Haven't Forgotten A Thing, Never Will

Spoilers fly free, so proceed with caution.

Cyberpunk 2077 is about a lot of things, but more than any other, the game is about death.

It's something that's with you near from the start of the game. Your first mission after your chosen lifepath prologue involves rescuing someone from the Scavs, a gang of butchers who strip cyberware from civilians klepped off the street. Finish the mission and on your way home, you'll get your first glimpse of MaxTac, best summed up as SWAT on steroids. They wipe three small time hoods off the face of the Earth with superior firepower, because there's no kill like overkill. This sort of thing just happens every day here.

Welcome to Night City, the city of dreams.

Downbeat subject matter, but hey, it's cyberpunk fiction. Par for the course, right? American cyberpunk is rarely a genre with flashy, happy endings. The Powers That Be, often corporations, are just too powerful for any one person to topple, so you're not going to be saving the world. Victories in the genre are often on a personal level. Endings are usually some measure of bittersweet. Just as often they'll be downright depressing. But the best always have something to say, like any story really.

In this case, it isn't a superficial theme in the way it often is in video games, where violence is often a key part of how you interact with the digital world you're presented with. One of the other well done examples would be one of its contemporaries, Red Dead Redemption 2, but even there your creeping death is more of a part of the plot than a central theme. Hell, you don't even find out until the start of what feels like act three and by then there isn't a lot of time left. There are two whole epilogue chapters, around a fourth of the game, afterward. In Cyberpunk 2077, it's the through-line of the whole game. I'd wager that a good half the missions in the game touch upon death in a myriad of different ways.

Obviously, it all truly picks up momentum at the end of act one. Your big heist goes horribly wrong when the son of the most powerful man in the world kills his father in a fit of rage, transforming the setting forever. Then, it's a rush to escape. Your mission control, T-Bug, and your best friend do not make it. Then the fixer who arranged it all, panicked that everyone involved in the heist is being framed for killing Saburo Arasaka, shoots you in the head.

You wake up in a landfill, haunted by a digital ghost, and your life is on a timer now; figure a way out of the mess you're in and remove the relic you stole before Johnny Silverhands digital echo subsumes you entirely.

I think the first real moment that theme hit me was the least expected, a moment where the expected veers in a direction wildly off the beaten path into something that stole my breath. In the midst of your main quest, you stop off at a dollhouse - essentially a futuristic brothel where the call girls use a behavioral chip to slip into something that best suits your preferences - looking for Evelyn Parker, the client who commissioned the heist that went so horribly wrong. You can't just walk in, so if you're going to investigate you need to pay for a session. You expect some crass jokes, some are even given thanks to Johnny Silverhands cynical wit, but then you sit with the assigned doll and the program takes over. Immediately, it takes a turn for the serious.

Of anything I expected out of the game, what amounts to a therapy session wasn't even on the list. Your main quest follows three tracks that converge at a certain point in the game, able to be tackled in any order. But whether you go after Evelyn first or put it off, it's likely the first moment you'll stop your crusade to save your life and take stock of what's happened to you. The doll, fed information from the data you gave at the front desk that's used to give your ideal experience, instead stops the flippant attitude everything is treated with in its tracks when she brings up that you're dying, that she knows you're dying.

V is a mix of a static character and customization. You can choose your attitude through most of the game and it shifts interactions accordingly, but there's a core there no matter what. You're scared of dying, but you haven't yet had the moment to really sit and grapple with what that means. Even here, you can just opt out of the session with the safe word, deactivating the doll program to get on with getting information. But to not engage is to miss an irreplaceable moment.

Instead of the crass humor or sexual tittilation you expect, that you see in most of the in game advertising and flavor text, you get comfort. Emotional comfort, not sexual. The doll coaxes the things V is scared to admit to out of them carefully and you get to choose how you react to it, what you're willing to admit. The most open responses get right into the heart of it all. You're dying, you have a digital parasite trying to take over your body against its will, and there's a distinct chance that no matter what you do your time is going to run out eventually. V can admit to some measure of questioning what existence is, what comes after, potentially even choosing the thought that the end is nothing but a void that they're hurtling toward, terrified of the vast nothing that may await them at the premature end of their life.

The ethos of the Edgerunner is to die well. Go out in a blaze of glory, stick it to the corporations oppressing everyone and do something so grand that everyone will remember your name. It's akin to the typical viking trope of glory on the battlefield, a fight and death they'll sing songs about. In the future of 2077, your song is in the form of a drink named after you in the bar dedicated to Edgerunners, the aptly named Afterlife. Your name will join the ranks of the other heroes who passed with the fury of a roaring inferno, like Johnny Silverhand, Cyberpunk Edgerunners protagonist David Martinez and yes, even your fallen best friend. It's an attractive notion. It's easy, even in real life amidst the horrors of 2025, to daydream about going out doing something grand, strike some sort of blow to help others, with your reward being the peace of no longer having to endure the pain of a world gone mad.

Up until the heist, V even dreams of going out that way, becoming a legend of the city. Someone whose name is said with reverence, like Johnny or even Morgan Blackhand. But dreams are one thing. Actually staring down death? Not even in a big glorious firefight or some heroic sacrifice, but in a painful, drawn out manner akin to grappling with terminal illness? Well, that has a way of changing perspectives.

Johnny Silverhand is, that early in the game, no help at all in regard to vulnerability and emotional baring of the soul, so it falls to the unexpected. A doll. It's the first moment V has someone to talk with, to really talk with, about the entire situation. Something they didn't realize they needed until they got it. It all hits hard. This isn't really a review, so I don't touch on it much, but all of the most emotional moments of the game hit because the voice actors they got for both the male and female V bring their A game at all times, conveying a depth of emotion that takes true skill. The strain in their voice when discussing such raw feelings hits, in this and many other parts of the game. When they leave, the load is lighter, their purpose stronger.

I don't think I'll ever forget that moment of unexpected wonder and connection for the rest of my life.

Obviously, it's just one of many hard hitting moments during the main quest. Eventually, Johnny mellows out and you form a real bond with him. His entire ethos, his ethics and ideals, all leave him deeply disgusted and appalled at what he's doing to you against his will. For all his crassness, for all his cynicism and at times seeming misanthropy, he actually believes in the things he says he does, even if he sometimes hides behind said ideals to make other things easier to deal with. He died trying to take down a corporation that willfully grinds common people into powder under their boots. The idea that he could be forced to strip someone of their body, their autonomy, is horrifying. 

It's touch and go at times whether you can even believe him when he says this. Anyone who knew him in the past thinks the man never does anything without an angle and does not genuinely trust him. It's obvious at times he would also like to live again and finish what he started. But any time you extend him trust, he'll stretch that trust as far as it can go but will ultimately give the wheel back to you, just like he said he would. By the end he's your true ride or die, ready to go back to digital oblivion so you can have just a little bit more time.

After all, as he tells you deep in the story when he realizes he doesn't even have a grave marker and the walls come down, you're his only real friend. The only person who may even actually like him instead of just tolerating him. He doesn't even dispute that he manipulated and took advantage of everyone else, but he's shared a body with you. You change him and he changes you. With your help, he even has a series of quests that amount to getting his affairs in order, trying, for the first time in his life, to do right by the old friends he never had the emotional capacity to show he truly cared for them.

If that was all, it would be enough. But a lot of the side quests and side gigs grapple with the theme as well.

One standout of many in that regard is Sinnerman. Job seems simple enough. Help a man kill a convict who killed his wife. For whatever reason, said convict is on a furlough. It's complicated fairly quickly when the client is gunned down but the convict takes a shine to you. Perhaps it's loneliness, perhaps it's that the connection with you feels more real to him than the entertainment exec he's forced to deal with and the police escort watching him. But ultimately, he brings you along for the ride.

