Spoiler Warning!!!
“I just want the world to know I was here. That I mattered.”
V is the main character in the video game Cyberpunk 2077, created by CD Projekt Red. V is a character who, based on your decisions, could be male or female, and they could have one of three different lives before the game’s events.
Life Paths
At the beginning of the game, you will be presented with three background options:
Corpo
If you choose the Corpo life path, you start the game as an Arasaka counter-intelligence agent. The company is having some major issues, and you are tasked with killing an executive who is a rival to your boss.
When you are preparing for the job, a team working for the executive you were meant to kill ambushes you, takes all your money and informs you that you were burned and that you no longer are a part of the Arasaka Corporation.
After this incident, V believes they lost everything and that their life is over. Fortunately, however, V’s friend, Jackie Welles, is there, and he introduces them to the world of mercenary work.
Street Kid
If you choose the Street Kid life path, you play as someone who grew up in an area of Night City called Heywood. You were involved in crime since you were very young, and then you left Night City to look for a better life.
After failing to find a better life in Atlanta, V returned to Night City and started taking street jobs like they used to before leaving. In one of the first jobs they take, V gets in trouble with the police and gets beaten up and thrown on the street. That’s when they meet Jackie Welles and start working with him.
Nomad
If you choose the Nomad life path, you play as a nomad who abandoned their clan and started doing smuggling jobs. During one of those jobs, V meets Jackie Welles. They take a liking to each other and start working together.
Decisions
What I liked about Cyberpunk 2077 was that I had the freedom to be a really good person or a complete asshole. You could save people, give them money, and choose to do them a favor for nothing in return. On the other hand, You could rob and kill them for no reason whatsoever.
Your choices in the game also have an impact on how quests play out and even how the story progresses. For example, If you choose to do a particular chain of sidequests, the people you helped in those sidequests would offer to help you at a crucial point in the game, opening up a whole new ending.
Moreover, depending on who you side with in the Phantom Liberty expansion, the game gives you two completely new experiences towards the end of the expansion.
Gameplay
Cyberpunk 2077 also allows you to have a gameplay experience that is unique to your preferences. You could play the game as an ordinary first-person shooter and only use basic firearms. Or, you could turn V into a type of cyber-ninja with blades coming out of their arms and could turn invisible.
I prefer using machine guns and pistols because I found the idea of having cyberware implants kind of weird, and I like my character to be as human as possible.
Johnny
In an attempt to steal an experimental biochip from Arasaka, V finds himself in a huge mess. One of the complications of that mess was that V started to see and talk to a rocker boy who died fifty years ago.
Johnny Silverhand was once in the military and participated in the Second Central American War. During the war, Johnny lost a friend who saved his life, and he also lost his arm. He deserted the military after some governmental secrets that showed that the USA started the war were exposed.
After deserting the military, Johnny became a sworn enemy of big corporations, and he made it his life’s mission to stand against corporate colonialism. He also founded a rock band called Samurai with his friend Kerry Eurodyne.
In 2013, Johnny’s girlfriend, Alt Cunningham, was kidnapped by Arasaka Corporation to force her to work on a top-secret project for them called Soulkiller. While kidnapped by Arasaka, Alt’s digital psyche was separated from her body, and her digital psyche was trapped in Arasaka Tower.
In an attempt to free Alt, Johnny decided to use a nuclear bomb to detonate Arasaka Tower, killing twelve thousand people in the process. During the attack, Johnny was captured by Arasaka, and they separated his digital psyche like they did with Alt and imprisoned it in a virtual prison called Mikoshi. Johnny’s body was later dumped in a junkyard outside the city.
The biochip V was trying to steal from Arasaka had Johnny Silverhand’s digital psyche in it. During the mission, V was forced to put the biochip in the shard slot in their neck. Then, V gets shot in the head.
The bullet that went into V’s head damages the biochip and forces it to activate. The biochip saves V’s life by repairing the damage caused by the bullet. It starts uploading Johnny Silverhand’s construct onto V’s brain, erasing their personality and gradually killing them in the process.
As a result, V starts seeing Johnny and talking to him throughout the game.
Who needs a happy ending, anyway?
There are six different endings in Cyberpunk 2077, none of which are happy. Every time I finished the game, I found myself thinking about all that V had been through throughout the game. The dangerous missions, friends, happy moments, and exciting adventures.
The game made me appreciate the journey that Cyberpunk 2077 takes you through. And it made me think about how that could also be applied to real life. You don’t need to worry about how you die or where you end up; you merely need to enjoy where you are right now and live the moment fully.
Thoughts
When I first started playing Cyberpunk 2077, I found V annoying. I was annoyed by how terrified they were and how much they kept complaining. But then I started thinking about how I would feel if I were in their shoes.
How would I feel if I was informed that I had only a few more weeks to live? And if I started seeing ghosts all of a sudden?
I started to understand that V was actually quite admirable. Instead of losing all hope and giving up, they decided to depend on themself to find a cure for their new condition.
I also enjoyed how V and Johnny’s relationship evolves throughout the game. When they first meet, the situation becomes chaotic pretty quickly, and they both start shutting each other out and trying to take control of the body from each other.
As the story progresses, V and Johnny gradually become closer in personality to each other, and they start to understand each other better.
Before buying Cyberpunk 2077, I had very high hopes for it. I had played the Witcher series, and I was sure that anything CD Projekt Red produced would easily be a game of the year contender. And if you know anything about the game’s first launch, you know how much of a disaster it was.
Even with the game-crashing glitches that filled the game, its story was too good for me to stop playing it. The game would shut down every two hours, areas took forever to load, and the graphics were terrible. Even so, I found myself finishing it multiple times in a row.
I recently tried it out to see how it became after the recent patches and to check out the expansion. And I have to say, it’s a fantastic experience. If you never played Cyberpunk 2077, I highly recommend checking it out.
