I know I’m late to the party with this one, and I’m sure some of ya are tired of discussing this, but this ending has been plaguing my mind for literal days. It is so melancholy, so heartbreaking, and so tragic that it has just torn a hole in my mind. I have played many games and have seen my fair share of gut wrenching moments in the medium, but “The Tower” is the one that legitimately tore me to pieces.
Seeing V desperately trying to bring back their long dead life; the traumatic and easy to connect with dialogue with your old friends who have long thought you dead and no longer even really care about you; to the way V’s voice conveys complete and utter defeat and acceptance of that defeat…it just destroyed me.
All of it made me think back to moments of my own life and the lives of others and really made it clear to me just how traumatic life can be. A fucking game did that.
What’s your opinion on “The Tower” ending or Phantom Liberty in general? Feel free to comment and discuss.
19 Comments
Yeah this one stung….
Seeing V, a once most powerful merc in the night city getting punched in the face and being robbed by some random nolife thug really hurt. V got robbed by someone who couldn’t even have made eye contact with, if V was in their prime.
The only thing positive about this ending is V lives, and that’s it. He lost everything, friends, power, fame, glory.
Like game implied often, it’s “blaze of glory or live long life as nobody”. I wanted V to live, but not like this. Not in this poor, defeated, depressing state. If this is the outcome for going for survival, I’d rather have blaze of glory.
I liked it as i was watching it, then after taking time and thinking about it i really disliked it. I honestly felt it was poorly written and forced it to be sad because “there’s no happy endings in Cyberpunk.” They make it seem like you are some completely broken person and your old life is over when it really shouldnt be. V has enough money/vehicles/weapons that they could either sell their stuff and start again somewhere else or continue doing their old merc work. Not having chrome shouldnt stop V. Especially for certain builds, mainly stealth and gunslingers/snipers.
And some of the calls just feels wrong, mostly the Panam and Kerry ones. V is needlessly vague about their procedure, especially when V has told people about the chip and their issue. Panam not wanting any form of contact with V feels wrong. Mitch telling you to just stay away rather than trying to help you tell her you didnt have a choice in being in a coma feels out of character for him. He seemed to have your back during the game most of the time.
With Kerry the main thing that bothered me was that he didnt get up and leave the room he was in for the moment. I didnt expect him to drop everything and come see V, dude has a life obviously, But he doesnt strike me as the type to not give his old friend the common courtesy of full attention for a minute or two. Especially after finding out you just came out of a coma.
Could V connect with his old friends and set up their life after the cutscene ends? Certainly, but the ending ends on a sour note because it wants it to be sad or at the very least, bittersweet. V doesnt even try to see about following Misty or Vik at the very least. They wanted V to be alone and destitute when it just doesnt make sense.
I know the tower is supposed to hurt, but the fact that Panam just flat refuses to ever speak to you again is the crappiest part to me and flat ridiculous. I mean sure, she should be pissed that you didn’t give her Ried’s contact info, but more than that, V should be pissed that Ried didn’t think to contact anyone in NC when V went into a coma. Not sure about Judy since I’ve only played male V, but the fact that Panam wouldn’t answer a call and it was Mitch in the credits that told you to stop trying to reach her… that was just flat unnecessary and painful.
That phone call should have been as simple as, “Hey, ya know how I told ya about the FIA? Well I’ve been in a coma in their medical facility for two years when they told me it would only be a month. They suck, I’m sorry. Also, I can’t be a merc anymore, but silver lining is that I’m alive and now I can join the family permanently and be with you. Drop some coordinates and I’ll be right there.”
But sometimes it do be like that ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Not gonna lie, this ending had me sitting in silence for a few minutes. Very thought-provoking stuff.
Honestly my favorite ending – every other one leaves questions to be asked but the tower ending was the first time I was able to put the controller down and separate this game from reality and more or less assimilate into the crowd of regular people. Beautiful ending – Beautiful game
It is honestly the worst ending. Anyone who genuinely liked it missed the point of the conversation with Dex in the car as well as the entire theme of the game
That’s why I’m sticking with The Star ending.
You give Songbird to Myers to let her survive as a vegetable, so V gets the same threatment, its Myers after all, shes nothing but consistent. I hate Myers more than Songbird, dont get me wrong Songbird fucked up many things but she admits it herself, wants to change but got to get the fuck away from Myers first. Myers on the other hand has a habit of burying her fuck ups. Or starting a war to hide her fuck ups.