It's quickly apparent what's going on. In prison, he found God. If you're like me, you roll your eyes at that point, which is likely the reaction the writers were shooting for. But in a reversal of expectations, it's the real deal, not simply seeking forgiveness from God because no one else will grant it to them. He goes so far as to face family members of a man he killed and leaves upset and disheartened she cannot forgive him. As you ride with him, you realize what this is all for.

The convict, Joshua, has accepted his death. It's almost funny, meeting an actual convict who was tried and put away for murdering a man simply because they annoyed him. That's a Tuesday in Night City. Hell, the news gleefully chirps about the body lottery of the day, any shooting deaths below thirty is a triumph. But execution is the verdict and he's willing to go through with it. He just wants for it to mean something. So he made a deal with the state and a media company; he's furloughed for a day to get his affairs in order, then his death is to be filmed. It's a crucifixion, complete with scripture read as he's nailed to the cross.

Even five years ago when the game came out, the real world was dark enough that satire has mostly lost its impact, at least at the current moment in time. But this still hits. A mans death is to be turned into a braindance - a sort of full body VR experience - in a quest to touch the hearts and minds of others, to remind them of the pain and sacrifice of Christ. He wants you as his witness, one of the only people he's felt some sort of real connection with in a long time, to see him through it. It's going to happen regardless, but when he has a moment of doubt, of fear, you can be there to comfort him. If he weren't so adamant, if it didn't mean so much to him, it feels like V would try to stop the whole thing even without your input. Meanwhile, the braindance studio is absolutely salivating at the mouth for this, ready to commercialize a mans gruesome, painful death simply because they stand to make a shitload of money off it. It's gross, it's unnerving, its an extreme that, while feeling more plausible today than it ever would have for most of my life, still feels just outside the pale.

It's such a shocking situation even Johnny Silverhand himself is taken aback. Johnny can be a hypocrite at times, but one thing he's fairly consistent about is that he respects people who hold to their principles and ideals and looks down on those that do not. When pressed, he all but says that next to Joshua he feels like a poser. Maybe Joshua is the real rebel. When the crucifixion happens, it's a rare occasion where Johnny has little to say. Johnny almost never shuts up, quick with an incisive comment, insensitive joke or acidic dig. But here, he silently, almost reverently, watches without comment as Joshua dies on the cross. Even Johnny Silverhand has some tact, giving Joshua a respectful moment of silence. All while the gross realization comes over that you met another man with a countdown to the end of his life and everyone around him but you decided the best course of action was to take advantage and make an ugly spectacle out of it. Public execution taken to a new, shocking low.

In Night City, even your death can be bought and sold.

Plenty of others lean into the theme as well. Afterlife bartender Claire recruits you into a big of street racing that quickly unmasks as a revenge quest against a fellow racer who accidentally caused the death of her husband. Your best friends mother hosts an ofrenda for him, a chance to say goodbye with all the people who loved him. You befriend a vending machine with an AI sophisticated enough that you believe he may be sentient and attempt to stop repair technicians from wiping him (an obvious parallel and thematically in conversation with the concept and questionable existence of the digital construct, digital ghost even, of Johnny Silverhand). The AI of a cab company recruits you to solve some manner of errors in its programming which turns out to be something more akin to evolving into a true sentient AI. You have to figure out what to do with it. A new side job in the expansion with the fixer El Capitan has you actually doing an altruistic job for once, attempting to klep medical supplies to help the local neighborhood ravaged by the long term effects of toxic waste dumping in the area. At one point, you come across the body of a Night City legend, the man who crashed the net himself, Rache Bartmoss.

Few games are in such strong conversation with its overall theme quite like this one. That extends to the endings themselves, obviously. In truth, the entire blog post was an excuse to talk about them in relation to that theme. I put the spoiler warning up top so I guess I don't need to remind you, but I'll do it just in case; I'm not going to dance around these endings, I'm going to end up spoiling them.

I'll do the ending the expansion, Phantom Liberty, added first. It's an absolute gut punch in the best way because it gives you what you think you want without dropping the theme. The Tower is the only ending where V will live on without a time limit. Every other one? V is either dead in a physical sense or will be in a matter of months. You got what you wanted. You betrayed some people, did a little backstabbing, all to get the means to save yourself and a promise from the NUSA to save your life. Credit due, in a contrast to Arasaka the government does keep its word. If you've a good relationship with Johnny, one of the most somber, sad scenes in a game full of emotional moments plays. He won't survive the operation, but that's okay, because the thought of you dying for him is scarier than oblivion. He does everything in his power to convince you that you made the right choice. All he asks is that you never let anyone change you.

The operation works. Johnny is gone, effectively dead. You're going to live. 

All it cost you is everything that made you who you were.

It's beautiful in a sick, satisfying way. What should have taken months of recovery turns into a two year coma and when you wake up you find nothing is the same. They managed to extract the relic and repair the damage, but the end result is that you'll never again be able to use more than the most basic, least intrusive of cyberware. No more wrecking any who oppose you like a god of the street, you're a normie now. A regular citizen. The kind you've spent up to fifty hours watching get mugged in back alleys and executed by Tyger Claws. Your life as a mercenary, as an Edgerunner, is over. The Edgerunner circles think you're dead, even, as Rogue reveals in a message that amounts to "you probably shouldn't come around anymore".

If that weren't bad enough, a two year disappearance has the effect you would expect on your personal relationships. Your love interests have moved on, either feeling you betrayed them by ghosting or that you died. Your friends have changed, even the ripperdoc you befriend has been bought out while the new age hippie mystic who'd always been there for spiritual advice is leaving the city. You have nothing. No one. When you leave, rocked by the revelations, some minor street hoods accost you. Two years ago, you'd have wiped them out and moved on. Now you can't even defend yourself, beaten and nearly killed when you're thrown down a set of stairs.

Irony. Pure irony. Physically, you are alive. But V the mercenary? V the Edgerunner? They're dead. Your entire identity, everything you did and built around yourself, your reputation and personal relationships, all gone. It's like you'd gone away to war, only to come home and find nothing is the same, that you're not even sure where you fit in anymore. Fittingly, the last shot is of your character disappearing into a crowd. It's where you belong now, with all the fear and anxiety that comes with being fully organic in a city of cybernetic warriors who start gunfights for fun.

Was it worth it? Much like the end of act one punctured the idea of the Edgerunners death, now the idea of living at any cost takes its own knife to the gut. Beautiful. Poetic. No notes. A triumph. I never want to experience it again.

All the other endings branch off from the same convergence point. The Tower is kind of a side thing, branched off and leading from the events of the expansion, which are divorced from the core games main plot. In the base game, all roads lead to Arasaka. You meet with Hanako Arasaka, who plans to move against her brother, and for your help she offers Arasakas resources to save your life. Johnny, naturally, balks. You collapse and nearly die. There's no time left. In the aftermath, you've got a bunch of choices, each with their own path to the end and associated endings.

Do you take Hanako's deal? Or do you call in some favors to raid the tower and reach the potential means of saving yourself nestled within its depths? If so, who do you call? Rogue, Johnny's ex? Panam and her family of Nomads? Maybe you decide to take a peaceful end, take your fate into your own hands in a small way and check out of the situation. Or did you reach max affection with Johnny? Because if you did, you've got a secret path ahead of you, where you can say "fine, I'll do it myself", saddle up with your terrorist ghost friend and assault the damn tower yourself like it's 2023. "A wild suicide run", as Johnny puts it.

