Cyberpunk 2077 launched in December 2020 to one of the most chaotic and controversial debuts in gaming memory. The bugs, the performance problems on last-generation consoles, the corporate apologies — all of it felt, at the time, like the story of the game itself. But CD Projekt RED did something that studios rarely do with sufficient grace: they came back. They fixed it. They patched, they iterated, they released the monumental 2.0 update that reimagined the game's systems from the ground up, and then they gave players Phantom Liberty — a full, dense, politically charged expansion that added a new district, new mechanics, and a story worthy of the best spy thrillers in cinematic history.

By the time I sat down with the game again recently, Cyberpunk 2077 had been thoroughly redeemed in the eyes of much of the gaming world. The version I loaded into my PlayStation 5 was not the broken mess of launch day. It was a polished, ambitious, deeply human piece of interactive storytelling running at a smooth and sumptuous frame rate on Sony's console, looking extraordinary through the television and sounding, on this particular evening, completely unlike any version of Night City I had visited before.

Switching to Japanese audio is not a complicated process within the game's settings — though, as I will discuss shortly, it requires a workaround on certain platforms that really should not exist in the first place. Once I had made the switch and let the opening scenes of V's story unspool in Japanese, the effect was immediate and disorienting in the best possible way. This was Night City filtered through an entirely different cultural and phonetic lens, and it was extraordinary.

The voice acting in the Japanese dub is not an afterthought. CD Projekt RED worked with professional voice talent to deliver performances that match, and in certain moments surpass, the remarkable English cast that most Western players know by heart. The pacing of Japanese speech — its rhythms, its use of silence, its tonal shifts — layers differently over the animation and the cityscape than English does. Characters who feel knowable and familiar in English reveal new dimensions when their dialogue is shaped by the phonetics and emotional vocabulary of Japanese performance.

None of what I am about to describe would have landed quite the same way without the right hardware. I want to be transparent with you: as a Razer Creator, I represent Razer's brand and create content in partnership with the company. But this transparency cuts in the other direction too — when I tell you that the combination of the Razer Raiju V3 Pro and the Razer BlackShark V3 Pro elevated my experience of Cyberpunk 2077 in Japanese audio, I am telling you something I genuinely felt, not something I was briefed to say.

The practical upshot of the dual-source capability was that during my Japanese playthrough sessions, I never had to choose between immersion and connectivity. I could be deep in a conversation with Judy Alvarez — listening to her Japanese voice actress deliver a performance of genuine emotional nuance — and still catch an important phone call without the clumsiness of fumbling with cables or ripping a headset off mid-scene. The two worlds coexisted in remarkable harmony. The headset became, in a very real sense, a metaphor for what Cyberpunk 2077 itself is: a place where multiple realities layer over each other without necessarily cancelling each other out.

Japan has one of the most sophisticated voice acting industries in the world. The profession of seiyuu — Japanese voice actor — carries a cultural weight in Japan that has no precise equivalent in Western entertainment. The best seiyuu are household names. They are recognized on the street, celebrated at conventions, and followed across decades of work spanning animation, video games, radio dramas, and audiobooks. The training is rigorous. The expectations are exacting. The output, at its finest, is a form of performance art that operates almost entirely through voice, and nothing else.

When CD Projekt RED commissioned a Japanese dub of Cyberpunk 2077, they were not simply hiring a localization studio to swap dialogue tracks. They were commissioning performances from practitioners of a distinct art form, and the results — heard through quality hardware at appropriate volume — are remarkable. The character of V, whose motivations and moral ambiguities drive the game's central narrative, is rendered in Japanese with a grounded intensity that the performance demands. The villain, the allies, the fixers and fixer-adjacent characters who populate Night City's economy of favors and violence — each one carries in their Japanese voice a slightly different register of the city's atmosphere.

One of the most striking things about the Japanese dub is how it handles Night City's slang — the invented argot of 2077 that the game's writers constructed to suggest a future in which English has mutated under the pressure of technology, corporate culture, and urban density. Terms like "gonk," "choombata," "nova," and "preem" exist in a strange liminal space: they are not Japanese words, but they have been absorbed and pronounced by Japanese voice actors, and the result is a fascinating collision of linguistic registers. Slang from a fictional future, spoken in one of the world's most phonetically rich languages, filtered through the creative choices of performers who bring their entire professional tradition to bear on each reading.

