reploids (all machines and electronics too, by extension) from falling into the wrong hands. The [third and [fourth games' story is slightly darker and a little more depressing, because in the third game, another government, led by a crazy mad scientist who also happens to be a complete monster, takes the place of the old one and turns out to be even more evil than the previous tyrant from the first game, thus making Zero and the resistance's efforts seem almost null and void. The worst part is that this is a mad scientist we're talking about here, so he's got the advantage over the heroes due to being in his own element (cyberpunk IS a TECHNOLOGICAL sci-fi dystopia, after all...) and because he's much smarter than Zero and the resistance. In the fourth game, Zero heroically sacrifices himself in the most badass way possible to stop the mad scientist and saves the world.
• In general, the Mega Man franchise has cyberpunk elements all over the series: In Mega Man (Classic) the robots are being made to make easier the human life, but various of them went reprogammed to be evil by Dr. Wily; in Mega Man X there're the Reploids, Ridiculously Human Robots that overpassed human population (which Dr. Cain is one of the few humans we see in the series) and can make their own decisions as well becoming rogues by themselves; and Mega Man Legends, a group of scavenger robots in an After the End scenario, in which cybernetics are so widespread in this world that it's impossible to tell for sure who is a robot and who is a human.
• The Outer Worlds has a corporate run future that has all the elements of a cyberpunk dystopia except for the fact that the influences are Steampunk and Gilded Age rather than cyberpunk. The corporations are also primarily incompetent rather than malevolent.
• Overwatch has some light cyberpunk elements. Ostensibly, the world is at peace since the end of the Omnic Crisis. The truth, however, is that the world is teetering on the brink of another war. There are a handful of Mega Corps, few of which have the people's best interest at heart: Vishkar is a prime example of this. The aesthetics also draw heavily on cyberpunk, with flying cars, various futuristic technology, and some characters who are cyborgs to varying degrees; from artificial limbs like Cassidy/McCree and Symmetra to full-body prosthesis like Genji.
• In the racing game RGX Showdown (and it's mobile game progenitor Rival Gears), cybernetics abound, pollution rates have skyrocketed and self-driving econoboxes with antigrav technology have become the (government enforced) standard means of transportation, while street punks have taken to scavenging the shells of early 21st century vehicles and "hot rodding" them with high-tech computers and jet engines to race against each other.
• The Deckers in Saints Row: The Third are a gang of hackers themed this way, down to their "Neo-Cyberpunk" clothing. The city of Steelport itself in the game has shades of a cyberpunk city. It's a Wretched Hive of a city covered in neon where drugs, sex, and guns flow freely. At the beginning of the game it's controlled by a ruthless criminal organization (of which the Deckers are a part) that has genetically engineered abominations as shock troops.
• Scrapland is set on a planet Earth that's been polluted to the point it can no longer sustain life, and abandoned by humanity. The robots stayed behind, and formed their own society out of the junk and scrap the humans left behind, ultimately renaming the planet "Scrapland".
• While the world of Splatoon generally has little to do with the genre, Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion introduces us to a far more cyberpunk-influenced world lying beneath the surface. The expansion is set in a gritty, run-down, subway system that features retro computing hardware as background elements, and an electronica soundtrack echoing throughout. The tight black leather-clad protagonist of the expansion, Agent 8, was apparently subjected to biotech experimentation (by a shadowy corporate entity, no less) and shackled with a number rather than a name. Agent 8 is under constant surveillance within the subway and has a remote-controlled kill device strapped to their back at all times. At the same time, they use advanced technology like the smartphone-like CQ-80 device, which can pull up a projected map of the subway system, and their Voice with an Internet Connection Marina hacking into the facility mainframe is both a gameplay mechanic and a plot beat in a few cases. To top it all off, the facility is run by a rampant AI that intends to destroy all life on Earth with a bioweapon death ray.
• Sunset Overdrive is a game where you play a young punk in a city run by a sinister soda megacorporation. There's even a malevolent AI giant soda Mascot that is one of the enemies. However, it takes place in 2027 (about 13 years after the original release date) and the satire is deliberately shallow fun.
• Tekken has the Mishima Zaibatsu and G Corporation's presences as mega-corporations, whose use of robotics and bio-technology have made the world a worse place definitely read as cyberpunk, but it all still coexists with explicitly supernatural and wacky elements. Tekken 4's attempts at Doing In the Wizard and overall aesthetic make it the closest to straight Y2K-era cyberpunk.
• Warframe presents Fortuna, a Corpus Company Town lit in cyan-magenta-yellow under the surface of Venus, where Solaris workers operate machinery to regulate the climate on Orb Vallis to make it habitable so the insatiably greedy Nef Anyo can make thick Profit from the Orokin artifacts found there. The Solaris themselves are cyborgs who are introduced (as children) to a lifetime of paying off debts —which are just Nef's thinly-veiled excuse to keep them as slaves in all but name— by having their heads severed and reconnected using cybernetics, and then replaced with prosthetic ones for extra dehumanisation. Their dialogue is chock-full of specialist jargon, especially when they are mercenaries undertaking high-risk jobs; and their environments are very utilitarian, looking starkly near-futuristic in what is otherwise a far-future Space Opera setting influenced by a long-fallen transhumanist empire that saw the Solar System as a canvas for their mastery of Organic Technology, encased in ivory and gold.