The suicide ending is self explanatory. It is, in a way, fitting. In a game where your life can be measured in weeks, where your death is entirely out of your hands, you choose the path of least resistance and take your death into your own hands. Johnny is supportive, even if he'd rather you two storm Arasaka Tower and try to save your life. Because it's a choice you made and Johnny consistently values those individual liberties. He'll sit with you as you peacefully say your goodbyes to each other and look out on the city one last time. Gunshot. Roll credits. You don't get any post game rewards out of it. I mean obviously, you skipped picking an endgame. But the option is there.

The rest of the endings, I kind of sort in my head by lifepath. Temperance aside, the other three endings all have a lifepath they feel the most fitting for. The Devil feels like it fits the Corpo lifepath the best. Someone who'd worked for Arasaka for a long time is more likely to try and put their trust in them for salvation. The Sun? Best fits a streetkid. They feel the most likely to stay in Night City after everything. Hell, they tried leaving once before. Went to Atlanta. Didn't go well. Then there's The Star, the ending where you leave with Panam and the Aldecaldos. Obviously the ending that slots best with the Nomad origin.

The Devil, well, if you choose this one, you get exactly what you deserve. You've played an entire game built around and showing the depths of misery and cruelty a world run by corporations has sunk to. Johnny Silverhand has spent most of the game telling you fifty different reasons why you should never trust Arasaka. You can't say you weren't warned. The game makes it very clear that only an idiot would even entertain the idea.

It's the ending where you've essentially decided V is desperate to live at all costs, the one where they so fear death they'll shake hands with some of the worlds biggest villains for even the smallest shot at survival. All they get for the trouble is a kick in the nuts. It's the only ending where Arasaka ends up stronger than ever. You've helped solidify their power in the worst possible way, playing a role in the resurrection of Saburo Arasaka, one of the settings biggest villains. You're sequestered on a space station with Arasaka doctors for most of your remaining months of life. Hanako Arasaka has already forgotten you, despite your help being integral to her success. 

To cap it all off, you've sold your soul and helped your enemies attain their goals and they can't even save you. All their tests fail to make headway. You're still going to die. Either you go back to Earth to live out the few remaining weeks you have left or you let Arasaka turn you into an engram, to be put into their digital prison. An engram, like Johnny was. A digital existence where you're not even sure if you're still alive in any capacity or if you're just lines of code that think they're a soul. An idea somehow even more terrifying than simple death and the void.

Chilling stuff. A terrifying ending to play through. But hey, you're the one who jumped into a pit with poisonous vipers. You can't be that shocked they bit you.

The Sun is maybe the most standard of the endings. I wish there was a better way to put it, but if "storm the heavens gates and burn everything down until you find a cure" is off the table, what's the next thing you think of? You eventually reach a sort of peace and decide to spend your last six months living as vicariously as you possibly can. Penthouses, high risk jobs and all the eddies you could ever spend. It's going to be over soon, so you decide to do everything you could to make the most of it.

The ending equivalent of the age old conversation piece "what would you do with your remaining time if you knew the world would end tomorrow". The stages of grief aren't quite the straightforward path people treat them as, but eventually you'll run up against acceptance, at which point there are a couple different ways you can go about it. This is one.

The other is in The Star. It's maybe the closest the game comes to a "good ending", or more accurately a "happy ending". With only six months left to live, you choose to spend that time differently, with loved ones far removed from the toxic pit of Night City. You and your lover, whether Panam directly or with Judy tagging along depending on your romance choices, join up with the Aldecaldos and leave Night City behind. Panam is hopeful that the nomad clans extensive contacts will turn up something that will save your life, but that's ambiguous. It's far more likely you're still going to die. But you'll do it in peace with some of the people who matter. 

It is, of course, not all sugar and sweetness. The bitter part of the phrase is still in full effect. You'll get six months to live with the people you love, but I could never really escape the thought of what effect that would have on those people. It's akin to the pain of a loved one in hospice care. At least they're around a little longer, but they're going to waste away before your eyes and there isn't anything you can do about it. That can be incredibly traumatic in itself. Then, of course, the pain of your death will follow at the end of it. Watching someone suffer on the way to the end is a uniquely hopeless feeling, one most of us will encounter at least once in life. The ending doesn't really bring that part up or talk about it, but as someone who has watched a loved one die slowly, it stared me in the face anyway. 

Tellingly, this is the only ending where your love interests remain in your life. These last two are the ones that merge the most with the other big theme of the game, that Night City is akin to a living nightmare that swallows up all of your hopes and dreams, no matter how hard you try, and leaves you rotting in an alley. The Sun is still a "good" ending, but your lovers cannot - or in Judy's case will not - follow you on the path to your grave. The Sun opens up with you saying good bye to them and effectively breaking up just before your "one last job". The Devil has you sequestered away on a space station far from anyone you know. The Tower, well, you're alive, but by the time you wake up two years later you don't really even have any personal relationships anymore. But here, at least with the women, you get to keep them in your life. In fact, it's the only ending where you can stay together with a romanced Judy. She's hell bent on leaving Night City eventually no matter what, so the only way to keep her is to leave too.

The Star seems to be the favorite ending of most people, in my experience. As bittersweet as it is, it's still the most hopeful ending, with peace and love and a tiny hope of maybe finding a fix for your decaying nervous system. I like it a lot too. I generally prefer happier endings and the Star has a soft, uplifting feeling, like the turn of a page in your life to something better. But it's not my personal favorite.

My personal hot take is that the best ending is the one where V unambiguously dies before the credits roll, leaving the body to Johnny Silverhand. See, the relic has changed V's nervous system too much, overwriting them to accommodate the engram of Johnny stored on the chip, and their own body doesn't even recognize them anymore. It's why V still dies in the other endings. Either V lives out six months left of their life or allows Johnny, who the body has changed to accommodate, to take it and live out a full life.

In Temperance, V decides to bow out and let Johnny live on.

Immediately, it brings to mind euthanizing a suffering loved one, with all the arguments, tears and fears that come with it. V can explain it outright, that they're tired of being in pain, tired of being afraid, and that if they go with Alt beyond the Blackwall, commit to being so much data and at least living on in some way, at least they don't have to fight anymore. The revelation that their own body will reject them no matter what breaks V. The fight to Mikoshi was all they had left. Now they're just tired. No amount of pleading from Johnny can talk them out of it. They've only got one request of Johnny.

"Just don't forget me, okay?"

Temperance is about sacrifice, acceptance and the grief of those left behind. It's about redemption. As fraught as your relationship with him may have been, you realize by the end that despite all his bluster Johnny Silverhand was being genuine when he told you that he wanted you to live on. Arasakas technology disgusts him. His mind was ripped out of his body against his will. Now he's doing the same to you through no fault of his own. Nothing in the world could eat at his morals, his ethics, his sensibilities more. It makes him ill.

Late in the game, after you buried the hatchet with him for good, he tells you outright that he thinks you may be his only real friend. Whereas everyone else tolerated him at best, V eventually seems to enjoy his company. He rewards you for this by becoming V's ride or die. Even revenge doesn't matter anymore. Whereas once his fondest wish was to off Adam Smasher, his killer, when V defeats Smasher and gloats Johnny is the one to reprimand them not to waste time. When Johnny said he'd take a bullet for you, he wasn't being metaphorical. Now it's V's turn to show that when he said he'd do the same back, he'd meant it.

Johnny Silverhand is the loved one left behind after a family member passes away. The one left with what ifs, with things they wished they could say to the departed, but the chance is gone. The one left with survivors guilt, wallowing in the grief that comes with a hole in your life in the shape of a person that can never, ever be filled the same again.

Months later, Johnny is still talking to V as if they're still there with him. The grieving hasn't stopped. The closest thing he had to a sibling is gone and he's left wearing their skin, like some macabre masquerade. But he's changed, swears he's not going to waste the second life V's given him. Swears he won't make the same mistakes, won't take for granted the gift V has given him.

