LogFAQs > #980794453

The main game's ending doesn't top this...but I think it matches it, shot for shot.

OK. Let's get talkin'. Here goes. Fundamentally, Cyberpunk '77 is a Buddhist game. This is a weird thought, I know, but here's the thing. Night City? Night City is a fucking pit. It's an endless loop of misery and pain. It's a horrorshow. People do unto others as others have done onto them, and that teaches the next generation of poor bastards that it's kill or be killed out there, and so they keep hurting each other. Without cure. Without cease. A broken world creates broken people, and using they've been taught, they break the world further.

"The wheel has to be broken." This kind of encapsulates it. Night City isn't just Night City. Night City is an embodiment of the Wheel of Samsara. It's an eternal recurrence of lives dominated by the fears and pains that besiege mankind from womb to tomb. And nobody, nobody, can ever overcome them.

...Or maybe...maybe they can.

You met the Zen Master. Remember how you could give him eddies, and yet he was nowhere to be found after every lesson? Something Buddhism teaches is that the Buddha, having attained enlightenment, escaped the cycle of reincarnation and pain and achieved total spiritual liberation -- the state known as Nirvana. But rather than immediately end his life, the Buddha chose to stay in this world and 'descend' to the level of ordinary people, and teach to everyone who would listen as much as he could before passing on to the end of his journey. The Zen Master isn't just a random monk. He is, allegorically, THE original monk, come down to teach a random sinner how to reconnect with the world and stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

Which leads us to Dogtown. You find another sinner who isn't just kind of like you but is you (you obviously noticed it, but Songbird deliberately looks a lot like default Fem!V), who is as dangerous as you are, as driven as you are, and as desperate as you are and fighting tooth and nail to escape their fate just like you do, and you get a choice. Do you see someone else hurting and decide that for once it's not about you and choose to care, even though there's nothing to gain? Or do you decide you cannot trust her cause she reminds you too much of you, and that's too scary?

Phantom Liberty is divided into two back halves. In one half, you decide to keep the cycle of Samsara going. As a consequence, everything goes to fucking hell. I know you love horror, and because of this, I'm just gonna tell you this: you owe it to yourself to check out the other half of Firestarter when you got a minute. CDPR cooked amazingly hard and delivered a bonafide horror experience in the cyberpunk ultrabadass simulator that you cannot miss. That route has no canon name (neither route does), but I call it the Descent. It takes you down, down, down, deeper and deeper, all the way to rock bottom. Because that's what you choose. You decide it's better to drag everyone else down into the hell you've gotten used to than let anyone else out before you...and it costs you. It costs everyone.

And then there's the route you chose. Night City International and Translunar is the tallest vertical climb the game has to offer for a reason. It's an act of purification. I remember the moment So Mi comes over the railing and you talk to each other, and while I can only speak for how Gavin Drea played that scene, I felt like V had never trusted anyone as much as he had in that moment. My boy was in it not for the money or for safety, but because this was right, because everything was clicking into place, and because it was a chance to make a difference. He was quiet. Calm. Focused. At peace. The Ascent is a purification. You choose to save someone else even though there's nothing in it for you, and in the process, you save yourself as well. You do what David Martinez couldn't, what Johnny Silverhand couldn't. You save the girl, and finally, finally, you break the cycle.

This game led me to a big personal realization. Salvation isn't something you earn. Salvation is something to give, because in this world, nobody is worth saving until we choose to say they are worthy and get involved with them. It says more about us that we choose to care than it says about them and the merits they made.

And now, you get to do one more good deed and see how things play out. First, if you managed to get the datapad in NCX, go back to the entryway. There's a lady there you can give it to. It's just the tiniest, littlest thing...but man, it makes a difference.

Second...go to where you found So Mi and the van. She left a message there.

The third and last thing, you can't rush. After some time has passed, you'll get a message. You'll know what it means when you see it. Both the Ascent and the Descent offer amazing rewards for completing them fully. I hope you enjoy yours. Receiving that final reward (both parts of it) marks the point, IMO, where V fully completes their journey of growth and becomes something more than just a hired gun. It sets them up to do the last thing no other runner could ever pull off. It's time to become a legend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiHw7MrTx30