Rebuilt against your reference. The thing I had wrong: I was treating ASCII as monochrome text with one glyph per character. It isn't. Every figure here is a multi-cell construction, every glyph carries its own hue, and the lighting is a real layer on top — beams, haze, bloom. That's what makes it a venue instead of a terminal.
Turn the toggles off one at a time — the characters barely change. Everything that makes it read as a room is the layers over them.
A mosher is a 5×4 block of glyphs, not one letter. Which means YARI, LUPITA, CHEO, NENE and IZZY stay distinguishable — different silhouettes, different hair, different stance.
Each character gets its own color. Depth comes from temperature and brightness, not from a single phosphor green. Background crowd goes cool and dim, front row goes hot.
Beams, strobes and wash are drawn over the character grid in screen blend. The glyphs never move for this — the room moves around them.
The glyph layer is redrawn blurred and added back. That single step is most of the difference between "terminal" and "neon sign in a basement."
ASCII kills boss presence — every cell is the same size. Wrong twice over. A figure spans as many cells as you give it, and layers can have their own grid size. The Gatekeeper Brute can fill half the screen.
The five mosher kits become five letters. Wrong. At multi-cell scale they keep their silhouettes. That was the strongest objection I had and it doesn't survive the reference.
So the honest update: ASCII for the game is viable — at this quality bar, not at the bar I was testing against. It stops being a cost-saving simplification and becomes a real art direction, with real art cost: someone has to draw every figure in glyphs and tune a lighting rig. That's not cheaper than the poster look. It's a different, and arguably better, game.
What I'd still protect: this is a third option, not a free upgrade. The poster-ink work is already built and shipping. Going here means re-authoring every entity as glyph art. Worth doing deliberately — worth not drifting into by accident.