Alright, now I'm going to go over your characters one at a time and see if there are any things that jump out at me as being off.
So far, looking at them, they all seem to be well equipped to succeed at their primary roles so I'm not going to worry about suggestions for the sake of economy.
First up is Johnny Hiro:
Points look good.
Gear seems in range.
The only thing that you might want to reconsider is the Incompetent quality. It represents a mental deficiency. The character is incapable of understanding how to do something to the point where they could be given a written set of directions and still not even be able to attempt it. Also, it gives you a point of Notoriety, which will detract from all your social rolls. I understand why you gave the character that quality, and I'm alright with him taking it, but I thought you should know how I view it if you wanted to reconsider and take something else. Minor compulsion could fit a similar role for the purposes of character.
Next is Spider
Points look good. One pt over on knowledge skills, but whatever.
Gear has a couple problems. Simsense accelerator is 14F and the R6 exploit with mute would also be 14F.
The Palladium allergy has me sort of scratching my head as to how you'd want me to work that in. It's found in electronics, but that could be mitigated with gloves. It also doesn't seem to add anything to the character, personality-wise, but if you want to keep it I'd like to know how you expected it to work.
Now Ghost
I'm counting 399 pts, so you could still add a knowledge skill, 5000 yen for gear or up a contact.
No problems on gear, but you might want to use that point to buy some lodge materials and binding materials. Binding skill is pointless without those two things. I plan to give you enough time before the first run to bind some spirits.
As to qualities, like I've said before, I don't really like Incompetent from a play perspective. He can operate a pistol with no problem, but a rifle or a shotgun just blows his mind? It's not a good quality. Also, for the spirit bane, you might want to put something in his backstory about why every fire spirit ever hates his guts. Seems important.
Bloody Mary
Points are golden.
Gear is good
Prejudiced is supposed to be unjustified. Being prejudiced against jerks is fully justified. So, you'll have to either pick a group that doesn't deserve your ire, or a different neg qual.
Jink
You can take 40bp worth of negative qualities if you like, but only 35 of those points will count toward your total. Also, 50bp is the max you can spend on gear.
The MCT-Nissan has a max armor of 3x body, or 9. Pilot serves the role of System in a vehicle/drone. Synthetic limbs have a capacity of 8. Obvious limbs get 15 capacity. A weapon mount provides recoil reduction equal to the body of the vehicle, so the weapon would have 13 RC already. The other RC could still be useful if you wanted to take it handheld, but isn't necessary for gunnery.
For qualities, I strongly recommend against 30 bp worth of debt. If I'm running this game, In Debt means more than just money. It means someone has hooks in you. For instance, 30bp worth of addiction is burnout level addiction, so 30bp of In Debt means that someone out there owns your ass like Heroin owns a terminal junky. A 30 bp quality is the central focus of a character's life. Everything he does will be about paying off that debt in karma and money before the debt ends up killing him.
Switchback
Points are all good
Gear is fine
As to the qualities, they all seem fine, but... pretty disruptive. Dude is going to be hounded, constantly. You'll have to determine the enemy's incidence rating etc.
The free contacts thing, that seems a bit much.
We could do (Cha + highest social skill)x2 and still have plenty of points for it. x4 is a whole lot.
Alternately, if we're sure I'm GMing here, we could try out my contact token house rule.
For every BP spent on contacts, you get 5 contact tokens.
Contact tokens are redeemed for contact ratings on an exponential scale.
So:
Loyalty/Connection 1 costs one token
Loyalty/Connection 2 costs two tokens in addition to the above cost
Loyalty/Connection 3 costs four tokens in addition to the above cost
Loyalty/Connection 4 costs eight tokens in addition to the above cost (Still only 3 bp at this point.)
Loyalty/Connection 5 costs sixteen tokens in addition to the above cost (Now that high rating means something. A whole 6.2bp worth of something)
Loyalty/Connection 6 costs thrity-two tokens in addition to the above. (12.6bp means that "friends for life" or "has lofyr's number on speed dial" costs what it's worth)
Cash in extra tokens for 1k worth of gear (up to 4k max,) because sometimes you borrow your friend's stuff and it looks better on you anyway.
It's designed to make high-level contacts cost a lot more than low level ones.
