Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

One of the biggest gaming letdowns in recent years came when the 2020 action role playing game, Cyberpunk 2077 was released. Originally built up over several years as a game-changer and something that would jump leaps and boundaries when it came to its graphics, presentation and game play, its eventual release after multiple delays was met with less than favorable responses from its fan base. It was widely criticized for its various bugs and performance issues, Sony removed it from the stores for a while as CD Projekt Red (the developers and publishers behind the game) fixed some of the problems, and they even became subject to class-action lawsuits for their apparent attempts at downplaying the severity of the technical problems before release. It went from one of the most anticipated games to one of the most hated, and while it did do well critically and the general consensus has dialed back and become more positive with the game’s improvements, it was definitely not a great starting point. Despite this, the future for this franchise looks promising, with an expansion as well as a sequel for the game coming in the future, and this increase in popularity more than likely came from the Netflix web anime, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, created by Rafal Jaki. Set in the dystopic metropolitan streets of Night City, the show follows David (voiced by Zach Aguilar), a Dominican American teenager whose top student pedigree at a prestigious academy doesn’t mean as much to him as the prospect of becoming more cybernetically enhanced and becoming a high-tech black market mercenary cyberpunk (otherwise known as an Edgerunner). After a tragic drive-by shooting causes an accident which gets his financially struggling mother killed, which leaves him broke and without help, David decides to abandon his education and live the life of the Edgerunner, coming across a group who his mother was affiliating with who decide to take him in. This group consists of trigger-happy Rebecca (voiced by Alex Cazares), veteran Edgerunner Maine (voiced by William C. Stephens) and young net-runner Lucy (voiced by Emi Lo) who David develops feelings for, and the show consist of David learning to adapt to this new environment, connect with his new teammates and discover how they live within this lifestyle, and try to remain sane with the various enhancements in his body and escape the inevitable condition of cyberpsychosis, which runs the risk of permanently corrupting an individual and turning them into a mindless killing machine. For a very messily handled game, it’s nice to see that Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a perfectly solid series with a decent grasp of what its fan base will want to see and seemingly delivered for them, as it currently has an 100% Rotten Tomato critical score.

Starting off life as a table-top game created by Mike Pondsmith before evolving into its own franchise, Cyberpunk seems to build from this idea of being a conglomeration of various other cyberpunk sci-fi like properties, combining their ideas into one environment and sort of acting as a loving bubble for everything cyberpunk related. For a video game, that seems to be a decent idea with many seemingly getting into the world and components of this environment despite the problems listed previously, and it could also function nicely within a series as the various call-backs and references would be a nice send-up to all those who appreciate the sub-genre and enjoy figuring out where each reference comes from (even from very obscure and even disliked projects). The problem comes from how there is very little spin placed on these ideas to make them their own entity and instead just leaves them as references that are so vitally important to the flow and pace of the main story, that it leaves the world with very little unique personality and just makes the project feel like it’s a rip-off of these other aspects rather than its own thing. This becomes pretty evident when you look at the narrative for this story written by Bartosz Sztybor, Jan Bartowicz and Lukasz Ludkowski, which is at the same time generic and beyond basic in execution, as well as weirdly complicated and difficult to follow. For a series that feels pretty small in scale and has a set-up that could very easily be told in the ten episodes that it has, the screenplay by Masahiko Otsuka and Yoshiki Usa strangely doesn’t flow very neatly and (without giving anything away) shifts gears halfway through which muddles up the motivation, thematic purpose, and even final intent of the entire show. The idea of a young boy falling into a rough-around-the-edges lifestyle and living up to an unfair society while coming to grips with the death of a family member had the workings to be functional enough despite being a little basic, but a lot of that is rushed out and replaced with another story, with its own different backstory and motivation which completely takes away from the original set-up and drowns it out for another premise that is equally as undeveloped and hard to follow due to how rushed it all feels. As a turn-your-brain-off experience, it does its job nice enough and won’t make you bored when watching as it’s a kind of show where it peaks your interest with its visuals and action sequences rather than its characters and plot (even though those aspects aren’t done bad), but going from extremely generic and simple to understand, to incredibly convoluted and hard to follow all in the span of one small season makes it difficult to pin down.

