Edgerunners makes a strong pitch for getting all chromed up.
, Netflix's new anime spin-off based on the show, doesn't have to deal with any of those problems. With no concerns for immersion or reactivity, it fast forwards through the ultraviolent life of a rando choom, and in the process makes Night City exciting and alive again.
Edgerunners keeps its cast tight: it spends most of its time on young street kid David Martinez and the crew he ends up rolling with, including elite hacker Lucy, and Maine, the Hulk-sized mercenary leader who takes him under his wing. It's your classic dystopian tragedy: angry, desperate for money and purpose in life, innocent David decides to turn to a life of crime—he just happens to do it with a military-grade cybernetic spinal implant that makes him faster than a bullet. The animators at Studio Trigger, famous for shows like Kill La Kill, are gleefully unsubtle. Edgerunners is full of heads exploding into chunky shards of bone and brain and floppy flaps of skin. The two women with the most screen time, both hackers, conveniently get naked every time they do a hack, and then a few more times for good measure. The animation has a clean-edged modern slickness to it, but its approach to violence and sex are just as trapped in the '80s as Cyberpunk itself. The ultraviolence is mostly fun, though, and sometimes bleak and off-putting exactly when it should be—there wasn't much chance this spin-off series was going to tackle big questions about the cyberpunk genre. But I was surprised by how much its little snapshots of life in Night City pulled me in. Early on David saunters through his block on the way to school with the precision of someone who's stepped over the same drunk, dodged the same pile of puke, and taken the same shortcut a thousand times; it immediately reminded me of leaving V's apartment in Cyberpunk 2077, but it's so much more effective to watch than to play. In the show, a few seconds of David walking the same route shows his swagger despite the squalor he lives in and packs in moments of background comedy, like random dudes in VR headsets going to town on cyber fleshlights. When he hits rock bottom, walking that familiar route is an inflection point: the moment he decides something's gotta change. In the game, leaving your apartment and seeing the same NPCs, the same bits of dialogue, just reinforce the artificiality of the world—eventually they're just background noise to sprint past on your way to the next mission. Heist scenes set on Night City's monorail made me want to boot up the game, jump on a train and watch the city go by through the window . Even the slang I rolled my eyes at in Cyberpunk 2077—every bit of dialogue with
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