King Arts
Well-known member
This might be stupid question I haven’t beat the game so I might get it wrong.Cyberpunk's 2077 themes including
-society is complacent in the crapsack world they've created
-technology will be used by corporations and the uber-rich to make themselves immortal at the cost of everyone else.
-being kept alive through technology is not actually living (Get it? It's called SOULKILLER because all of this over-reliance on technology in this desperate vein attempt to live forever KILLS YOUR SOUL! do you get it? DO YOU GET THE MESSAGE YET?!?)
-Everyone is in it for themselves, the sooner your aware of that the less it'll hurt when they backstab you
-we all have to die sometimes so it's best to die swinging and becoming a legend.
Bonus points
-toxic masculinity bad (Heavily implied with Johnny Silverhand)
-artificial intelligence is not really alive and it will be the death of us all (Heavily implied with Alt's point in the game)
These themes are not new or profound they've been in the mainstream philosophical stage ever since the Industrial Age, and honestly no, what you do doesn't matter, in fact, it can't matter. because if there is a definitive ending, let alone a defenitive happy ending, then how will they be able to milk the franchise with such hit sequels and spin-offs like Cyberpunk 2079, Cyberpunk 2084, Cyberpunk 2099, Cyberpunk 2105 and Cyberpunk: Cyber Warfare. It's hilarious honestly because for all of the accusations from movements like punk that claim, happy endings are just a piece of cheap boring commercial tripe, the punk movement itself has been heavily commercialized for decades if not since its very inception.
As for the game itself, Johnny is dead, Alt has become every AI clique in the book (Save for going all Skynet but don't worry they'll go their soon enough) and unless Project Red does a mass effect where your character and save data from the previous game carries over to the sequel, then V is likely dead or will be reduced to a cameo with the Arasaka Corporation inevitably recovering because again, got to have a villain to milk those sequels baby!
in a very thick sense of Irony to the trope, it's cynical corporatized dribble pretending to be a rebel pretending to be much more philosophically deep than they actually are. (Which I mean most philosophies aren't that deep to begin with but that's another subject.) It's preachy, it's pretentious, it's the equivalent of the edgy teen trying to pretend he's grown up, and in such a game/world to quote Johnny from WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play."
But aren’t there two maybe three happy endings where you save yourself? One of them is the Arasaka ending where they download your memories, the other is the opposite where you let Johnny take you over. It depends on your philosophical perspective on what “you” is is it your body or your memories. Arasaka protects your memeories but your body is destroyed, if you let Johnny take over your body is still alive and you can argue that it’s no different than amnesia and you aren’t actually Johnny just a crazy v who thinks they are. Also the ending with Panem where you try to look for a cure it’s a maybe because it doesn’t say if you found it or not.