Over the next thirty minutes, you see it's the truth. He's given up smoking and drinking. He's befriended a local kid, an aspiring musician, and bus ticket in hand, he asks the kid to drive him where he needs to go today. Along the way, you get a sense of just how much Johnny Silverhand is trying to be a better man. He freely gives the teen musical advice, doles out tips and life advice in equal measure. When the topic somehow veers towards V, he speaks with a great sadness tinged with fondness, with longing. Months later, Johnny misses his friend, misses that feeling of someone always being there, a connection deeper than any other.

At a stop to a music shop, he fiddles with an expensive guitar and allows the kid to do the same. Then, without a second thought, he spends thousands of dollars on it and they continue on their way. The next stop is the columbarium, basically the modern equivalent of a cemetery in a city with no space for the traditional variety. Johnny pays for a niche and pulls off the bullet pendant, the memento of the headshot that nearly killed V the first time, and places it inside.

In one of the most somber, moving moments in a video game, as the track New Dawn Fades plays, Johnny talks to his departed friend one more time. Tells them that he has to try to move on, to try and do something, because he can't keep carrying all the weight of his grief like an albatross. But not to worry, he'll never forget V. Ever. How could he? He's wearing their face.

Sending the kid home, Johnny boards a bus. Suddenly, the kid yells for him from outside. Asks him to get off. Johnny forgot his guitar.

"No I didn't," Johnny says quietly. "Haven't forgotten a thing. Never will."

Johnny Silverhand, rockerboy, scourge of Arasaka, angry revolutionary, culminates all of his growth by leaving Night City behind. He has a life to live, one his best friend gave their body for him to experience, and he cannot spend it living in a city that will swallow your soul if you stay. There are always more battles to fight, more corporate over-reach to work against. But Johnny is different. He'd spent most of the game a passenger, forced to reckon with the fact that, fifty years later, nothing has changed. Maybe he didn't even matter at all. So why would he do the same thing over again? The price of his second chance weighs heavy on him. He can't do V a disservice like that. So he takes off his sunglasses and looks upon Night City for the last time. The future is unclear, but at least it's something different, maybe something brighter.

I'm a sucker for redemption stories, so maybe I'm pre-disposed to like this ending, but I think given the larger context of the game it may also fit what it's doing the best. Johnny Silverhand is all over the game, basically your secondary protagonist, and he starts in an ugly place of rage, telling you to blow your brains out. But being merged with V changed his perspective, changed who he is. He's finally the decent man you could see glimpses of. It just came at a heavy cost.

Johnny died once. Now he lives. He's seen what little his first life amounted to. Arasaka tower still standing, ancient rockers ignored as they try to hawk his fifty year old music and his body dumped in an oil field, forgotten. He's taken stock in his life and didn't like what he saw. So he changed.

Maybe it's just because I relate strongly to that sort of grief. I've lost a lot of family members unexpectedly, many in a short period of time. I know how soul crushing it can be, could see myself in the way Johnny casually muses on his departed friend. They're never far from his thoughts. The way he can get choked up when thinking about them or talking to them. That hurt, that hollowness in the chest, I know it well. I've been through that sort of loss, been through the desire to pick myself up and try my best to keep moving, even if nothing will ever feel right again. To want to be better in the wake of a great loss, if only to be able to tell myself that at least they'd be proud of me.

Cyberpunk 2077 handles grief in a very mature manner. Both with this ending and with the loss of your best friend, Jackie Welles. The mission consisting of Jackies ofrenda is poignant, beautiful and heartbreaking. It captures that feeling of sifting through memories, of reminders of the people you lost, of trying to keep a brave face as your heart is breaking. The smiles at shared experiences and bitter tears for the inability to share any more with the departed. That feeling inside of wanting to scream at people on the street, to vent out the frustration settled in your chest like a lead weight, the anger burning inside because the world just moves on while a part of your world is ending. You can call Jackies number after he's gone and V will talk to him, tell him everything that's happened even though they know and acknowledge Jackie is gone. They just want that one small bit of comfort, of peace, the thought that maybe Jackie can listen anyway.

I'm an emotional guy. I've misted over at plenty of things. But this game is one of the few in which, in the confines of my room, lights off, I started to full on ugly cry. Nothing did it as much as Temperance. Nothing felt as though it had my heart in a vice quite like that ending. I almost didn't want the ending to stop, because a part of me wanted to see what Johnny would do next, to see where this redemption takes him, to hopefully see him find some measure of peace and happiness.

Perhaps its fitting, too, that this ending hands the reigns from V to Johnny. Our role is over. We came into V's life as their journey in Night City began. At the end of every game, we give up control and the worlds go on into the unknown behind the black, just past the credits scrolling on our screen. Nothing outside the time we controlled V is elaborated on in depth, and now, as we depart from our role in the game, it feels fitting to pass the reigns off to someone who will continue on in our stead in the fiction. There's something uplifting in that. Something hopeful in leaving things to Johnny as he ventures into the unknown, determined to be better.

After all, if the angriest man in the world, the one with a chip on his shoulder the size of a mountain, can redeem himself, can find something better within him, then maybe, just maybe, this world isn't entirely doomed after all. 

Silence Isn't Always Golden

I've played a lot of video games over the course of my life, going all the way back to when I was around six or seven. So naturally I've seen the idea of game stories and the protagonists who star in them grow and evolve over time, going as far back as the Sega Master System. I like stories. I'm sure you've noticed, I've only been futzing around with this review blog on and off for sixteen years at this point. So when we reached a point where games could actually start telling stories, that's when they started sticking with me the most.

Naturally, what you can do with your lead character has gone through its own metamorphosis. Limitations had us starting with silent protagonists leaping through pipes or smacking weird flan monsters in dungeons. Sure, you got rudimentary RPG's back when I was a tiny person, but those weren't the norm unless you had a personal computer long before anyone else did and messed around with games like Ultima. Eventually hardware advanced and developers had more space to work with, so we were given grander stories of personal strife, love, loss and triumph. More recently, if we count recently as the last twelve years, there's been a sort of mix between the two, a half and half approach.

My early childhood was filled with characters that didn't talk much. I begged my mother for pretty much every Sonic game that came out, even the spinoffs like Spinball. I liked Mario to a lesser extent as well. Despite that, when games started having plots, I quickly preferred that. Oh, I still get any decent Sonic game that comes out, even story light ones like Sonic Superstars. That love has been lifelong. But there are few times in my life when I distinctly remember a shift in myself, in my way of thinking.

One of them is playing Final Fantasy II on SNES*.

I'd borrowed it from a cousin on my step-fathers side of the family. For as long as I'd had it, it was one of those almost transformative experiences. We didn't have a home computer until 1999, so in 1993 or 1994 I'd never experienced the sort of storytelling that PC players were more familiar with, but once I got a taste, I wanted more. I didn't finish it back then. I must have been seven or eight. The CPU in the Giant of Babil was a wall I couldn't get past. But I thought about the game long after I had to return it. I'm sure you're shocked it's still in my top three of the franchise, beyond even VI.

What can I say? Formative experiences have more weight in personal rankings. I'd wager that's part of why people revere VI the way they do. It was their first time experiencing a game like that.

Since then, silent protagonists fell a bit out of favor with me. I still play plenty of games with them, but if a game takes any sort of stab at having a story, I often wonder what the point is if the choice is made for the character to keep quiet. I'd like to hear them converse with other characters, share viewpoints, have opinions on things that are happening.

