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. You're a civilian now, akin to the random un-named NPC's you've passed on the street all game. 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 best digital 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. 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. Though, again, tying to death in its own unique way. Plus, 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. 

Tellingly, this is the only ending where you're 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, I already discussed what happens to your personal relationships there in depth. 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 brother 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.