Asking here since I don't meet the requirements to post in the CDPR forums.

edit:
Arasaka docs/techs said they shredded Johnny's engram, per V's request. But when does V request that? I don't remember V or Hanako ever discussing what would actually happen to Johnny. Or did I just miss that?

I was quite shocked and saddened when they said that...

I did the ending (both choices) quite possibly the most thought provoking ending to the game... deeply unsatisfying and meant to be as such. Absolutely heart wrenching ending to the game... 10/10 of the 6 possible they did a fantastic job on it!

Thank you - can you elaborate on what you found thought provoking in the endings?

Agree. Oddly, the "bad" ending was the best ending. LOVED it. Horrifying and profound.

Did OP get edited for spoilers??? I had a very specific question about something they say in the ending lol. Am I not allowed to ask? Or...did I just hallucinate filling out the body of the post? I'll edit it now to include the actual question... Odd.

And agreed. The ending has stuck w/ me ever since I beat the game a week ago.

That ending sucks big time. First problem, they shred the engram and fix "the madness", but that's not the core issue V has. The personality shift is a problem, obviously, but the main damage comes from the chip rewriting and reshaping V's brain. And it turns out that V's brain damage is something the Arasaka dickheads just shrug at and refuse to do something about. They have nanites that can unfuck a brain that got scrambled by a gunshot, but they can't reverse damage caused by their own nanites. Right.

The second part of why it sucks is that everything in it is somewhat predictable. Arasaka has the tech to turn people into engrams. We know because Johnny got turned into one some 50 years ago. What are the odds that they've done nothing with the tech since? What are the odds that the god of Arasaka, facing his own end of life, would then not look at that technology as a way to extend his life?

And given what happens with Yori, we must conclude that Saburo also had an engram of himself created. Since he's clearly not all that dead when he visited Yori, it seems that the engram creation tech they have does not actually kill the original body. That then begs the question of whether they've already taken a scan of V?

Alternatively, it may be that their scan still scrambles the brain of the person being scanned, but they can restore that brain without destroying the engram created by the scan. Essentially meaning that they could put the same engram into a whole host of bodies, if they so desired. Do they have the tech to tweak engrams before putting them into a body? Not entirely impossible, is it? In that case, expect endless decants as a lab rat.

Either way, the Arasaka ending is like the worst possible way to end the game. You've made a deal that restores the literal devil and you've got fuck all to show for it. You're either going to die slowly and miserably in a few months, as your brain turns to goo, or you get zapped and officially put on ice in some Arasaka storage until presumably the end of time. Frankly, suicide by repeatedly running into a cactus is a less painful way to achieve the same ultimate outcome, death, without all the horrendous implications.

The Arasaka ending is only good if you want to know more about the Arasaka-Family.
For V is it a bad ending.

For me the best ending is the Aldecaldos ending.

I want to avoid spoilers and there is no way to talk about it without using them.

It's just that thought provoking sounds rather deep and I did not see anything deep or solidly philosophical in any of the endings. Neither was it unexpected or a real plot twist. All rather predictable, including what happens to V.

Did you play though the ending on the space station and follow it to its conclusion without going back to earth?

Yes I did. I played all the endings except the Ripper ending. It was really getting on my nerves with the whole repetition and cube story. When I replayed it to see what happens when you go back to earth (poor me expecting you would actually get to say something to all the NPCs) I just skipped through the medical scenes as fast as I could.

Also do explain how does V suddenly feel good after the ending (even if not forever) if he was basically falling apart when he got to Mikoshi?

i like the ending somehow.

you get to be digitalised and can continue to live somewhere in the future when the tech is ready for it. sounds cool to me.

i mean, everything i really care for in the present is gone or not that important after all.

Jackie? Dead.
Panam? Yeah okay, you could´ve had sex but it´s not really a relationship by any means...
Judy? Far away and will stay that way.
That now gone private investigator guy (sorry, i really liked him, just forgot his name -.-) is about the closest thing you have to a friend.

so why not wait 20-30 years and be "reborn" in the future? sounds good to me ;)

I really like this question and wish there was more of it in the game.

The counterargument is that "you" will be dead and someone else will be created with the same memories and personalities. You're leaving a legacy but never coming back.

Additionally, shards throughout the game make clear that people signing up for the "secure your soul" program are being dealt dirty, with modifications made to their engrams without their permission

...which is awesome sci-fi / literature and much deeper than any of the other endings IMO, whether it's truly a happy ending or a tragedy.

You get killed in the process of building a digital scan of your mind that is unlikely to be perfect, and which is now in storage at Arasaka, probably the biggest bag of dicks on the planet. You have no guarantee that they can't actually modify that scan either. You have no guarantee that they cannot copy it as many times as they want.

Technically, it is very conceivable that they will make a copy of V's engram, tweak it for "research purposes", download it into a body of their choice, apply some stimulus, observe, eliminate when experiment is complete, and repeat. Over and over and over. And the original engram will never know, because it will never leave storage.

They could do what they did with Saburo, so obviously they don't need another 20 years of tech. On top of this, they clearly have the nanite tech to modify brains, gene treatment is advanced enough that they could probably fix up a body without problems anyway, and cloning new organs is also feasible. So what exactly is the reason why V can't get fixed now, aside from it not really being a priority for Arasaka?

Did anyone ever find this out? I got the same ending but I never saw any dialogue where V chooses to shred Johnny?