Maybe this is why I'm one of the five weirdos in the world who has never really fucked with Zelda. The only ones that ever grabbed me are the weird ones, like Majoras Mask, or ones that take a wild swing into something new mechanically like Breath of the Wild. Outside those games, a lot of the franchise is kind of samey. Same sub weapons, same styles of dungeon, same basic plot. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's Malibu Stacy with a new hat, but it's not lost on me that the only ones that ever grab me are the ones that do something wild in the game mechanics.

Hell, even Metroid, a series I actually do like, could probably do with having her talk every once in a while. Heresy, I know. Yes, I remember Other M. The problem with that game was that the writing was bad. It had nothing to do with Samus talking.

Which, yeah, the writing can make or break something like that in general. It's the difference between The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and every Bethesda game that came after. Morrowind, you're just a player avatar who chooses some questions so people can exposit in your direction, but Morrowind is such a richly detailed game that you don't need to have a character to be invested in the world. Thought went into every strange aspect of Vvardenfell and it shows. Even the main quest is interesting, which cannot be said about any other Bethesda game.

It's the difference between the Bethesda written Fallout 4 compared to the Obsidian written Fallout: New Vegas. One's a rich adventure populated with interesting characters, plots and locales. The other is Fallout 4**. Hey-o!

I get the base appeal. Hell, Todd Howard says it outright. It's a power fantasy. That's a concept that goes back a long way. Not all are like the games Bethesda puts out these days, where they go above and beyond trying to make you feel like the most special boy ever to walk the land, but the base idea is that they're supposed to be blankish slates you can see yourself in, that you can inhabit. Even Link. They don't talk so you don't break from that feeling because of a reminder they have thoughts of their own. There's some merit in that. But you can be a power fantasy and still be interesting. Hell, Captain Marvel had it figured out back in the forties; a kid who turned into a superpowered man when he spoke the phrase of power would would hang out with an upright tiger in a suit and fight a psychic worm.

Huh. Now that I think about it, going by that last example and Morrowind, maybe the trick is to get weird.

I actually felt somewhat vindicated recently. Did you play the Dead Space remake? If not, shame, you've got plenty of company. That's probably why we're not getting a remake of the second one. Regardless, that's a game that went from the protagonist, Issac Clarke, never saying a word in the original to actually interacting in the remake. The game was better for it. 

My friend had been worried in the lead-up that they'd make him too chatty, have him react to the horror elements too much and by extension undercut the tension, but it turned out he only spoke when other characters were involved. It improved things a lot. Along with the better writing and better voice acting, giving Hammond and Kendra a voiced Issac to interact with made the conversations feel more natural. In the original game, they're always talking at you. Now, they're talking with you. It alleviates some of the pressure since they no longer need to hold up everything themselves. Issac can pull some weight. I ended up more engrossed in the story and game, which I actually didn't expect.

Most of the memorable stories in games, the most unforgettable moments, involve characters. If Final Fantasy VII's Cloud is just a blank slate rather than the glorious mess we get, does it hurt as much when his love interest dies? Does him piecing his mind back together in the lifestream even work? Because it's all memories and backstory of that character, not anything the player got to choose. If V isn't given dialogue in Cyberpunk 2077, can it be a story about facing mortality and your own legacy in the same way? Does the sequence in Clouds hit the same? Does Johnny Silverhand hit the same if he's just monologueing to a proverbial wall the whole game? Would Red Dead Redemption 2 make me cry if Arthur Morgan isn't a fully realized character with his own history, thoughts, dreams and morality?

Fighting a big pig for some golden triangles is cool and all, but I'm not going to think about it long, long after I'm done the way I did some of the previous examples. After finishing Red Dead Redemption 2, I was talking about it with my Discord friends for weeks after. Had the soundtrack looping for almost a month, despite already hearing plenty of it. Steam tells me I'd put in five hundred hours by the time I was finished. For all the time I'd spent enjoying Mario games, nothing has stuck with me quite like the moment Aerith died and Cloud spent the rest of the game grieving.

Well, except the music. To this day I randomly hum Bob-omb Battlefield out of nowhere, to the annoyance of my friends. That shit's seared in my brain like the image into a projection TV that was left on a paused screen too long.

It wouldn't fit every game. I wouldn't suddenly want every game to have protagonist dialogue or fully voiced characters. I don't need my player avatar to spout things in the middle of a round of Peak. Your banter with your friends is the draw in co-op games. But for a majority of games, I don't know, if they bother to have a story I don't think they need to be mute all the time. The idea that I can't immerse myself if I'm not pretending the character I inhabit is me in the game world always seemed odd to me.

Even Final Fantasy XIV's Warrior of Light, ostensibly a player avatar themself, will at least give a stoic nod or two and let you choose some things to say to your friends.

Was there a point to all this? I don't know. I felt like writing and this was what was on my mind at the time. Word vomit everybody! The best part of having your own blog, audience or not, is you can write whatever the hell you want. You can say "it's my blog, I can write whatever the hell I want".

* If you're not in your late thirties like me you've probably only ever seen the game by its actual name, Final Fantasy IV. Short version is that for around fifteen years, Final Fantasy II and III never made it to American shores. Worried just putting out a game called Final Fantasy IV without the other two would confuse people, they just called it Final Fantasy II in America. V didn't make it over for roughly a decade either, so when VI came over it was just called III. Around Final Fantasy VII they just said fuck it and reverted to the regular number scheme, slowly filling in the gaps in the following years and re-titling II and III to their Japanese numbers for every re-release. 

**At the time of writing I still haven't finished that game. I think I put like five hours in it when it came out and just wasn't having it. Incredibly dumbed down and filled with dumb busywork like the settlement building, which modders had already done better. Maybe one day I'll finish a playthrough out of sheer spite. It's how I got through Final Fantasy XIII, a game that made me pretty damn mad at times.

Future State: Wonder Woman (comics)

Writers: Becky Cloonan, Joelle Jones, Dan Watters, L.L. McKinney

Artists: Jen Bartel, Joelle Jones, Alitha Martinez, Mark Morales, Leila Del Duca

Collects: Future State: Wonder Woman #1-2, Future State: Immortal Wonder Woman #1-2, Future State: Superman/Wonder Woman #1-2

I suppose it had to happen at some point. Didn't I say with Futures End I like alternate future stories? Today is my first foray into Future State, which was a two month "event" of sorts where the main line went on hiatus and were replaced with special two issue miniseries set in an alternate future. 

That's what it ended up being, at any rate. Originally, the idea was for this to just be the future of the DC Universe. Called 5G, it was essentially meant to move the DC Universe to the next generation by skipping five years, introducing new characters and letting some characters we knew take on familiar mantles. Bleeding Cool leaked a ton of information on it when it was still meant to be where DC Comics happened to be going. Ultimately, the idea of making it the new present of the DC Universe was scrapped, probably because it was a bridge too far, and the company ended up firing the long time editor in chief who spearheaded the move, Dan DiDio.

Credit given where credit is due, it was an incredibly ballsy idea. Dan DiDios time running DC was filled with moments like that for better or worse. Some worked out, some didn't. In my personal opinion, it's likely for the best this got canned. Merging the New 52, itself a ballsy initiative back when it happened, with the old pre-Flashpoint universe breathed a lot of new life into the line with the Rebirth initiative and there was no need to blow the whole thing up again with some radical change that shifted a bunch of characters around and forcibly changed the guard. Now, three years removed at the time of writing, a ton of books have had absolutely stellar runs in the continuing universe, proving it just wasn't necessary, and DC just announced an alternate line akin to Marvels Ultimate Universe, called the Absolute Universe, which will act as a fresh slate and new take.

But Future State was born from the ashes of 5G and I think it's worthwhile to look at them as their own books and ideas. Get a feel for what 5G might have been and see what might have been worth keeping. This volume collects everything on the Wonder Woman end of Future State with the idea seemingly that there were three Wonder Women, each with different mission statements.

