Cyberpunk Edgerunners

Gimmie Danger

Night City's disenfranchised live in colossal megabuildings, barely eeking out a living.

Netflix's latest anime series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a short, but exhilarating dive into CD Projekt RED’s infamous Night City landscape.

Produced by the legendary Studio Trigger (Gurren Lagann, Kill La Kill), Edgerunners is a brilliant, 10-episode standalone series that also serves as a sort of prequel to CDPR’s infamous game, Cyberpunk 2077.

While you won’t find Keanu Reeve’s rockerboy persona Johnny Silverhand, Edgerunner features a whole new cast of vicious, system-crashing rebels, hellbent on getting some payback from their corporate overlords.

Unfortunate Son

The series centers on the young David Martinez, a bright rebel from a poor neighborhood, his mother dreams of him climbing the Arasaka corporate ladder, and works dangerous shifts as a paramedic to send him to a prestigious academy. However, David soon learns that Night City that his mother’s dream is a neon-washed impossibility. Night City is just about the cruelest place on earth, and no amount of straight-edged hard work can lift you out of the trash pits.

The city is crawling with criminal elements: violent street gangs, corporate soldiers, and no shortage of netrunners—hackers with implanted cybernetics, capable of frying your brain just by looking at you. For David, growing up at the bottom of this hostile system leaves him with a burning hunger to climb to the top, even if that means flirting with the city’s seedy, ultraviolent underworld.

In Night City, Fixers arrange dangerous gigs for independent mercenaries, taking a sizable cut of the pay.

Automatic Love

Trigger’s knockout style and animation is on full display in David’s companions, though there are none more richly painted than Lucy Kushinada. With fierce neon eyes and rainbow-gradient hair, Lucy stands out in a saturated world of soulless corpos and chromed-up goons. Trigger places Lucy center-stage, creating a deeply expressive, believable character that mesmerizes David, luring him into a world of colorful mercenaries and bloody gigs.

Where David’s wild dreams to become a Night City Legend raise the show into true Cyberpunk, Lucy grounds the story with a simpler, human desire: that one day, she and her friends would be free of Night City’s violent, dog-eat-dog world—especially David. She complements David’s characterization with her cool, collected personality, but it’s her sheltered capacity for empathy that makes her a truly memorable deuteragonist.

Lucy meets Night City halfway, with her electrifying gaze and penchant for danger.

Knock a Little Harder

Not to get caught up in Edgerunner’s glamour, Trigger faced a daunting task with the 10-episode limit, and it certainly feels at times that they themselves fall for Night City’s allure. Though characters like David and Lucy receive ample time for their arcs, fellow Edgerunners Becca, Pilar, and Falco come up short on time. This is due in large part to season’s time crunch, as the typical anime season is 12-13 episodes at thirty minutes a piece. Edgerunner’s runtime is more than a full hour short, and a good bit of the time that is there is spent (respectably) drooling over the Night City skyline, or setting up the central characters.

Lucy and David sit atop the roof of one of Night City's glistening, corporate-owned towers.

Both the limitation and series’ intense emphasis on the setting is likely due to the unique partnership between Studio Trigger, and CDPR—the studio that owns the rights to the Cyberpunk universe the show is set in. As Edgerunners was produced and released after Cyberpunk 2077’s infamous debut, one can

imagine CDPR potentially pressuring Trigger into highlighting the visual spectacles that drew gamers into the long-awaited franchise, hoping to a resurrect game sales with an appealing, energetic anime.

If that was the plan, it paid off brilliantly: selling some 2 million extra copies post-Edgerunners, passing a 20 million milestone across all platforms.

An Arasaka executive ditches the ivory for an intensely satured office space.

This criticism is not meant to disparage the show, or claim it’s some flashy, inflated advertisement for consumer products the likes of which can be found throughout Night City’s corporate world.

On the contrary, Edgerunner’s success is due to Trigger’s lively cast of characters, pertinent social commentary, and relentless visual engagement with one of the most exciting sci-fi worlds ever animated. What Trigger does in 10 episodes, most isekai can’t do in 10 seasons, and the revival of CDPR’s franchise is only a further testament to the frenzied genius of the studio.

Verdict

If you’re down with a hyperviolent classist dystopia of chromed-out mercenaries waging war against oppressive corporate armies, you’re in for one of the wildest rides in all of anime. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time, and leaves you wishing there was more.

The titular Edgerunners, David's new family and crew.