This Week in Anime

Cyberpunk Edgerunners is a Certified Crowdpleaser

Chris
Well Steve, it's come to this. Doesn't look like there's anything else left this season for us to cover, so we've got no other choice but to finally look at Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World. Might as well get into it.

Hold on, there seems to be something wrong with my stream here.

What the-?

Sadly, Keanu himself doesn't seem to be on hand for a new Cyberpunk project nearly (checks) two years after Cyberpunk 2077's original launch. But we can still follow your dreams back to Night City for the new Netflix anime.

Though those dreams might just as easily turn out to be nightmares.

That's what happens when you put up the eddies to get Studio Trigger on the production. I never got around to Cyberpunk The Video Game before this (apart from watching a laboriously long multi-part video essay on it), but I definitely would have been more enticed at the time had it been styled more like the work directed by one Hiroyuki Imaishi here.


Which makes it a little funny that the Steam page for the game now opens with a trailer intercut with footage from this show. Clearly the response to Edgerunners has already been a boon for the franchise.

In that aspect alone the streaming-service-based lack of TV censorship is a godsend for a show like this and the people making it. You're getting Imaishi cutting loose with his 'sex and violence at machspeed' tendencies in a way he really hasn't been able to since Dead Leaves, while also having the benefit of decades of experience plus a more powerful crew and franchise sponsorships tempering the output here. So it's simultaneously less limited but more focused.

While it can definitely reach for exploitative heights in some cases, it fits on account of the aforementioned style of that established Cyberpunk setting and those old-school OVAs. Even when it's being presented as "fun", the ultraviolence is shown here for a reason, a point.

And most of the time that point is "Night City is a hellscape that will kill you and everyone you love with zero hesitation if you blink at the wrong moment."

After everything David gets put through in the first episode, the bit that hit me the hardest was his mom's cremated remains being unceremoniously dumped out to him in a canister like a cheap can of soda out of a vending machine.

This is after a barrage of systemic failings involving for-profit paramedics neglecting mortally wounded victims, cut-rate doctors charging for stabilization and care that doesn't even work, and upbeat funeral-plan voice-overs trying to sell David on the most cost-effective disposal methods for his mother. It's all in service of that old dystopia chestnut: Capitalism sucks, and future capitalism really sucks.

If you can't grow your own backbone, store-bought is fine.

That's a fair point though, that after the first episode's financial woes, Edgerunners is less interested in that capitalism element. Hell, the first thing David does after getting his fancy Sandevistan spine installed isn't to try and make money using it, it's taking on the elitist bully who shit-talked him and his mom.

Perhaps ironically, it's this act that puts him on the radar of the corporation who will dog him through the rest of the tragic track this story becomes.

Truly, Lucy and David's first date night goes as perfectly as one could reasonably expect.

So long as you also practice safe cybering later on in the night.

I am a certified Trigger mark, so me liking this a bunch was to be expected. In my personal case, I think it running on repeat through my own head since I watched it (and even finding time to watch several episodes multiple times in the run-up to this column) comes from how successfully that eventual tragedy of its ending lands, which we can definitely get to. But even before I totally knew where it was going, I found the episodes flying by, whether we were watching characters in bloody brawls, or just vibing as best they could in moments of downtime in this world and its fancy licensed-music soundtrack.

The extra F's in 'This Fffire' are for Franz Ferdinand!

That alone makes for an invigorating, thematically appropriate introduction to every episode (love the way David 'burns himself up' as he runs by the end). And other uses of music play with the illustrative and directorial efforts you mentioned. Like you highlighted the repeated and reflected shots of David in the first episode, and they do the same sort of thing with the music on the moon in the second episode, bringing that back for the final one. All to ensure I'll be crying in the club the next time "I Really Want To Stay At Your House" comes on.

I could definitely feel how the license affected the direction of the story. Like obviously Trigger's characters in here can't upend or revolutionize anything in Night City or the Cyberpunk world by the end because, hey, Mike Pondsmith and now CD PROJEKT RED still need that sandbox setting to play in. But Imaishi and his funky bunch never feel like they're straining against that kind of limitation. Rather, I feel like those constraints enhance the tone of the story they do choose to tell here. And yeah, it's great to see that being based on a glossy mass-market AAA video game didn't result in them reigning in their famous visual and character design sensibilities.

Oh don't worry, I'm absolutely here to toast to her with you!

A real market-ready moeblob, that Rebecca.

Rebecca's interesting as a secondary character, taking on the fan-favorite life that she has, because I think she illustrates what works about Edgerunners as a story in its setting. She doesn't have a major character arc alongside what the likes of David or Lucy get, but her presence, her relationships with them or her brother Pilar, make the crew feel more 'real' and the world they occupy lived-in. She undergoes some personality shifting, alongside physical upgrades, to sell the vague time-skip that happens partway through the comparatively-short run.

She's not the main character, but she is, in essence, the best mascot that Edgerunners could have asked for.

