But is it pure luck? Remember, you are talking about the greatest merc Night City has ever seen since Morgan Blackhand… 
[If that is how you play it. But she is not someone who would be content as a fixer or random rich asshole.]
Wait, I can get a cat!? (Looks online) And it’s even named Nibbles. My old cat was named Nibbler. Time to get some cat food.
And yeah, I pretty much agree with all you wrote. I mean, Silverhand is gone for 50 years and almost immediately regains all his friends, and he isn’t even a person. I disappear for two years and I’m now a persona non-grata? And like you, I’m filthy rich, have a half-dozen nice apartments and a load of nice cars and bikes. Not to mention a set of cyberware worth well north of 1M by itself that I no longer need.
No one knows about my Arasaka F9-QLOAD cyberware.
I don’t think that’s really accurate, though - there’s two people you meet who used to know Johnny: Rogue, and Kerry.* And both of them treat Johnny pretty much the same way V’s friends treat them after they get “cured”: “great to see you, glad your okay, we had some crazy times, now I’m getting on with my life and you are not a part of that anymore.” Rogue will go on a nostalgia date with Johnny, but makes it clear that she’s not interested in restarting their relationship (and it turns out she’s seeing someone else anyway). Kerry agrees to do the Samurai gig, but after that he’s more interested in hanging out with V (particularly male V) than Johnny. The main difference is that Johnny’s old friends are still in Night City, so it’s possible to meet them face-to-face, while V’s friends have all scattered to the winds, so you have to make do with a phone call.
*Well, also Alt, but it’s debatable whether the AI counts as the person Johnny used to know, or even counts as a person at all.
I’m not expecting my old friends to drop everything when I make my triumphant return, but my understanding is that Panam won’t even take my calls. Despite being among the most loyal of them when I left (the reverse was true also). It’s also implausible that none of them would bother to check in after the expected time (two weeks?) and make an effort to follow up after I’m a no-show. Heck, Viktor if no one else. He’s basically retired and has few other friends. He’d make it his hobby to keep track of me (he did so for my final boxing match, after all).
I guess maybe some of that came from practical issues, like not being able to get the same voice actor. Still.
Side though, those are also the only two you TELL about Johnny, and whom you confirm his existence too. You meet the other bandmates but don’t tell them, so who knows how they would have reacted (my read, Beth Isis would be amused but a “thanks, no thanks” to more than just the meeting, Henry is such a fuckup, but probably would be happy, and Denny probably thinks Johnny was destined for a bad end and so what).
Johnny was obviously a charismatic psycho, who inspired strong feelings, for good and ill, in those around him, including V. But V… in some senses, V is the born loser - in all the lifepaths, he’s basically saved from being an abandoned sad-sack (or worse!) by Jackie. And on his first big break, everything goes wrong. Seriously some Charlie Brown karma as it were.
An argument can be made is that Cyberpunk 2077 is entirely Johnny’s story, and V is the chauffer/driver that gets us there. I think that goes a couple of steps too far, but the various endings all reinforce the ephemeral nature of things, lifespans, and relationships, so making an impression that lasts, like Johnny does, or V’s (possible) flashpan as the biggest thing in Night City in the Sun ending seems to be as good as it gets.
Take having a drink named after you at the Afterlife as the City moves on, that’s about as good as it gets.
Arguably. As various characters point out, even nuking Arasaka’s tower accomplished almost nothing: they just rebuilt a bigger one, and continue to be as powerful as ever. Samurai is treated as old-person music, and only a handful of people care about them (like that one lame collector). He’s remembered by a few friends and enemies. Bartmoss has way more lasting influence, and is still being talked about in hushed tones.
Silverhand does get a drink at the Afterlife, though.
From a narrative perspective, I felt as though a half century was far too much time to have passed since Johnny’s demise. Saburo Arasaka is pushing 160+ years, so the technology to prolong lives exists, but is that technology available to everyone? And some of these characters, Kerry Eurodyne and Rogue, seem to have been in a state of arrested development. It’s been a lifetime since Johnny died and the events of the 2020s but their lives still revolve around him and that time in their own lives. How many young people are going to go to a club to hear a reunion from the remaining members of Samurai?
I’m guessing the game is set in 2077 so it didn’t interfere with Mike Pondsmith’s plans to update the table to RPG setting to 2045. From a narrative perspective, I think it would have made a lot more sense for the game to have been set twenty or so years after Johnny died.
Granted, he wasn’t successful at creating any change, but you find other Samurai stuff across town, there are MULTIPLE ferverant collectors (your quests involving quite a few), and “books” about Samurai and Silverhand. But his friends and enemies absolutely DO remember him. Very few people who encountered him probably ever went “who was that guy again” while he was alive, and considering it’s been 50 years, even being remembered as an “oldie hit” is pretty good.
But yeah, again, my point is that no matter what, very little beyond human evil and banality last. And Johnny seems to have done a much better job than V.