The combat sequences are where Japanese voice acting shifts into another register entirely. In English, combat dialogue in Cyberpunk 2077 has a particular flavour — sharp, cynical, street-tough, occasionally darkly funny. In Japanese, the same lines carry a different kind of edge. There is a precision to the delivery that makes encounters feel more kinetic, more urgent. When V dispatches an enemy or narrowly avoids an ambush, the Japanese voice acting communicates the physicality of the moment through channels of expression that English, for all its virtues as a language of action cinema, cannot quite replicate. Listening to it through the BlackShark V3 Pro, with its clear midrange and tight stereo imaging, was a genuinely visceral pleasure.

Specific characters in Cyberpunk 2077 deserve mention in the context of what the Japanese dub reveals about them. The enigmatic Johnny Silverhand — a rockstar revolutionary whose digital ghost haunts V's consciousness throughout the game — is a character who exists at the intersection of charisma and toxicity. In the Japanese dub, his voice carries a quality that is simultaneously seductive and dangerous; the delivery is smoother in certain places, more sardonic in others, and the overall effect is of a slightly different Johnny — one whose manipulation feels more cerebral, less theatrical. It is a fascinating interpretive choice, and it changes the dynamic of the game's central relationship in ways that are difficult to fully articulate but impossible to miss once you have heard them.

Judy Alvarez, one of the game's most beloved characters and the emotional heart of its Watson storyline, is rendered in the Japanese dub with extraordinary care. Her warmth and her pain — a combination the game's writers have layered into her arc with genuine craft — translate beautifully into Japanese performance. There are scenes between V and Judy that, in English, are already among the finest pieces of interactive storytelling I have encountered. In Japanese, they gain a different but equally resonant emotional quality — softer in some registers, more aching in others.

Before I arrived at Japanese audio, I played through Phantom Liberty — the game's major expansion set in the previously inaccessible Dogtown district — in two languages: English first, then French. And here I must confess something personal that informs much of what I am about to write. I am a native French speaker. French is not a second language for me; it is the language in which I dream, in which I argue, in which I write when I want to say something precisely and with feeling. And playing Phantom Liberty in French was, in its own entirely different way, a revelation.

The French voice acting for Phantom Liberty deserves its own extended appreciation. French is a language of extraordinary nuance when spoken well — a language in which the gap between saying something directly and saying it with perfect ironic detachment can be a matter of a single syllable's inflection. The French dubbing cast for this expansion understood that Dogtown is a place of ambiguity, where allegiances shift and nobody is entirely what they claim to be. The performances reflect this. Characters speak in French with a quality of deliberate understatement that is, paradoxically, more unsettling than if they had been played broadly.

As a native French speaker, there is also the simple joy of hearing a world I know intimately — Night City's slang, its corporate-speak, its street poetry — rerouted through French. Certain Night City expressions sound genuinely hilarious in French in a way that is impossible to explain to a non-native speaker. Others acquire an unexpected gravity. A character delivering what, in English, would be a fairly standard piece of tough-guy dialogue suddenly sounds, in French, like something from a Jean-Pierre Melville film — lean, cool, morally weightless, and deeply, effortlessly stylish. It was, on more than one occasion, genuinely difficult not to laugh with delight.

The expansion's key characters — the morally compromised agents, the desperate civilians of Dogtown, the enigmatic figures who trade in secrets — all gain distinctive new qualities in French. The Dogtown district, already one of the most atmospheric environments in contemporary gaming, feels genuinely different when its inhabitants speak to you in French. The politics of the district — the way power operates through fear, favor, and the constant threat of violence — resonate through the French performances with a particular sharpness.

And now, having completed the expansion in English and French, I cannot wait to return to Dogtown in Japanese. I know the narrative. I know the characters. I know the moments that will hit differently in a new language — the scene that made me genuinely emotional in French, the exchange that felt icily perfect in English. Going back to those moments in Japanese, with the distinctive emotional vocabulary of seiyuu performance, is one of the things I am most looking forward to in my gaming calendar for the months ahead.

It would be a disservice to write an extended piece about Cyberpunk 2077 without pausing to simply celebrate the game itself — the world that CD Projekt RED has constructed and the inexhaustible richness of its adventures. Night City is one of the great fictional spaces of contemporary storytelling, full stop. Not just in gaming — in any medium. It is a city that rewards attention with revelation, that punishes impatience by withholding its best things until you have earned the right to encounter them.

The city is divided into districts, each with its own distinct identity, visual language, and social ecology. Watson — V's starting neighborhood — is a place of immigrant ambition and corporate shadow, where food stalls operate in the shadow of abandoned megabuildings. Westbrook is Night City's aspirational face: the glittering, neon-drenched surface beneath which older and stranger things operate. The City Center is corporate verticality and enforced civility. Pacifica is a monument to broken promises and grassroots community endurance. And now Dogtown — Phantom Liberty's gift — is something else entirely: a place where the state's authority ends and something rawer begins.

