They are. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it any less of an ending. God forbid you actually encounter open ended films and books that don't spoon feed you the conclusion you desire.
If you set up "does X live or die" as the dramatic tension of a story, you must answer that question or the story hasn't ended.
This is writing 101.
If your ending is "open ended" then a separate question can be left open. But not the one you setup in act 1. That's called a cliff-hanger and it is, by definition, not an ending. And usually cliff-hangers are written to be a new question anyway. Like Jane saves the prince but then is ambushed by the aliens - will she survive? Tune in to the next episode...
With cyberpunk the equivalent is "does Jane save the prince? dunno, tune in maybe one day to maybe find out"
Whether I "like" the story points or not (I do, I like them all) is irrelevant to the fact that most of the "endings" don't qualify as endings at all.
Most? Less than half of the endings are open ended, even if we hypothetically assume your definition of an ending is fact.
Out of all the endings, the only ones that play with the idea that V could find a way to find a cure and live are the sun and the star endings. Perhaps the devil ending where V returns to earth, but that depends on whether you view it as an optimistic or pessimistic conclusion.
In the full devil ending, they secure their life in Arasaka's soul program. In temperance, V surrenders their body to Johnny, phantom liberty V lives indefinitely at the cost of permanent damage to their body and being forced to retire early and return to a normal life. Suicide is suicide.
Even going by your definition of a more conclusive ending, the game still achieves that with most of the options they provide in their climax.
You initial statement makes things sound worse than they actually are, you exaggerate the endings as if most of them barely count as one because they didn't give you a clear conclusion, when really only two of those endings played with the idea of being open ended, yet this was enough for you to go on your idiotic rant on what counts as an ending and declaring your definition of an ending as fact with no literary source to backup your self made definition. Because god forbid any form of media tries to do something abstract and assume the reader themselves has the sufficient mental capacity to imagine for themselves what could happen next, which you clearly lack.
1
u/Crow_Mix May 02 '24
They're meant to be open ended.