It’s even more depressing when you do it without high affinity with Johnny: He will belittle and chide V during the whole AV ride. He’ll also call you a Judas if you give her up on the launch pad in any case. Which is kinda interesting given that V and Johnny aren’t really seperate persons but a split personalities who begins bleeding into each other over the game.
With the tarot also being a break of the 4th wall and essentially giving away plot points and in the case of the ending where said endings will take V, look at what the The Tower stands for:
>16. THE TOWER.–Misery, distress, indigence, adversity, calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin. It is a card in particular of unforeseen catastrophe. Reversed: According to one account, the same in a lesser degree also oppression, imprisonment, tyranny.
(The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A.E. Waite)
Quite a bad card. Also consider that in the Rider-Waite deck the crumbling tower is crowned (“materialistic thought being bought cheap, downcast”) but there are even more associations:
>I agree rather with Grand Orient that it is the ruin of the House of We, **when evil has prevailed therein, and above all that it is the rending of a House of Doctrine.**
>In yet a deeper sense, it may signify also the end of a dispensation, but there is no possibility here for the consideration of this involved question.
Dispensation:
>the divine ordering of the affairs of the world.
>an appointment, arrangement, or favor, as by God.
(dictionary.com)
Misty’s Esoterica is closed. This is the only ending other than suicide or failing DFTR where no card reading is given during the credits. Even setting the outright misery in the ending aisde they’re telling you on different levels: You may have succeeded in your goal of survival but you screwed up badly and the price was too high.
It stung, it hurt and it shocked me.
Until I realised that V is back to smashing up Scav haunts and using other means outside of cyberware to augment themself and with a tonne of experience behind them.
Morgan Blackhand believed Solo’s were becoming too reliant on chrome and he was right.
The ending gave me hope with its intentional ambiguity.
Eh it’s not that bad overall, unless you also just lost all the eddies you have. Not everyone just abandons you, the merc life is pretty overrated, considering you’re brain was being rewritten id really argue that V was too optimistic about it. And it annoys me how little planning they do in the invent the operation just doesn’t work or you die in general.
V got a happier ending than I really expected if anything. Especially with what you have to do to get it which felt like it was treated as the wrong answer. I’ve experienced sadder endings
I agree. The tower just leaves you feeling empty. With unanswered questions. Not a good way to conclude V’s story.
Originally, there was no tower ending. Songbird was supposed to cure V with a special chip, which could be activated in the devil ending.
Then the leaks happened and CDPR massively changed the storyline of the expansion, also introducing the tower ending.
I think they made the tower ending so overly sad and devastating as a way to punish the leakers. It’s also more fitting with the tone of “wrong city, wrong people” as the tower really highlights that there are no happy endings in Night City. They made characters like Songbird more morally grey so the story narrative required some changes too. Overall, they’ve succeeded in creating a bitter ending, with maybe just a tiny bit of potential hope at the horizon.
Though the star still reigns supreme.
Spoiler tag would be nice…
It’s a sad ending because all you experience is the loss from one life and the hard beginning of another.
CDPR did their very best to make us feel bad, almost as if they felt they had to, wouldn’t surprise me, tbh.
Also the utter fragility of V when faced with the robbers is either temporary cause they’re still in recovery or is intentionally exaggerated. Prior to the heist, V had almost no chrome and still did merc work with Jackie for several months, and lived for years in NC, if you play as a streetkid.
Your whole god among men merc period was barely a few weeks out of twenty something years, you have plenty of experience living as a human rather than a borged out murder machine.
I have plenty more to say about how the Tower ending isn’t so bad, but i’ll stop ranting here.
Depending on how creative your headcannon is, this might be the best ending
I played this ending on a V I had almost 200 hours on and, to this day, still think someone started chopping onions in my room
I completely agree, I got this ending earlier today and I just didn’t feel the same afterwards. Like imagine you were dying and then you finally get cured but then two years of your life went by, you can’t do the one thing you’re good at anymore or you’ll die, and now your just back to being a nobody (in my perspective). This ending hurts me because I want V to live and I also want him to be happy. And in most other endings he gets screwed over or just dies, but I love the ending and rate it my second favorite so far
I really didn’t recognize my V, without the hair, tatoos and eyes implants, so I felt a bit disconected