The characters are mostly kept as these one-note archetypes you’ve seen in these kind of cyberpunk environments, but they are given the benefit of having pretty good designs and pretty great voice talent supporting them. Whether or not they work as individual characters, they do have great looks that help them stand out not only amongst each other, but among other cyberpunk worlds with their dramatic and vibrant but also memorable designs and quick to grasp personalities. Most of this seemingly comes from character designer, Yoh Yoshinari, whose worked on series like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Little Witch Academia, which also feature characters with strikingly and memorable designs through their coloration and models. The voice talent is also very strong, with names that might not be the most well-known to those outside of the anime spectrum, but people that are clearly giving effort into dialogue that isn’t always the best written or constructed but delivered in an emotive enough manner that it makes things feel more impactful than they should be. Sadly, while these qualities do help the cast out quite a bit, it doesn’t change the fact that the minimal time spent with most of them and with a narrative that throws away development time in exchange for constant monologues that spew out world building components that seem to attribute to nothing within this story, it leaves them feeling less engaging and memorable than the voice talent and designs would have you believe. David as a lead is decent enough in a way that any regular tough, streetwise, and loud-mouthed teen boy with a heart of gold archetype could be, but the direction his character goes down keeps shifting to the point where his end result is pretty out-of-nowhere and feels like an excuse to wrap his story up nice and quick without having to look back on the previous development. Lucy, at first, seems like a pretty cool character who has some fun potential and even a decent motivation, but the direction they take her down is arguably the worse out of anyone in this cast, with a backstory that is confusing and arbitrary, a relationship with David where there is zero chemistry or connection, and being reduced to a damsel in distress for the last few episodes of this series, it’s a really bad end for her. Most the others don’t have much to offer outside of their looks and occasional cool moment, and it does feel like each of them could be fleshed out into bigger roles, but the show doesn’t really give time to explore them and only really uses them for what they can bring to action scenes. This can also be said for most of the villains, who don’t really show themselves until the final act of the story and outside of this cyborg assassin near the end who actually looks and sounds pretty intimidating, none of them are the least bit memorable (you’d figured they’d want to use Giancarlo Esposito for more than a few episodes).

Arguably the trickiest element to talk about when it comes to this series is the animation. It was done by Studio Trigger, an animation studio responsible for animes like Kill la Kill, Little Witch Academia, Promare and BNA: Brand New Animal. This production was a combination group effort between Studio Trigger and CD Projekt (even the co-founder and a key animator for Studio Trigger, Hiroyuki Imaishi, directed and helmed this series), so there was this idea set in place where Studio Trigger would bring their own spin and visual eye to what CD Projekt directed it to look like, it would be their control over how their world would look. From a production and lay-out perspective, it’s a great success as the environment does look pretty cool, visually engaging through the bright colors which adds a fun spin on the usually dreary and neon vibe these kinds of cyberpunk series go for (even though that element is still featured) and has enough interesting angles in otherwise basic environments to make it look a bit more fun and cooler than it would initially. The already mentioned character designs are always well done, and most of the action is very high-octane and keeps the adrenaline high and pumping as it is as fast paced as it is graphic and extreme in the gory details. The problem with this comes in the form of how chaotic and often overly animated certain moments are to the point where it’s hard to keep track of what is being shown on-screen. Studio Trigger has always had this issue with some of their other projects where it really comes down to quality of the drawing overriding the quality of shot composition and visual awareness for the audience, and it leaves a lot of the action feeling extreme and full of motion and craziness, but also very visually messy and contains extenuated moments that are packed with so much line-up and coloration that it becomes hard to pinpoint what’s even on screen. It’s not even to the point where the show is trying to go abstract and it’s a miss in a different style, it just feels like a gimmick of the studio. Sometimes it tries something new and it’s fun like when it goes into the hyper speed mode and it leaves glitchy trails behind the individual or the eyes glitch around to the point where they leave the structure of the character, but for moments that are presented straightforward, it’s just given so much more detail that it ironically becomes harder to see.

Cyberpunk 2077 came back from the ashes of failure and made itself better once it actually took the time to get rid of some of the glaring bugs, leaving the franchise in a place where people want to see more from it (how can you not love something with Keanu Reeves in it). This series arguably helped reshape the brand recognition for the franchise and released something that while definitely not spectacular, left a good enough impression that allowed others to feel in capable hands with this techy world going forward. Considering this was only a one-off thing as there are no plans to continue this moving forward, this brief series actually did quite well for itself and made the most out of what it could, paving a decently shining and appropriately neon and chrome-esque pathway to a nicer future. The characters aren’t great but passable enough, the story is ironically too basic in one moment and too complicated the next, but it does keep your attention, and the visuals are chaotic and often hard to keep track of, but it looks really good during those messy moments, so it’ll be up to the viewer whether or not they went to dive headfirst into this fast-paced but still decently entertaining world.