The first time around I didn’t trust Silverhand at all, so I decided to give him as little control of V’s body as possible. As a result, I lost the option to ask Rogue to help me. Plus I didn’t believe I could get to Mikoshi even though Hanako told me where it was. What if she was lying? I also thought nobody was better than Arasaka to help me since they made the chip. So I went through with Hanako’s plan, helped Saburo to be reborn and rebuild Arasaka, only to learn that I would have only six months left.
I actually thought that was a good ending. I made some money, made some friends, and made a name for V. More importantly, I finally got rid of Johnny, whom I was struggling to understand. I wanted V to be the best kind of merc, competent, reliable, but calculating and cold, so the decisions I made for V was always based on his self interest alone. At the final farewell, Johnny tried really hard to convince me that he and V were not so separate. He said he was “the V with a heavy conscience”, but my V never had a conscience in the first place. He said V didn’t get it, it’s not about Arasaka or life and death, “it’s about principle”, but what had been his principle? Anti-corp?
Maybe this is me being ignorant and privileged, but I had trouble buying into the anti-corp theme. It’s easy to complain. It’s easy to blame others or the so-called system. Corporations are also living to the principle of self-interest. You can call them evil. It’s an easy label. But what does that get you? If you want something get it. If there’s a race win it. If there is a system learn the rules and game it. I’d much prefer the fiercest competition than getting my place decided without a fight.
When I played as Silverhand, I had to make choices for him, and it was hard. I was rooting for V and now it’s like playing poker with myself. It even occurred to me that I could let V pretend to trust Silverhand and give him control, but then I would be controlling Silverhand so I could give the control back to V. But would that be me betraying Silverhand? Shouldn’t I make the best choices for Silverhand if I was playing as him? I don’t know if this was intentional, but the forced reckoning was intriguing. I just wished his lines had been more coherent and his arc better put together. For example, Silverhand had been in a mind prison without a body for fifty years and finally got out, yet he didn’t talk about it at all. How did it feel? Did prison change him? Was he eager to get V’s body and not go back? Was he sad to see what he did hadn’t changed the world at all? Compared with the blank slate for V, the game was relying on the pre-existing personality of Silverhand for the majority of the plot, so it feels weird that questions like these are either not discussed, or up to me to decide.
Then I found out about all the other endings. Panam was always too much trouble for my V so I didn’t pursue that, but I went back and tried the Silverhand ending, this time knowing for sure that I can give the body back to V as Silverhand. It made me feel even better about my first choice when I saw that V still only had six months left. My V wouldn’t care about becoming the legend. Commemorations are for the living. The dead don’t care.
Despite not regretting getting the first ending, I’m glad I did the second ending because I adored Kerry Eurodyne. Again the dialogues can be better written. After they started seeing each other, I went to Kerry’s apartment and tried talking to him, but the prompts didn’t even change. When V called him it was also like nothing ever happened, although that’s actually true with most of the NPCs. I also wished there was an option for V to try to romance Judy and that Judy could reject V just like River Ward did. Maybe there was and I missed it.
As for the setting, it could have been more enjoyable if V’s gigs were a bit less repetitive and passers-by a bit less dull, but the open world is already very impressive. With the right amount of imagination to make up for the terrible rendering, the cityscape invokes the dreadful image of a labyrinth, bridges tangled but connections intangible; buildings and people interlinked, like cells, powerless individually but formidable and inextricable as a whole.
One of the crucial differences between games and real life is you can turn back time. A fork in the road is less the defining moment of your life if you can always go back to it and travel the paths you didn’t pick. However, there is one mistake in this game that’s easy to make but very hard to correct. Like many others, I only realized I could have saved Takemura once I finished my first ending and started reading walkthroughs. I didn’t have a save before that mission and even if I did, starting over from there would have meant wasting a lot of time. By showing all the other optional mission objectives but omitting saving Takemura — making it part of the linear main story instead of the repeatable finale — the game subverted the whole promise of being able to turn back time and made the pain of loss palpable. Just like in real life, I made a mistake and it cost me dearly. I’m just glad I can watch a video and see the exact moment when I did it. That is not always possible in real life.