The book starts by presenting the chapters involving Nubia, one of the new Wonder Women and the one who seems to still be active in the United States. Nubia is a character that's been around a long time, long enough I'd heard of her despite not being a Wonder Woman mark, but I'll be damned if I can remember much of anything that she's ever done before this. This seemed to do a lot for her, though; despite 5G's cancellation, Nubia's taken on a bit more spotlight in the years since, to the point she leads Themyscira now.

It's some meat and potatoes comics, probably the most familiar feeling sort of story in the book and it has its place as such. Grail, daughter of Darkseid, is gathering some artifacts for an unknown reason, and Nubis has to stop her. She looks to her family for help gathering artifacts, then ends up in another scrap with Grail that has Circe involved. A couple mysteries are teased that may or may not ever appear again in the main timeline, but it ends fairly tidily. Nothing super spectacular, nothing bad, I could see the character maybe holding something down for a bit, a miniseries at least if not an ongoing.

Diana Prince, Wonder Woman Classic, has something a bit more abstract, interesting and thematic. She's who the title Immortal Wonder Woman is referring to, now among the pantheon of gods, and her story takes place way past anything else in the entirety of Future State. In it, we're at the last moments of the universe, thousands of years into the future, as something called The Undoing is swallowing the stars and leaving emptiness in its wake. Earth is gone, what's left quickly follows and Diana is left alone struggling to hold on to hope and find some measure of life left, some reason to keep on fighting.

It's heavy stuff, with plenty of emotional moments. Everything is dying and even the amazons of Themyscira, mired in their ways, would rather fight and die rather than try and rebuild on some new planet in the universe. Swamp Thing is dying, itself the last hope if reviving something of life. Darkseid is in full nihilist mode, accepting the end coming and returning to Earth just hoping to find some challenge left worth fighting. Diana watches everything fall apart, wearing reminders of the people she loved, and has to find a reason to hope the universe can be saved.

The opening sequence is one of the most effective, as she returns to the long abandoned, decrepit, tomb quiet Batcave long, long after Batman is gone. She's looking for a memento of Bruce, something to take with her, and ends up conversing with what seems to be his spirit. She mourns him and obviously misses him, but he simply reminds her of who she is and what she meant to everyone. She was a light of hope. Batman and Wonder Woman have a great friendship, on rare occasion teased as something more, and the sequence leans into their connection as friends, comrades in arms and people who would trust the other with their lives. Of the many items she carries, Batmans utility belt is the one we directly see her acquire and gives us the mission statement of Immortal Wonder Woman.

She's hope. In the end, hope can save the universe, or at least leave it born anew. Two incredibly somber issues that end with her light shining. It's about as perfect a summation of the character as you could ask for.

Our last leading lady is probably the most interesting and, being a new character, has the most page space between her own two issue mini and the one she shares with Jon Kent, Superman in Future State. Yara Flor is immediately differentiated from the other two. Pigheaded but noble. Quick to lose herself in anger but not cruel. Enjoys the fight but not battle crazed. Mischievous but loyal enough to risk her very soul to dive into hell itself to attempt to rescue a departed sister Amazon. She seems to lean more into a modern fantasy sort of story. All in all, she makes a strong first impression, bouyed by some fantastic art, and I was immediately taken with the character. She has a nice friendship with Jon, too, being the voice of reason to his overworking himself. Even the place she seems to live, in the Amazon, gives her an interesting local of her own.

Unfortunately, it feels like she suffered the most for 5G being cancelled. Following this, she got a seven issue miniseries positioning her as DC's new Wonder Girl, but aside from appearing occasionally in Wonder Womans solo book she hasn't had any major spotlight that I've seen since a role in Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths. I'm not entirely sure why, but DC would do well to get on some kind of ongoing place for her adventures, because she's pretty great in what little I've seen of her so far.

Yara and Diana got the best of the art duties in this. Joelle Jones pulls double duty with Yara and she draws the hell out of everything Yara goes through to save her amazonian sister, from jungle dangers to Cerberus to the ferryman at the River Styx. I'll be reading the Wonder Girl miniseries to get more of the character and this art. Diana, meanwhile, has Jen Bartel on art. Shout out to the coloring here. The linework is clean and expressive, but the coloring does so much for setting mood, from the cold, dead, forgotten Batcave to the bright colors of Themyscira, reflected nowhere else in the world, to the glittering stars in the lonely void. It sets a hell of a mood. Plus, I love it when space is depicted with  gentle hues of color, rather than a simple void. Top shelf all around.

This is obviously only one piece of the overall Future State event. Is it an event? I guess it qualifies. It feels more akin to something like Age of Apocalypse, which did the "replace the ongoings for a couple months" trick too. Regardless of what you call it, this volume only handles the amazonian end of things, so the jury is out on anything else. But what is here is, I think, worth at least reading, if only for the first appearance of Yara Flor. Who knows, your local library might have it if you don't feel like dropping some cash.

Batman - One Bad Day: Bane (comics)

Writer: Joshua Williamson

Artist: Howard Porter

Original Graphic Novel

Bane has had quite a journey over the last thirty years of comics and in the process become a rather complex character. There's obviously the work done by co-creator Chuck Dixon. There's everything Gail Simone did with him in Secret Six. It's far from the worst thing Tom King did during his Batman run, might even be low on the list, but his time using the character didn't really reflect any of that.

One Bad Day was an initiative I rolled my eyes at. DC can harp on the Killing Joke too much as it is, making an entire initiative around the line of someone being one bad day away from snapping seemed a little too cute. The first I read, the one dedicated to the Riddler, only reinforced that feeling. But whereas the Riddler book did some dogshit things with the character on top of leaning in too hard on the "One Bad Day" tagline, Banes graphic novel suggests it might play as more of a theme with others. A focus on the things that made the characters who they are and how they shaped them.

In wrestling parlance, Bane is what we'd call a tweener, a character who sits between a good guy or a bad guy and can lean a bit either way depending on circumstances. They can have a grudge against a hero, a case where they're firmly the villain, or a grudge against a villain, which obviously puts them in the opposite position. He has a complex relationship with Batman, both foe and begrudging ally when circumstances are right for it. Tom Kings run nearly ruined this dynamic by having Bane kill Alfred, which is probably why it should just be undone already, because it's a cloud that hangs over the character*. Especially when we get stories like this, where the complexity seeps back in.

Banes story revolves around the substance that empowered him to break the Bat, once upon a time. Venom is a cloud over his life, an addictive substance that can, over time, absolutely wreck your mind and body. On numerous occasions, when he's slipped from its grasp, Bane has dedicated his time and effort to eradicating it so no one can suffer the fate he had. It's his thematic "One Bad Day", the thing that changed his life forever.

When we start, it's seemingly some time in the future. Bane kicked the habit of Venom once and for all and, as far as he is aware, has managed to eradicate the substance from the face of the Earth. He spends his time in Mexico reveling in past glory; he's a participant in a regular wrestling event where he recreates the "breaking of the bat" with whatever local wrestler takes up the role that night. He has a mansion on the outskirts and his life is rather lonely. Over his fireplace, a framed newspaper of the day he broke Batmans back. Sometimes, he will see apparitions of his mother, long gone from his life. 

The obvious parallels Bruce Wayne are stark, only Banes life is far lonelier. He seemingly has no connections, just money, his matches and dark nights in front of his mantle. It changes when a small time drug dealer shows up at his door.

Banes reputation precedes him. You don't get a solid victory over Batman like Bane did and just end up forgotten. Hell, you can argue no one else ever did on the level Bane did. Batman was out for months and even required a temporary replacement. Everyone knows his story and of the drug that gave him great strength. The drug dealer has brought a vial of venom, something he thinks Bane would want. Only Bane is enraged. He thought he'd destroyed the substance entirely. Demanding to know where it was found, he and the drug pusher leave to finish the job.