It is if you’re rich enough. Yorinobu is Johnny’s contemporary. He’s 70ish. Note that Beth Isis (who’s a reporter) nearly looks her age. Denny and Kerry, who are rich look to be only a couple of decades older despite 50 years. Rogue, who’s wealthy, but not that wealthy, looks far younger than Beth Isis but (IMHO) older than Denny or Kerry.
So yeah, if you have the eddies, you can live a very long time. Saburo’s appearance is in part from the damages he took in his WW2 youth (!) and the fact that he was pretty damn old and always getting older as said technologies came out.
But yeah, Kerry never really grew up, but that’s not exactly unknown for rich rock stars, and Rogue has bad damn taste in men. She always knew that Johnny was a shit, and treated her poorly, but she kept being far more loyal to him than he ever was to her, despite all those telling her better. 
Mostly, yeah. But maybe life extension has also had the effect of stretching out people’s timelines. Night City itself has seemingly been in a kind of arrested development for the past 50 years. Rogue should be 70 or so… maybe she can’t afford the top-shelf stuff, but what she can get puts her in the realm of a 45-year-old today. Which isn’t exactly youthful, but not elderly either.
Yeah, Panam is a huge jerk about you being in a literal coma for two years, but that’s just Panam. Everyone else is still cordial with you, but they’ve all moved on.
But my point is that V’s friends react about the same way that Johnny’s friends reacted. You’re both treated like fondly remembered but slightly unwelcome ghosts.
They all do, IIRC, with Vik holding out the longest, but you’re in a top secret federal hospital on the east coast - there’s not a ton any of them can actually do about finding you.
Fair enough. I have a savegame at that particular point. Maybe I should go and see how it plays out. How long do I have to wait in-game for that plotline to trigger?
Anytime after you’ve finished Phantom Liberty, you can go to Misty’s, get up on the roof, and call Reed to come pick you up. (Assuming you didn’t let Songbird escape, of course) Doesn’t matter where you are on the main game’s quest line - I still hadn’t met Hanako when I triggered it in my play through.
The Afterlife is lame, though, run by a sellout and with its pathetic appeal to nostalgia via the imitation Harukiya decor and drinks named after dead legends. The Atlantis was the real deal.
As for Johnny nuking Arasaka tower, well, as he put it, that was supposed to be the first shot in a long war; but as soon as he is out of the picture, people (especially people like Rogue) forgot all about it and Arasaka just built a bigger tower. That is what people in Night City are like, apparently, as V finds out the hard way in that ending.
I can’t even get a drink there these days, as the bartender hates me for not participating in an execution. And Rogue won’t tell her to just deal with it.
I never thought about it that way but that’s exactly what happens. 
I ain’t gonna say I’m a paragon of virtue, but I’m not a murderer for hire. And I’m not going to willingly enable a murder if I can help it. I told Claire that I was going to race like normal, and that’s what I did. Frankly, though the corpo was a complete ass, his move was within the bounds of the race. Everyone knew the stakes. Claire wanted to kill the guy after he’d left the race.
All true. From my perspective everything up to that point was very violent; people trying to run each other off the road, shooting at each other, killing an opponent isn’t unusual there. So it didn’t seem all that odd to kill someone in that circumstance. But you’re right, it was a cold-blooded murder outside of the competition and very much an execution.
I went along because I liked her and by that point I’d already killed so many other people during jobs (even cold-blooded murder) that it didn’t seem like that big of a deal.
I play V like there are two kinds of people; friends and obstacles. You do everything for your friends but when an obstacle is in the way you remove it.
Well, I guess I’m gonna go for 100%. I’m down to 6 left:
King of Cups - Fulfill songbird’s request
King of Pentacles - Refuse songbird’s request
The Tower - Complete things done changed
Relic Ruler - Unlock all relic perks
The Devil - Help Takemura avenge Saburo
Little Tokyo - Complete all gigs and NCPD scanner hustles
I have lots of manual saves at critical points, so I think the ending-related ones should be straightforward. The last one is just going through the motions. I did save S****** so I think that one just requires going further in the main missions.
I hope I haven’t permanently missed some of the
Relic perks
I’ve gotten all the ones from the miniboss fights in Dogtown, so I don’t know what others I might have missed.
Finished 'em off. Definitely worth going down the other major Songbird path–didn’t realize that it was completely different from the airport path. Sorta some System Shock vibes. That robot…
And went through the cure ending. Sure, I get that there are no happy endings in Night City, but this was a little over the top. People that spent years and years in the place all decide to book it in the same two-year span? And I think I could have bothered to pay rent in advance… wait, didn’t I actually buy all those apartments? Maybe not–those prices were suspiciously cheap for a big city. Still.
I had to do the Adam Smasher fight again to get the Arasaka ending. That fight felt way harder and longer than the first time I did it. I did put the game on hard, which I guess would be the difference… but I wonder if it also scaled to the higher level cap as well.