Visual Novels

• DRAMAtical Murder certainly have a basic cyberpunk set-up of poverty intersecting with neon-infused high-class artificial urbanite that uses a lot of technology along with an active punk street life (and of course, the usage of electronic music as BGM. Then there's Rhyme itself). Though the usage of modern technology is mostly for the people (although not exactly good), and by the time the good endings and re:connect came, it shifts into Post Cyber Punk.
• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: The entirety of the Killing Game is experienced through the lens of sixteen teenagers caught in a kill-or-be-killed situation until either the Mastermind behind the game is ousted or someone wins the game by getting away with the murder of a fellow student. Then when the Mastermind is cornered at last, Tsumugi Shirogane reveals that the entire game was the then-present franchise being turned into an Immoral Reality Show that went on for no less than 53 Seasons... all in the name of relentless profit due to the show's massive popularity of the show, which owes to humans achieving world peace and needing a vent for their violent tendencies in fiction. The end result is a relentless maelstrom of Fridge Horror, especially with participants in the game being equally jaded and sick as the show itself before being brainwashed into completely different characters. Combined with this relentless meta-attack on Cash Cow Franchises and unfettered greed is also the highest level of tech the series has seen, complete with a robot participant in the 53rd Killing Game and other high-level examples of technology throughout the school, further lending credence to the theory. Now what Tsumugi says in itself is part of the Ambiguous Ending, but if Tsumugi's to be believed, depending on when Danganronpa transitioned from a normal franchise into the dehumanizing bloodsport it is now, then upwards of 49 seasons with at least 686 deaths were caused from this show. That, of course, is where the Fridge Horror really comes into play of the setting likely being Cyberpunk; if the show is so lethal and inhumane, what does it say about the society that has enabled such a show?

Web Comics

• Last Res0rt has the generic cyberpunk plot pretty well secured... but is almost a bit too bright, cartoony, and furry to let the darker aspects of the genre really sink in.

Web Original

• Something Awful's "Great Authors Series" imagines what classic authors would write if they stepped wildly outside their comfort zone, with a piece imagining what it would look like if William Gibson wrote about a present-day (2013) kid looking for doujinshi. The omnipresence of Japanese otaku culture, the "electric cigarettes" and five-hour energy drinks, the information traveling in from far-flung Shinjuku, Toronto, and Dallas in the blink of an eye, a Dell laptop running the fancy-sounding Chrome operating system, and social media are described in terms straight out of cyberpunk... with only the last sentence ruining the illusion:
  "What Vektor discovered in his Twitter feed caused him to hesitate. Something unbelievable was unfolding around the world in real time, bouncing from server to server and metastasizing as a constant chorus of Tweets scrolling through his overloaded feed. It was even worse than he feared. A comedian had just made a rape joke."

Western Animation

• Get Ed started out as an animated action show about futuristic couriers. As it went on, episodes became more character-driven, stories began to focus on a Corrupt Corporate Executive with an army of clones and robots at his disposal wanting to take control over the city. The main heroes have to try and one-up the baddie with superior tech-savviness and impromptu inventions. The series ended bittersweetly with the heroes thwarting the Big Bad's apocalypse brought about via technology at a heavy cost. Had the series not been Screwed by the Network, the second season would have gone even more deeply into Darker and Edgier Cyberpunk territory.
• Love, Death & Robots: The episodes Sonnie's Edge & Blind Spot are predominantly set in a cyberpunk world.
• The Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Real Kids Don't Eat Broccoli" is a parody of Blade Runner. Buster Bunny plays the Deckard role and is dealing with a number of fake Toons in the movie parody.

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