Despite all the insanity and awesome on display typical of a Studio TRIGGER production, it is still a prequel to Cyberpunk 2077 which is quick to remind you that it is a Crapsack World full of bittersweet endings that will tug at your heartstrings.
Warning: Spoilers Off applies to Tear Jerker pages. Proceed at your own risk.
- Those who played the game beforehand and reached Afterlife to check out the drink selection know that David is Doomed by Canon, as he has a drink named after him — something that usually only happens to Night City legends that went out in a blaze of glory. As a result, the entire show effectively becomes a winding tension of knowing that it's just going to keep escalating until a violent crescendo, and to say it's a Bittersweet Ending would be an understatement. No one wins in Night City.
- The death of Gloria Martinez is bad enough, but its effects further remind the audience of how utterly miserable Night City is to its citizens. The absolute apathy of Trauma Team and the healthcare system, the way funeral packages are treated as mundanely as car deals, and Katsuo's relentless classist bullying make it clear why this event sends David over the edge.
- Gloria had been working herself to near death to pay for David’s tuition at Arasaka Academy in the hope her son can get hired by Arasaka and gain the chance of a better life away from the crime and violence of Night City. Her death instead leaves David with no one to turn to but Maine’s crew, resulting in him taking up the violent lifestyle of an edgerunner that will ultimately end with his untimely demise at the hands of Adam Smasher.
- To twist the knife further, David wasn't allowed to see her during her hospitalization.
- Maine's demise is a tragic case of Sanity Slippage as his cyberware threatens to send him into a full-on cyberpsychosis that threatens his entire crew and himself; but the capper is Dorio's sacrifice to try and bring him back from the brink, which sends him so far over the edge he becomes a voluntary cyberpsycho against everyone around him, butchering dozens of police officers and an entire Trauma Team unit, until he gives up the ghost and decides to simultaneously give Dorio a funeral pyre and commit suicide by putting her corpse on an entire pile of explosives just before MaxTac could arrive... sparing only a moment to give David a pep talk and urging him to go and live instead of staying with him in his final moments.
- The moment in David's cyberpsychosis state where he mistakes Rebecca for his mother, telling her in an almost childlike tone that he'll get to the top of Arasaka's tower. Rebecca just sadly smiles back and says yes he will go that far despite very well knowing that they are going there to spill blood and likely not survive. There's a sad tragedy to the fact that its still very obvious after everything he's done at this point that David still deeply misses his mother and a part of him does wish he could have fulfilled her dream before she was murdered as collateral in a drive-by. When his cyberpsychosis first started getting bad he would look on at a picture he had of her and her ashes with a Thousand-Yard Stare.
- David's first instance of cyberpsychosis is both this and Nightmare Fuel. David gets sent on a job to steal some information from Arasaka and during it starts losing track of reality and slipping into cyberpsychosis to the point that he kills a director and his innocent assistant that was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Once he comes down from it he's horrified that he killed someone innocent and to make it worse he realizes by a framed picture in the Arasaka workspace that she too had a son he just orphaned. The assistants picture of her and her son at Arasaka Academy looks eerily similar to the picture he has of his own mom. This event clearly had a serious impact on David, as he's extremely morose and troubled thereafter.
- By the point that David's cyberpsychosis clearly starts to really hit the fan, Rebecca goes from trying to stop him from following Maine's path to effectively trying her best to roll with the flow knowing this isn't going to end well. Despite being the most crass and violent member of the team, she ends up sticking with them to the end — and then gets stomped into a barely-recognizable paste by Adam Smasher as the opening course in a completely pointless and gruesome death. The cast don't even get the opportunity to grieve or be shocked, either, given that it's Adam Smasher coming for them next.
- The worst cyberpsychosis moment however is the one that causes his falling out with his Ripperdoc; as it leads to Lucy realizing he's falling down the way of Maine and much like Dorio had prior, begs for David to cut back on the chrome, only to metaphorically and physically push her away as he gets passive aggressive towards her impromptu intervention and when Lucy cannot give him an answer as to why she refuses to come back to the gang, David suggests to break things off to Lucy, which causes her to panic and begs for them to stay together... only to be interrupted by her detecting a netrunner getting too close to finding out about David, forcing her to leave in the middle of their conversation and leaving the question of their relationship hanging. This is all however worsened when it's revealed that the netrunner was a deliberate trap by Faraday designed to bait Lucy in, which leads to everything crashing down in the final arc and straight into the Bittersweet Ending of the series.
- Kiwi's death is also pretty tragic, even if it's karmic for her prior betrayal, as she clearly has second thoughts about betraying the group that has been True Companions with her for a long enough time now that she's prepared to forgo her self-serving philosophy and not take Faraday's offer to join him up in Arasaka... only to have a Heel–Face Door-Slam by Faraday who was planning to dispose of her to cover up loose ends about the Cyberskeleton, and in the end, her final act to atone before his goons light her up is to direct a vengeful David straight to him to save Lucy, somberly looking back on how her choices led her here before she bites it.
- While David and Lucy's reunion in the finale is a sweet moment, it's also clear that Lucy is horrified to find David in the cyberskeleton he installed in the previous episode. She knows full well that David's cyberpsychosis will begin to overwhelm him the second he installed the system and she wells up knowing that the love of her life will soon die once he did. All she wanted was for David to live, a dream that would soon be rendered impossible once Smasher forces David to send Falco and Lucy out of Arasaka Tower.