The story paints a complex picture of the character, one that adds the depth that some writers forget. Breaking Batmans back is Banes greatest triumph in life, but much like some athletes, it's also a great success that he has never been able to replicate in his life. It hangs over his life like a cloud, his one moment of glory in a life ravaged by the drug that gave him the power to do it. He sees a parallel of himself in the drug pusher, a kid who got forced into the life when he was left with the debts of his dead father, a life situation the son of King Snake knows all too well. Bane struggles at moments with the temptation, obvious on his face, of reclaiming that glory while realizing it's a Faustian bargain. He has a subtextual need for Venom to die so he can be free of that temptation.

For a graphic novel clocking in at just under seventy pages, it does everything it needs to, tying back through the history of Bane himself and the very substance of Venom. There are callbacks that go as far as the Legends of the Dark Knight arc that introduced Venom a year before Bane made his first appearance. It looks to paint a full portrait of the man and I'm pleased to say it largely succeeds. It even ends up a positive note, with Bane reflecting on advice from Batman to make a change in his life. It's the closest to a "happy ending" you can picture for Bane at this point in his life, suggesting a change in life direction that could take him to a better place.

Howard Porter holds up his end artistically with some of his best work in years. His depiction of Bane is at times grotesque, always ugly, a man ravaged by time and the obvious effects using a drug that suddenly bloats your musculature might have on your skin and body. Moody colors darken the page during contemplative moments, contrasted with brighter colors in the ring, in action. The storytelling is clear, Porter will even get inventive with layout at times. He does that trick I love, where a ton of tiny panels can depict a long fight in the span of two pages without wasting page space.

The story and art synergize to make something that genuinely does Bane right. I'm unsure if it is in continuity. After all, the Riddler graphic novel was decidedly not. This one also seems to take place after much time has passed, perhaps up to a decade beyond the present day of the DCU. As such, I lean pretty heavily toward it being its own thing. But while I like continuity, it's far from the end all and be all. A good story justifies itself and hell, even if it isn't canon, this story uses past continuity incredibly well to tell its story. Continuity is a tool, it doesn't need to be a shackle.

Of the two One Bad Day graphic novels I've read so far, Bane is the first outright success. Sharply written, well drawn and respectful of its main character, it's the best Bane story I've read in a minute. I'd personally recommend tracking it down and reading it in whatever way strikes your fancy. It's worth the time.

* Speaking of this cloud, the one reference to Alfreds death, in flashback, aptly illustrated my meaning. It's took me out of the story for a brief moment, because if that event happened in this stories internal continuity it makes it harder to believe Batman will work together with the man who killed his surrogate father figure. But it's a rock and a hard place situation. The bedrock of this story is in Banes life story, so can you just conveniently leave it out to make things easier? I don't know the answer. It doesn't wreck the book, but it does remind me of what a mistake that moment was and that, whatever your thoughts on comic death or characters coming back to life, the character of Bane would be far better served if it were undone. It's a moment of cruelty that does nothing for the character.

The New 52 - Futures End Vol. 2 (comics)

Writers: Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, Keith Giffen

Artists: Patrick Zircher, Jesus Merino, Aaron Lopresti and many more

Collects: The New 52 - Futures End #18-30

 Volume one was a decent start but felt too slow at times, which became a bit of an issue by the end. The first volume contained eighteen issues worth of material including the FCBD special that kicked it all off, inching close to half the overall weekly in one tome, a lot of ground to cover without speeding up. Thankfully, that's less of an issue with volume two. Containing a lighter thirteen issues, it also shifts out of first gear and actually starts to get some momentum going.

We do start to get some answers as to what exactly is going on and some threads start to converge. The Firestorm arc starts to bleed into Tim Drakes plot, while Terry is also starting to think that he needs Tims help, thereby tying that in. It's made plain who attacked Stormwatch, though if you have a clue about what symbol said enemy uses you'll see it coming. Grifters plotline dips into Brother Eye shenanigans, so we're getting closer to whatever the hell let him take wider control, while also dealing with the mystery of the missing Earth 2 refugees. Most importantly, back in the future Terry escaped, Brother Eye realizes that Terry has traveled through time, which means he has to do his best Skynet impersonation and send someone back to deal with the threat.

By the volumes close, we've got all the pieces in play for the last volume. Brother Eye has escaped to the wider world, we have a new Firestorm, Brainiac is coming, Tim Drake is starting to realize he can't really leave this life behind and Mr. Terrific barrels onward with his tech ambitions, despite warnings from friends. Also, Frankenstein and his team manage to escape the danger they were in, warping away, but we don't actually see where they end up in this volume. For some reason, it happens in the middle of the volume and the remaining four or five issues are dealing with other things. A strange breakdown, but might simply be the nature of how the divisions for the collection broke down.

It's hard to say a lot about the writing that wasn't said last time, because I'm not at the end yet, but as mentioned before this volume moves faster and that does it a lot of good. Unfortunately, my nitpick about Terry needing more page time holds over from the prior volume, but it is what it is. They really are juggling a lot more ongoing plots than I expected and they all need page time. Thankfully we start to see him more as the volume wears on and with plotlines intersecting I expect it will be less of an issue in the final volume. 

As for the art, it's the same deal as last volume. Hard to critique. Competent work that blends together well enough. Never horrid nor spectacular.

Obviously I'm going to hold any opinions on if the weekly is good overall until I finish the final volume, but the second is a bit of an improvement over the first, which I already thought was a decent read. So far, as long as it doesn't completely shit the bed with the ending, it'll probably hit somewhere in the middle as far as ranking DC's weeklies.

Bit of a short review, I know, but there isn't a lot of bad that sticks out and any good I could emphasize depends on how the series closes out.

The New 52 - Futures End Vol. 1 (comics)

Writers: Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, Kieth Giffen

Artists: Patrick Zircher, Jesus Merino, Aaron Lopresti and many more

Collects: The New 52 - Futures End #0-17

I was pretty excited about this back in the day. It's a time travel, avoid the bad future story and I often dig those. It's a weekly with Batman Beyond, one of the best variants of Batman ever put to paper, front and center. It has a bunch of writers I generally like. But reviews of it week to week were mid and money issues put me off from getting the trades in a timely manner. It became one of those "I'll read it when I get to it" projects, only who the hell knew when I'd get to it.

Well, I finally did. It's pretty decent? I want to say good, but this is only a third of the overall weekly so I don't know how it will shake out. It's not quite the slam dunk I expected from the talent involved, but I'll get into that. Still, I enjoyed it.

The series starts out hot with its zero issue, which is entirely set in the devastated future of thirty five years out from the then DC Universes present day. And when I say devastated, I mean it. Brother Eye has taken over everything its eye can see, assimilating heroes in frankly horrifying ways, and the whole thing is essentially the last stand of the remaining heroes. Seriously, there's some body horror going on, as much as they can get away with for a general audience. Circumstances leave them unable to pull it off, leading to Batmans backup plan; he's going to go back to the past and destroy Brother Eye before he and Mr. Terrific even build it. Unfortunately, he's injured in a standoff, so he sends his protege Terry McGuinnis in his place.

From there, the series is structured similarly to past weekly projects. 52 comes to mind. There are multiple running stories throughout that dip in and out when necessary. The duo that make up Firestorm are on the outs and we see what leads to the two agreeing never to merge again. Grifter is caught by agents of Cadmus for shadowy business. Frankenstein is lured into rejoining S.H.A.D.E. to investigate a sudden attack on Stormwatch. Mr. Terrific is completely up his own ass and marching the world toward the dark future without realizing it. Lois Lane is investigating the Green Arrows death. Tim Drake is in hiding and it's unclear why. Then there's the most important plotline, Terry McGuinnis working to avert the future entirely.

