Cyberpunk: Edgerunners review: Cyberpunk 2077 as a psychedelic anime

As the names of its lead artists and production studio Trigger loudly announce themselves in splashy, Franz Ferdinand-scored opening credits, you more or less know what you’re in for with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners“Anime spinoff” of troubled videogame Cyberpunk 2077. There’s a funny redundancy in the title which feels like an encapsulation of the series’ ethos — in the world of the show, “edgerunner” is another word for “cyberpunk,” so in a sense this is called Cyberpunks: Cyberpunks. That indulgent doubling-down is indicative of what this all is: It’s CyberpunkHowever, Continue reading. Better still — with the notable exception of all the jargon, knowledge of 2077 isn’t a price of entry for EdgerunnersIt stands on its own, but it incorporates characters and ideas from the game.

Set in a nondescript year before the video game, its protagonist David Martinez and his overworked mother Gloria are at the bottom of the city’s ladder, with every aspect of their lives weighed down by exorbitant fees. David eventually has no other choice but to fall in with a gang of mercenaries — cyberpunks — after meeting a mysterious but sympathetic netrunner (a hacker, basically) called Lucy. In the hope of earning something, he starts to work for other people. Everyone’s mutual need to make something of themselves locks the populace into repeating cycles. David has experienced the gradual death of capitalism and is more open about it in his world.

Edgerunners goes all in on the vulgarity of Night City’s final boss version of capitalism, breaking down the various exploitative systems running their lives, from health care packages to in-home washing machines that require credit. Even within the home, this commodification intrudes — and there’s also something funny about a dystopian Netflix Original where everything in life has become a subscription service.

Two characters of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners sitting on the moon looking at the Earth rising

A top-down image of the downtown district of Night City in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

Sci-fi and machismo aren’t a new combination for director Hiroyuki Imaishi, who directed Gurren LagannThe feature film, and recently, the documentary. Promare. The way that he and his team play with the rise or fall of a criminal leader is amazing. EdgerunnersIt is still distinctive. And though the series’ unpacking of this trajectory is cut a little short by its episode count, its visual storytelling manages to make up for any lost time. There’s (sometimes morbid) fun to be had with the various twists turns in the story from Bartosz Sztybor and Masahiko Otsuka’s propulsive screenwriting, as the series goes between the violent exploitation of ’80s anime — think the work of Yoshiaki Kawajiri — and more earnest sentiment, a similar combination as in the emphatic macho posturing and genuine brotherly love in Gurren Lagann and Promare.

Romance can be a balancing component in the equation EdgerunnersDavid could find a way out by imagining a real and even idyllic escape. Cynicism would likely be implied by violence and the commodification, chaos, and random uglyness of the settings and the nature of this game. But for all their ridiculousness, Imaishi’s works have always been ruthlessly sincere — when a bright-eyed punk proclaims he’s gonna fly his love interest to the moon, in that moment he and the director damn well mean it. However, such sentiment does become dangerous, and Lucy’s attempts to keep David out of harm’s way and his corresponding attempts to fulfill her dreams end up endangering both of them. Imaishi, co. and others reject cynicism as the cybernetic implanted human body. It only makes the tragedy of the series’ narrative arc sting all the more.

Despite all of that, the show does choose well where to lean on storytelling that only it can do — leaning into a lot of the psychological horror of existing in the space of Night City, of risking your mind while using bodily augmentations to get an edge over other gangs, while giving a bleeding-heart romantic edge to David’s story, and actual stakes and emotional weight to the hectic gunfights he throws himself into with abandon.

A character being thrown into a glass wall which is breaking on the impact. The person who punched him is in the foreground and still mid-punch

A woman sitting on the back of a couch against a window of a futuristic city. She’s lying down on her side, talking over the shoulder of a man sitting on the couch, who’s turned to look at her

It was released on April 1, 2005. Cyberpunk 2077 was noted to be a slightly too nostalgic take on the genre, perhaps not forward-thinking enough as it was keen to reproduce a memory of cyberpunk’s popular image. This and other familiar features from Deus Ex are also included. Blade RunnerPlease see the following: Ghost in the ShellDesigns inspired by nature OfCyberpunk 2077 remain, but the visual identity of the show still feels wholly its own, and Studio Trigger’s ideas feel inventive enough to refresh this shared setting. It’s filled with so much of that idiosyncratic personality that it even feels intrusive when the obligatory Cyberpunk branding appears at the end of every episode. Still, it’s simply exciting to see the studio’s and Imaishi’s trademarks imposed on this world — like their signature face-off shot, those extreme low-angle shots of huge guys getting in each other’s faces before a fight. And it still leaves room for more delicate notes to flourish around the exaggerated machismo, whether that’s through the way the scribbles of texture on David’s face remain the most consistently human touches about him, or how the visual presentation of what would otherwise just be another in-game system or a meter to watch imbues these things with real narrative meaning.