The open world of Night City is not merely a backdrop for the narrative. It is itself a narrative — a story of what happens when capitalism, technology, violence, and human resilience collide without resolution. Walking its streets, hearing its ambient noise, and engaging with its incidental characters reveals a world of extraordinary textural richness. There are side quests in Cyberpunk 2077 that are more emotionally complex than the main stories of many acclaimed games. There are encounters with minor characters that linger in the memory for weeks.

The main narrative — V's search for a way to disentangle themselves from the relic chip that is slowly overwriting their consciousness with Johnny Silverhand's memories — is a story about what it means to be a self, and whether a self is worth fighting for even when the fight is almost certainly unwinnable. It is a story that takes place against the backdrop of an imminent and possibly violent death, and it handles that backdrop with more honesty and more grace than most terminal-illness narratives in any art form I can name. Playing it in Japanese adds another layer to this already layered meditation: the language itself carries Buddhist inflections in how it treats impermanence, and those inflections, entirely unintentional in the game's design, nevertheless resonate in surprising ways against the narrative's themes.

The characters you meet on V's journey are, by any measure, exceptional. Consider Panam Palmer, whose relationship with V contains some of the finest examples of found-family storytelling in gaming. Consider Kerry Eurodyne, whose arc involves the specific grief of surviving an era rather than a person. Consider River Ward, whose storyline deals with institutional violence and its legacies in ways that feel urgently contemporary. And consider the Phantom Liberty characters — Reed and the rest — who complicate V's story by introducing the specific moral vertigo of spy fiction, where every loyalty is provisional and every truth is partial. In Japanese, all of these characters are given new voices. New textures. New reasons to care about them.

I have spent the majority of this article in a state of enthusiastic celebration, and the enthusiasm is entirely genuine. But it is time to address something that has been a source of genuine frustration throughout my multilingual playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077, and that speaks to a broader failing in how the games industry treats language as a feature rather than a right.

Getting Japanese audio — or French audio, or any alternative language audio — onto Cyberpunk 2077 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X is not, at the time of writing, a straightforward process. Unlike the PC version, which allows players relatively easy access to additional language packs, the console versions of the game require workarounds that range from inconvenient to genuinely opaque for less technically adventurous players. This is, to put it plainly, unacceptable in 2025.

The case for full multilingual audio patches on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC simultaneously is not complicated, but let me make it explicitly. First, the artistic case: the Japanese, French, and other language dubs of Cyberpunk 2077 are not lesser versions of the game. They are distinct artistic achievements — performances by professional voice actors that offer interpretive readings of the same material, each of them valid, each of them valuable. Restricting access to these versions is not a neutral logistical decision; it is an artistic decision that limits the audience for those performances.

Second, the cultural case: gaming's audience is global. CD Projekt RED's games are played everywhere, by people who came to Night City from an enormous variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds. For a native Japanese speaker — or a native French speaker, or a native speaker of any of the game's supported audio languages — the ability to experience Cyberpunk 2077 in one's mother tongue is not a luxury. It is the difference between engaging with the game's themes at full depth and encountering them through the scrim of a second language.

Third, the commercial case: the 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty expansion demonstrated beyond any serious argument that CD Projekt RED is willing and able to make significant post-launch additions to the game. Language patches are a less technically demanding undertaking than a full systems overhaul. The infrastructure for delivering them exists. The content — the voice recordings, the localization work — has already been produced. The barrier to providing full multilingual access on all platforms is primarily one of organizational will, not technical capacity.

My earnest and direct request to CD Projekt RED is this: provide complete, easy-access multilingual audio for Cyberpunk 2077 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC simultaneously, as a standard feature accessible through each platform's native download system. Do not make players hunt through forums for workarounds. Do not create a two-tier experience where PC players have access to a linguistically richer version of your game than console players. The experience I had playing in Japanese — the artistic revelation of hearing Night City in a new phonetic register — should be available to every player on every platform without friction or effort.

This matters not only for Cyberpunk 2077 but as a precedent for the industry. When a studio of CD Projekt RED's stature demonstrates that multilingual audio is a core, accessible feature across all platforms, it sets an expectation that other studios will feel pressure to meet. Given the investment that players around the world make in these games — financial, temporal, emotional — they deserve nothing less.

Let me return, briefly, to the hardware, because there is something worth examining about what it actually means to live in two audio environments simultaneously — and how that experience shapes one's relationship to a game as immersive as Cyberpunk 2077.

