Bo Staff Becomes Staff/Stave
Not Everything Needs To Be Japanese

I expect this to be a point of extreme resistance because of how much legacy is built in and also because of how unapologetically otaku the game aspires to be, but I think generally there is too much of a Japanese cant built into game weapons (this is forgivable with the katana which is a cyberpunk staple).

In this case, I don't think the bo staff really needs to be specifically a bo staff, each of the variant martial arts has indigenous version of stick/staff weapons and I think it would cast a greater roleplaying net and support more variations on theme that stray from the simple defaults, merely at the cost of a slight change in name and description.

No resistance from me on this one. One think I like about just calling it a staff is that, in my mind, it leave a lot of room for the player using it to bill it how they like and for those perceiving it some latitude in what they imagine it to be. Even if the name and description were changed to be a little more generic, players who want to could still call it a bo staff ICly.

And more than just the direct expression of the individual martial arts (which are themselves in some sense just the first of many that never got expanded on and because ossified as the only options) a bo staff is really just one thing, whereas a staff in a generic sense can be a lot of stuff. A corpsec riot control staff (which is actually a thing). A walking stick turned improvised weapon.

Sindome's creative design really suffers from the design of a lot of things being envisioned for a single very specifically imagined archetype, and weapons are probably the worst example of this. I believe a considerable amount of the popularity of katanas is not even related to their strength but just because a ceramic katana was pretty much one of two cyberpunk-y weapons in the game for the longest time.

If the weapons can't be themed to be more cyberpunk I think they could, in some cases, at least be themed to be a little more generic and thus potentially futuristic if you squint.