by Toussaint Egan

If you were ever looking for an example of the sheer cultural might of anime in the 2020s, one needn't look any further than Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. The 10-episode spinoff series produced by Studio Trigger (Kill la Kill, Little Witch Academia) and directed by Hiroyuki Imaiashi (Gurren Lagann, Promare) was not only lauded as one of 2022's best anime, but all but single-handedly resuscitated the beleaguered reputation of CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077.

The relationship between Cyberpunk 2077 and its anime counterpart are so enmeshed now that not only has Trigger returned with yet another season four years later, but CDPR has announced an imminent Edgerunners 2-themed update for the game as well — more than two years after the company formally moved on from Cyberpunk 2077 to more fully commit to the development of its forthcoming sequel.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 follows the intertwined stories of an all-new cast of characters set in the dystopian high tech metropolis of Night City, primarily through the eyes of Roman Carax, a 12-year-old aspiring filmmaker whose affinity for cinema puts him at odds with the immersive "braindance" sensibilities of his generational cohort. While exploring the city with his camera, Roman stumbles upon the scene of a "Cyberpsycho" attack in progress. A veteran mercenary, King (voiced in English by Clancy Brown of Spongebob and Gears of War fame), has been driven inexplicably mad through the exhaustion of his cybernetic enhancements, sparking a four-way gun fight between Arasaka corporate security, an anti-cyberpsycho police squad, paramilitary paramedics, and King's own bludgeoned and defeated comrades.

What begins a quirk of "wrong place, right time" inadvertently thrusts Roman at the heart of an extraordinary and tragic story involving Talia, the rebellious cyberaugmented daughter of King's former lover; D, a mysterious netrunner on a one-man mission to avenge the murder of his nomadic clan; and King, now rendered all but handicapped by his near brush with death.

Tonally, Edgerunners 2 is a far cry from that of the previous season, which centered on the story of David Martinez, a streetwise kid whose career as a mercenary outlaw draws the ire of an insidious corporate fixer and his ruthless clients. Where Edgerunners comes in quiet before gradually building to explosive and devastating crescendo, Edgerunners 2 starts off with a bang and unspools its story to explore the dimensions of its characters as their humanity and hopes are slowly chiseled and chipped away.

In terms of visuals, Edgerunners 2 is a beautifully crafted work of animation — though its action set pieces sequences don't quite muster up to the precedent of the previous season. One of the most striking and memorable creative licenses the original Edgerunners took was in the visual interpretation of David's Sandevistan cyberware abilities, depicting him as a consecutive series of frames weaving across the screen in a blueish-green blur of speed à la bullet time. Edgerunners 2's equivalent to this is how D's netrunner hacking abilities manifest in the physical world, particularly after having installed a mysterious datashard containing a volatile artificial entity of questionable origins and motivations. Streaks of red lightning trace and bounce across the screen igniting havoc wherever they land, vaulting vehicles into the sky and plunging whole city blocks into pitch darkness.

Although technically a standalone story, Edgerunners 2's story weaves together a surprising connective thread between itself and the original series from a red herring first introduced in the second episode of the previous season. Combined with D's aforementioned nethacking abilities, which themselves appear similar to the Blackwall nethacking seen in Cyberpunk 2077's expansion Phantom Liberty, Edgerunners 2 skillfully manages to make a narrative and aesthetic meal out of the few unexplored elements the original game has to offer. It leaves one to wonder what possibilities Trigger could manage to conjure up in the future, perhaps in tandem with Cyberpunk 2077's as-of-yet untitled sequel.

On a whole, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 doesn't surpass Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, but rather complements it. While some might see that as a disappointment, it's more or less entirely intentional. Night City is full of stories that brush against and occasionally intersect with one another, and none of them are identical. Roman and co. are only another handful of people whose lives have been thrust into the churning maw of necro-capitalism and techno-hedonism that is Night City and forced to find a way to live through it all, let alone survive. All you can do is try to save yourself and as many others as possible along the way. Everything else is just collateral.

/out of frame

🔻 Toussaint: Finished up Control Resonant last night, still chewing over my thoughts on it. The environment design is wonderful, and the side missions featuring Altered Items that were previously introduced but not seen in the original Control were delightful. Story-wise, I'm a tad bit more mixed, but overall I would say I came away from the experience more satisfied than not. Now I can finally read through Kambole's write up from earlier this month.

🎃 Rollin: Growing up, Halloween was just… fine. It was fine! Not my favorite holiday season, but fine. Now that I've got kids, however, the fall is a huge dash to the finish line every year punctuated by an incredibly busy October — and I always look forward to it.