The Razer BlackShark V3 Pro's dual-device connectivity is, in practice, a tool for managing the particular complexity of being a creator in 2025. My sessions with Cyberpunk 2077 are not purely recreational. They are, simultaneously, research, content development, experience-gathering, and the raw material for articles like this one. They are also, often, times when professional life does not simply pause and wait politely. Emails arrive. Conference calls are scheduled. Colleagues need to share a thought. A streaming playlist needs to be started or adjusted.

Without dual-device audio, managing all of this while staying inside Night City would require constant physical disruption — headset on, headset off, back on, phone pulled out, propped somewhere. The immersion would be fractured a dozen times per session, and the quality of both the gaming experience and the professional response would suffer. With the BlackShark V3 Pro handling both channels, the transitions are seamless. Night City's Japanese audio plays on one channel; a phone conference plays on the other, audible but not intrusive. The game waits. The call proceeds. Then the call ends, the balance naturally redistributes, and Night City comes back to full focus.

There is something almost cyberpunk about this arrangement, if you will permit the observation. The defining aesthetic of the genre — and of Cyberpunk 2077 itself — is the fusion of the technological and the human, the blurring of the line between the digital and the organic, the layering of multiple information streams onto a consciousness that is expected to navigate them all. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 while fielding a phone call about a content project, through hardware designed to make that dual existence frictionless, while listening to the game in Japanese via a headset that renders the performance with audiophile clarity — this is, in miniature, precisely the kind of cognitive multiplicity that Night City was built to represent.

As I write this, I am partway through my Japanese-audio playthrough of the base game, and Phantom Liberty in Japanese awaits me — an experience I am anticipating with a specific and refined eagerness that comes from knowing the material well enough to understand exactly what a new language will do to it.

Playing through Phantom Liberty in Japanese is going to be a different experience from both the English and the French versions, and I already know which moments I am most curious to encounter in the new language. There is a scene — I will say only that it involves a confrontation in Dogtown between characters whose relationship has been defined by mutual deception — that in English is played with a kind of cold professional menace, and in French takes on the quality of a stage drama between two people who know they are acting and have chosen, nevertheless, to continue the performance. What will it feel like in Japanese? What tonal choices will the voice actors make? What will the language's particular relationship with honor, obligation, and the performance of loyalty bring to a scene that is entirely about the impossibility of trust?

This is, I think, the deepest argument for multilingual audio in games like Cyberpunk 2077: it does not merely allow you to hear the same game in a different language. It allows you to play a fundamentally different experience with the same geography. The map of Night City does not change. The quest objectives remain identical. But the meaning of the journey — the emotional register of its relationships, the weight of its silences, the quality of its joys and its grief — shifts in ways that are irreducible to mere localization. It is, at its best, reinterpretation. And great art — which Cyberpunk 2077, whatever its original flaws, has become — rewards reinterpretation.

To CD Projekt RED: you have built something extraordinary. Cyberpunk 2077 is, in its current form, a landmark achievement in interactive storytelling, and Phantom Liberty is an expansion that rivals the best narrative DLC in the history of the medium. The world you have created is rich enough, and the voice performances in every supported language good enough, that the multilingual experience of Night City constitutes multiple distinct artistic experiences within a single game. Please give every player on every platform — PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC alike — frictionless access to all of those experiences. The players who will find their favorite version of Night City in Japanese, or French, or German, or Brazilian Portuguese deserve to find it easily. Make that possible. They will thank you for it.

To my fellow players, and to anyone reading this who has not yet tried Cyberpunk 2077 in a language other than their own: do it. If you have even a passing curiosity about Japanese voice acting, switch the audio language and play the opening hour. If you speak French or have any love for French cinema, play Phantom Liberty's early scenes in French and notice how the genre conventions of the expansion — the spy thriller, the betrayal narrative, the world of shadows and allegiances — breathe differently in that language. You will not regret it. Night City has more versions of itself than you have yet discovered, and every one of them is worth finding.

And if you want to find them properly — with the full frequency range of every performance preserved, in both ears, while the rest of your life continues to make its reasonable demands — I cannot recommend the Razer BlackShark V3 Pro highly enough. As a #RazerCreator, I am a partisan observer. But I am also someone who spent hours in Night City in Japanese last week and emerged convinced that the hardware mattered — that the clarity of the voice acting, the warmth of the soundstage, and the seamless dual-source capability all contributed meaningfully to an experience I will be talking about for a very long time.

Night City never sleeps. And now, finally, it speaks Japanese. Go listen.