Speaking of which, the time between the show starting and bullets exploding heads only adds up to seconds, as the show begins noisily and for the most part stays that way — a hail of bullets and brains as Imaishi layers buckets of blood on top of neon. Such violence is immediately tied in with its exploration of how everything — gore and pleasure alike — is commodified in this world: David first seen buying and viewing people’s final memories as snuff films (referred to as “braindances,” as in the game) specifically, of a “cyberpsycho” gunning down the police and then dying violently himself. It explores that depressing intersection of fleshy desires and chrome bodies, where everyone is looking for stimulation. This can often be seen as many people writhing to the machines attached to their crotches.

With a penchant for giddy, hyper-maximalist style, director Imaishi and his staff are a perfect fit for the constant overstimulation of Night City — frames packed with rich, sometimes overwhelming color, just up to the limit of being too busy to comprehend. The creators frame the exaggerated proportions of Yoh Yoshinari’s character designs through forced perspectives and plenty of wide-angle shots, especially in conversations, sidestepping typical one-two shots by flattening the faces of both participants into the same frame. It’s perfect for its cast of big, memorable personalities, all looking to become big shots in its setting of Night City — like Becca, a small girl with big metal fists and even bigger guns.

A group of augmented biker types with red eyes and machine parts, staring at the camera

Three characters sitting on a club bench with laser lights illuminating in pink, blue, and purple around them; they’re all looking up, as are the people nearby

Trigger is able to create new visual languages through various in-game concepts like bullet time. David can be empowered by a prototype military implant placed in his spine. He moves at lightning speeds, but the world slows down, and his journey through it is recorded in an sequence of multicolored afterimages. They are stills of each frame in which he moved, suspended in time. Lucy is particularly impressed by netrunning’s visual representation. It tunes out all the noise and colors of the world to become a virtual space Lucy can sneak through. It’s a cyberspace appearing as an abstract world of pixelated monochrome that almost looks like the background from Death Grips’ video for “Guillotine.” On the opposite end of this feeling of empowerment through technology, the traumatizing psychological impact of these body modifications and abilities is also a visual focus, as “cyberpsychosis” is shown through You may experience blurred visuals character’s Eyes multiplying on the screen, and other disturbing or exciting ways of malfunction.

It’s not just style for the sake of it either, although with the amount that Edgerunners has, that’s enough to entertain. There’s emotional power in its presentation, perhaps best represented in its sixth episode, “Girl on Fire.” Episode director Yoshiyuki Kaneko, along with storyboarder and animation director Kai Ikarashi (who worked on an equally electric episode of SSSS.Dynazenon), capitalize on astonishing ambition in their portrayal of a fractured mind and the group splintering, and the series’ emotional tipping point for the entirety of its cast. Coupled with exhilarating quick-cutting through the chaos of gunfire and smashed skulls, it’s also the best representative of the show’s visual depth in even its quieter moments.

There’s also exciting sonic diversity in its score by Akira Yamaoka. He replicates the game’s heavy, dark EDM rhythms but also flirts with reggae and dub, dancehall, breakbeat dance music, thrash, and death metal, any of which could punctuate the next spontaneous moment of action. This is to say that the entire series offers a wide range of thrilling variations. The sleeker drawing style gives way to more chunky lines that are closer-up. They maintain an intimate feeling in a world that is losing its humanity. Those smudged textures and incredibly detailed, chaotic drawings that accentuate one character’s behemoth size, those intentionally dirtied drawings, maintain a feeling of rawness, reminders that these are humans drawn by human hands rather than anthropomorphic pieces of metal. Those same smudges of pencil also act as a rather devastating motif, particularly in episode 6 — the same marks witnessed in close-up on the face of one of David’s friends, slowly losing their mind, are also left as a lingering mark on David by the episode’s end.

There’s perhaps too little time to feel the full impact of David’s trajectory and the little tragedies of the people he runs with — a midseason turning point jumps ahead in his arc, and the episode count makes these events feel a little too compressed even as the show works overtime to sell these changes (and mostly succeeds). Regardless, it does manage to find the psychological horror in people losing themselves amidst all the metal, conjuring the grimier parts of the genre’s aesthetic history as various characters have waking, Tetsuo – The Iron ManGunmetal’s uncontrollable writhing through open wounds is a nightmare that will make you scream.

The show’s strongest feature is its ability to portray the unmooring and psychological struggles of its characters while remaining authentic. David finds himself becoming more attached to his gang and becomes disturbed by how easy it can be for him to murder people. A narrative that isn’t earnestly possible in the first-person shooting environment in which body counts are just numbers, ironically adding to the low quality of life it depicts. These ideas are expanded in the book. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is easily the most exciting thing to come out of the game’s redemption arc. Even if it’s hard not to wish that Imaishi and co. had a little more room to expand their take on this world, EdgerunnersIt is exciting, new and exciting enough to be exciting as it expands on its innovative visual representation of ingame concepts.

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