- What makes the above even worse is that David outright tells Lucy that other than her he has nothing left in his life. It's clear David has taken the deaths of his mother and Maine hard, and the lack of those parental figures is partially why he increasingly became reckless with his upgrades until he literally loses everything apart from his torso and head upon installing the cyberskeleton. He knew full well his mission to rescue Lucy from Arasaka was going to be a one-way trip, but he does so anyway to give his soulmate a chance to live her dream.
- This moment really drives home how tragic David and Lucy's self-sacrificing love for one another is as a core of the story. Both will protect each other by any means necessary, and both are ready to die if that's what it takes for the other to live. Yet in the end, it's this willingness to sacrifice oneself that ensures their downfall, and it ensures that one partner will be left to mourn for the person they swore to protect. This leads us to...
- David's death. As he gets beaten mercilessly by Smasher, Lucy desperately begs Falco to turn the car around to pick up David from his increasingly hopeless fight. Falco resignedly refuses to do so, stating David's final request to him was to help her escape. The money needed to go to the moon and the final words he shares with the two serve as no consolation for Lucy, as the episode then cuts to a broken and tired David at the mercy of Night City's infamous full-borg legend. Knowing he kept Lucy safe from harm, he uses his last bits of strength to laugh and reject Smasher's offer of becoming a construct before he meets his end.
- Thanks to David's Heroic Sacrifice, Lucy manages to finally escape Earth and make it to the moon where she'd hopefully be free of Arasaka and the hell of the world below.. before she sees David happily presenting what they had both worked to achieve, a blatant hallucination or memory remnant playing in her head. It doesn't fade, only just ceasing to exist, leaving Lucy alone as she realizes what it cost to get her there. The last shot we see of Lucy is her feeling heartbroken and exhausted. She musters a tired smile when she sees the hallucination of David, both thankful and utterly ruined at the same time now that her life's goal is completely stained with a tragedy she may never recover from. When she hallucinates David on the moon with her, it's clear that her real dream wasn't to get to the moon but to be with him.
- Worst yet is the revelation that it's arguably Lucy's fault in the end that David had to die to begin with, as her inability to communicate with him the truth of her actions as she went on a one-woman crusade to keep him safe from Arasaka behind his back ultimately led to the drama of her being captured, David being put into the Cyberskeleton, and having to do a Heroic Sacrifice against Adam Smasher, to begin with, to ensure she escaped. In trying to have a perfect happily ever after with David, she unknowingly caused a Bittersweet Ending that borderline is a Sudden Downer Ending for herself even after accomplishing her dream of being on the moon because she couldn't be able to continue living with David.
- The series' ED credits sequence
features a montage of Lucy living in Night City. This already gloomy sequence becomes significantly more painful by the series' end, however, as it becomes clear the ED portrays what happened to her between her escape from Arasaka Tower and her trip to the moon. She gets out of Falco's car, slowly lumbering through the streets with an utterly numb expression. She then tries to escape the pain of losing David first by smoking cigarettes and then diving into cyberspace. But even in cyberspace, the emotional pain becomes too much to bear, as she's then shown jolting from her tub before eventually breaking down and screaming over David's death. Combined with Dawid Podsiadło's remorseful lyrics, it serves as a rather sobering display of Lucy struggling to forgive herself for what had happened to the love of her life. - Those who have played Cyberpunk 2077 after the 1.6 Edgerunners update can go to the Corpo Plaza, where the Edgerunner crew had their final stand against Adam Smasher. Once there, the player can find Rebecca’s custom Carnage shotgun, Guts, off to the side from the center, presumably after being sent flying when Rebecca was killed by Adam Smasher. What makes this a Tear Jerker is that the implication that Guts has been in the park, barely hidden by some bushes, for over a year. At no point was it recovered, be it by NCPD, the Arasaka cleanup crew, or even by other Solos. Which brings up two potential ideas: EVERYONE missing the pink and lime-green shotgun in the middle of a Corpo plaza; Or the idea that no one even bothered to look for it, leaving it to just rust away into nothingness now that it’s time in the spotlight was over. Just like Rebecca.
- Sasha Yakovleva's entire story in the prequel animation. A netrunner who used to be on Maine's crew, she lost her mother at an early age to neurodegeneration. This neurodegeneration turned out to have been caused by Securicine, a brand of painkillers made by Biotechnica that her mother regularly took. On her run against Biotechnica for Maine to steal valuable data from them, Sasha finds out the truth about Securicine — namely, that Biotechnica knew all along about the side effects that killed her mother, but chose not to disclose them to the public. Instead of deltaing out with the data she was there to steal, Sasha decides to upload the data about Securicine to a tipline for N54 News, exposing Biotechnica's sins to the world and getting some justice for her mother. Sadly, this comes at a price, as she is discovered by Biotechnica's sentries and has to fight just long enough for the data to be uploaded, just before she is sent out a window to her death. Though to her credit, she goes out with a smile.
- In the Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 update, the Columbarium is updated with the names of the crew and it's heavily implied to have been written by Lucy. She even wrote an epitaph for Gloria Martinez even though they never met.
