Meeting Hanako at Embers: Why Video Game Endings Are a Bummer — And Multiple Ones Are Even Worse

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #196. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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A tongue-in-cheek but also painfully earnest look at pop culture and anything else that deserves to be ridiculed while at the same time regarded with the utmost respect. It is written by Matt Marrone and emailed to Stu Horvath and David Shimomura, who add any typos or factual errors that might appear within.

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I never want videogames to end. I will play them until I hate them. Until I am forced to break up with them.

I still play the same level of Tower Madness 2 again and again, now trying endlessly to hold off the alien hordes as long as I can by placing the fewest number of towers, despite my youngest son noticing and pleading with me to add more firepower. My Stardew Valley farm is in Year 26. And, most recently, I painstakingly chased every side mission – not to mention pointlessly attacking the same gangs over and over after they’d respawn – in Cyberpunk 2077, distracting myself as I stubbornly refused to complete the main storyline.

Game endings are a bummer, particularly in a game you love, where they mean no more twists, turns or surprises. But you can’t hold them off forever without missing out. Eventually, I had no choice but to begin the final quest of Cyberpunk 2077 and follow the now-infamous instruction to “Meet Hanako at Embers”. That meeting launches a point of no return, when your character, V, must continue on to face his (or her) destiny. (As an aside, I’d like to have just enough of my faculties left when I die to turn to whomever happens to be next to me and whisper, right before I draw my final breath, “It’s time to meet Hanako at Embers.” So, stay tuned.)

Unfortunately, Cyberpunk 2077 allows gamers to make choices – and finish the game with a number of different outcomes. I say unfortunately because, while at first that might sound really cool, it turns out to be a curse.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that, if you’re like me and want to suck every last bit or marrow from a game’s bones, it means meeting Hanako at Embers repeatedly, rushing past the repeated scenes and dialogue several times. Or at least finding a save point or two right before a major fork in the road, and retuning to it to make different choices. And because I’m obsessed, it means doing all of it in a single, furious sitting, in which every restart yields diminishing returns.

Which brings me to reason number two. While I won’t spoil every ending – and will be as vague as possible in my descriptions – I will say I found three endings to be most illustrative. In a pair of them, you either lend your trust to the evil corporation Arasaka or to the government – the NUSA – to cure your, uh, life-threatening medical condition. Alas, though both have the world’s leading specialists in the field, the cures are, at best, unsatisfying. In other words, you’re doomed. Even endings in which you’re not about to be dead don’t really instill much confidence. In what felt like the bleakest final scene to me, you are stripped of the street-tough abilities that basically had defined your character and you end up walking anonymously into a now almost unfamiliar Night City after getting mugged by a pair of low-level goons – goons who, previously, you could have turned into a pile of steaming body parts without even a hint of effort.

That’s not always the tone. In my favorite ending, you drive off into the sunset with your best girl at your side, escaping Night City for new adventures and the vague hope that somewhere out there, you’ll find your cure.

But here is when the multiple endings of Cyberpunk 2077 completely fall apart.

Had my favorite ending been the only ending, or perhaps even just the first ending I saw, I might have felt about as pleased as one could feel, given my journey in a fantastic game was over. But nope. There are those other endings – the ones in which V discovers that he is, in various less than delightful ways, incurable. If all V ever did was flip the bird to Arasaka and the NUSA, hop in a car with Panam and tunnel outta town, you could dock your Switch 2 with a sense of satisfaction.

But the multiple endings tell us too much. What awaits V beyond the limits of Night City? I’d love to say it’s some kind of magician – some deus ex machina – who can do what everyone else cannot. But we know better now. V is going to die out there. Panam will bury him under the sand, perhaps with a thoughtful cairn to mark his grave. Then, while she might not turn into one of the Panams we see in the alternate endings – the bitter and angry ones who curse V or simply refuse to answer his calls – she’ll be forced to move on without him, regardless. Eventually, the elements, or some passing group of rowdy chooms, will knock over the cairn, and the rocks will be buried in the sand, along with V’s rotting corpse.

Even this ending seems happy compared to some of the even more depressing options. But I can’t help wondering: Had we been given just the one open-ended ending, would it have been worth more than the many multiple ones that ruin it? Cyberpunk 2077 promises a choice, but ultimately reveals that choice is an illusion.

Game over indeed.

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Matt Marrone is a senior MLB editor at ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @thebigm.