Well, it's the most important in theory, but one of the things that keep it going from decent-to-good all the way to great is that it feels like, at times, that plotline is the one that has the least focus. After we're past the zero issue, Terrys story is around, but as you can tell from the preceding paragraph, it's one of like eight narrative strands the weekly chooses to service. I don't think any of the narratives lost me, but it's a lot to juggle and none of them have fully merged by the end of the volume.

Which leads to the other issue that keeps the first volume from being a bit higher up on the quality chain. With so much to juggle, the book often feels like it's moving very slowly. We're jumping between a bunch of narratives, for a good chunk of the volume all of them are in setup mode and you can go a couple issues before you see a plotline return again. I imagine this is a very large part of why the weekly issues god middling reviews. If the pace feels slow to me in a collected volume, it must have been absolutely maddening to follow week to week.

Having yet to finish the overall story, I'm not a hundred percent sure which you cut, but maybe Lois Lanes plotline could have been folded into one of the others at the least. I'd have said Tim Drake just going off this volume, but that's the one plotline I DO know the destination of and yeah, can't really be cut. Maybe some pages could have stood to be trimmed from Grifter on Cadmus island. But whatever could have been decided, Terry needed more pages. He was the big draw of this weekly and he could have stood to be front and center more.

The art is about what you would expect for a weekly. There's a rotating cast of artists, some regular and a few pinch hitters. They all generally hit a baseline of quality so it looks consistent enough to carry the day, you just can't expect any standout artwork because that's not really what you see on these sort of projects. I kind of wish there was more to talk about, but the demands of a weekly schedule mean consistency of the whole mean more than any individual part. No shade from me, it's about the only way to hit a weekly schedule for a year. Wildly different art across one project almost never works out anyway.

It's difficult for me to pass judgement on a single volume of such a large series. A good chunk of the plotlines only just kick into gear by the end of the volume. I'll have more formed opinions by the time I'm finished. But for one volume, it's a pretty decent read with the caveat that you understand that it's a slow burn and there are a lot of plotlines being juggled. If that's not a turnoff for you, feel free to give the first volume a go.

Strange Adventures (comics)

Writer: Tom King

Artist: Mitch Gerards, Evan "Doc" Shaner

Collects: Strange Adventures (Vol. 5) #1-12

I think one of the things I like least about Tom Kings work is that I always feel like shit after I read one.

His writing often has a theme he goes back to, trauma, and he's admittedly good at it. It likely stems from his past experience in the CIA. He knows how trauma can fuck you up and most of his stories are about how it can break you down, lead you to do things you might never have without it, from self destruction all the way to war crimes. It's a good theme, but I wonder if he ever feels the need to write beyond that. I also wonder if he realizes any time he takes a comic character his approach doesn't do a lot more than ugly them up pretty bad.

Adam Strange as a character is very much in the vein of classic space adventurer serials like Buck Rogers or John Carter of Mars. He's one day teleported to a far off planet, falls in love with it and uses its technology to fight against anything that might threaten it. A lot of adventure and sci-fi, pulpy stuff. There's the occasional war, but it's much in the way that sort of stuff is depicted in comic books, without dwelling much on the horrors of it. Pretty clean cut Silver Age fare.

Tom Kings "Strange Adventures"* asks what it looks like when we stuff all the horrible stuff in.

We start after the war on Rann, the planet of which Strange has become an adopted son of sorts, is over. Strange and the Rannians had pushed back the Pykkt and saved their planet. Now, in the wake of the war, a retired Adam has returned to Earth with his wife. What awaits him is adulation and medals. He wrote a memoir about the war, which carries the same title as this comic, and spends his days at book signings. Until one day, one of the people who showed up for the signing turns hostile. He screams about knowing what Strange did, about the things he'd done to the Pykkt, and causes a scene. 

Under intense scrutiny, Strange turns to Batman, asking him to dig into Stranges past and life to absolve him of wrongdoing. Batman rightly decides that he cannot do this for Strange, that given their long history of fighting together and friendship Batman could not possibly be objective, but he promises to turn the case over to someone who could. Michael Holt, Mr. Terrific. A man who lives up to his name. Suddenly, Adam Strange is wary of the investigation he called for. Turns out it's for good reason, as when Terrific starts digging deeper, some things stop adding up. By the end, a lot more will be revealed than Adam Strange bargained for.

As always with Tom King, it's impeccably written. Even when I don't much care for the work in question, I can never deny he's a skilled writer. And he synergizes well with Mitch Gerards and Evan Shaner. The story, as it unfolds, switches between the present day on Earth and snapshots of moments of the war on Rann in the past, both with a different style. On Earth, it's more detailed, almost grimier, reflecting the uglier side of things slowly coming to light. On Rann, it's brighter, cleaner, with simple lines and bold colors, as if to reflect the inspiring story he told of the war, of the biggest moments. It's a neat trick and the contrast can be a gut punch when things start breaking down in the present while we see moments in the past of triumph and love.

Tom King is spoiled for great artists to work with. He's like Mark Miller in that way. Only, you know, actually good at the whole writing thing. Or at least he's a hell of a lot more consistently good than Mark Miller's ever been.

I think I just don't like his approach or what he does to characters or settings. Most of the time it just makes me roll my eyes. I think back to Murderin' Riddler for one example but he does it to almost anything he touches. There's Batman, obviously, which he positioned as a form a slow burn suicide. But he also did it to Mr. Miracle, who may or may not be trapped in an eternal purgatory after a suicide attempt he may or may not have escaped from. He's done it to the JLI, where Guy Gardner is seemingly murdered quite brutally** and Ice ends up essentially fitting the femme fatale role that's never once been even remotely hinted for her as a character. He takes interesting characters, often with depth, and utterly breaks them in ways you can't walk back from.

I cringe when a new Tom King comic is announced with some DC property I like, because there will be some new way in which characters I like are twisted in ugly ways.

That said, I should say that it's fine and despite my probably harsh words I'm not mad about it or anything. His Batman run aside most of his work is self contained and designated outside main continuity. It harms no one allowing him to do his take on these things because he doesn't have to worry about whether he breaks the proverbial toy or not. Adam Strange is as he always has been in the DC Universe proper. For this reason it's not like I'm even saying "why do they keep giving this guy work". They're often Black Label. He can go nuts. I'll either like it or I won't, and that's okay.

I just think, after numerous work, I just don't like the way he takes these bright characters and utterly breaks them. Even when it's not in continuity, it's not fun to see Adam Strange as a war criminal who has done some terrible things beyond that I won't talk about because it would spoil the whole third act. Part of me thinks that taking these bright, colorful characters and doing such utterly nasty things to them is about as childish as you could ever view these fictional entities once written for kids.

That's probably why I've turned on a fair bit of 80's comics. You know the ones, where everything had to grim and gritty it up. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but it starts to feel so very edgelord, to me, to take things that are meant to be a positive escape from a frankly terrifying real world and drag them through the mud. That's probably why I've turned on a lot of Alan Moores work, long held as classics, including Watchmen. Some like Swamp Thing fit, because that's horror, but everything else? Geez, dude.

But outside my personal feelings about approach? Or content? Strange Adventures is a very, very well written and drawn comic book. And it may well work incredibly well for you. Maybe this approach is what some people are looking for and it's good it's there for them. I don't even regret reading it despite disliking its tone and I would encourage anyone to try it for themselves. It might be their new favorite. It's well written, well drawn, I'd even say that overall it's a good story. I almost never regret reading a great comic, even if it makes me feel like shit.

I simply never need to read it again.