As someone who primarily knows Kurosawa as the voice of the level-headed Misaki in BanG Dream!, this was a rare treat indeed!

Though I feel compelled to note that I also watched plenty of the dub for this series, and her English VA, Alex Cazares, is carrying the crazed energy of the character just as well.

I know it's unlikely given the status of the project and how things, uh, turn out for Rebecca in the series, but you have to presume that CDPR is looking at their Twitter timelines and wondering if they're leaving money on the table by not referencing her somewhere in some Cyberpunk 2077 DLC.

Party balance is important in any RPG. It does take a couple episodes for the crew to get introduced, and thus everyone isn't around for super-long in the first part of the series, but I love how Edgerunners still uses those all-important vibes with its effective musical montages to sell how David finds a home and fits in with this crew.

I'm personally a fan of the crew's big boss-man Maine, especially the simple, but strong arc of him going from shaking David down as a suspected gear-thief, to the two of them developing a genuine rapport.

Trigger's ability to instill character and personality into this incredibly-designed cast of individuals (seriously, even smaller players like Pilar and Dorio stand out because of their designs and how the animation portrays them) also comes through when it wants to illustrate that something is wrong with a character we've grown to know like Maine.

Though okay, maybe that's cheating because that particular one's less the efforts of Trigger as a collective and more down to the specific talents of our good friend

Astounding that Trigger or anybody else hasn't given this guy his own series yet. Episode 6 is pretty much perfect because of everything you just mentioned. Though I also especially love the way it illustrates the effects of Cyberpsychosis, in cues that the whole production crew round back to for the show's final episode: Past backdrops interacting with characters and props from the present, dissonantly occupying areas that the affected can see and understand, but can't parse from each other.

This is also another good spot for a sidebar: It was never going to be the case given its licensed, made-specifically-for-a-Netflix-drop model, but Edgerunners, and this sixth episode particularly, would have killed in weekly releases.

My god it would even have had the potential to take on life as a redraw meme.

Not that reacting to Edgerunners as a whole is an undesirable experience. But I do wonder about the alternate universe where we had this series' airing spicing up this whole season instead of being dumped at our feet only a couple weeks before Chainsaw Man and October's other heavy hitters suck up all the oxygen. We missed out on real-time speculation on where this show would go after episode 6, or reactions to the time-skip in the next episode alongside the new, Absolute Unit David.

It's just another stylistic throwback to those old OVAs. One that I'm not sure we can post direct screencaps of, since ANN can't show off that kind of sauciness unless we're getting sponsored by Queen's Blade.

Actually though, David getting superhuman samurai syber-swole lets me touch on another aspect I appreciate Edgerunners' approach to: All the cyber-implant upgrades and body-modifications never propel a theme of "But are you really human anymore?" in this series. David, Lucy, and others' various ports and modifications are means to the ends that are their dreams. Taking on too many of them is a case of potentially losing your self, your ability to recognize your life and those in it, more than any technical question of if sick-ass robot arms make you less of a person.

It really plays into the whole overall theme of inherited will that Edgerunners has going on. It works within the inherent tragedy that this story was pretty much always destined to depict: The idea that David was never going to achieve his mom's dream for him, nor could he conceive of a goal for himself beyond finding a way to help Lucy achieve her dream. Realizing that payoff mostly took the sting out of seeing Lucy, who was introduced so strongly in the show's first half, spend its second half moping around the apartment before just getting kidnapped.

It's frustrating because they could almost have killed two birds with one stone! Kiwi's past interactions with and instruction of Lucy are referenced in the episode where the former sells out the latter, really making you wonder what a full interlude of an episode expanding on both these ladies could have done.

Instead the most we get is an earlier infodump from Lucy on her Stranger Things backstory, which probably feels the most like a video-game cutscene-character monologue of anything in this show.

Ah yes, everyone's favorite classic cyberpunk story: The Blues Brothers This is the kind of delivery we can ask for, though I don't know that anyone familiar with Imaishi's style would expect anything less than David strapped into a giant metal murder-machine, multi-wielding firearms atop a car racing around with Rebecca and Matt Mercer selflessly backing him up.

It's another testament to the successful stylization of the show, that this part is a culmination of the inevitably tragedy of David's path, and also whips ass as a climactic action scene.

The immediately-recognizable invocation of That One Scene from Promare is exactly the sort of indulgence I think Imaishi has earned at the end of all this.

I mean, at least his role in this show explained how he got the name Adam Smasher. Since he did

smash 'er

It's an absolutely unforgettable final moment. And knowing that Adam there apparently is an established Cyberpunk character makes me hopeful I might be able to avenge her death if I ever get around to playing the game and facing him.

Take note, corpos, this is how you use a tie-in to sell us on a video game: Give us the chance to get the guy who got our Best Girl.

But then that kind of catharsis really is present at the end within the show itself. For all Lucy's inaction in the last stretch, David's efforts and the will of himself and the others he failed to save which he then passes onto her still makes that big moment feel earned. It lands as the end of a series-long journey for David, and somehow makes a scene of a character getting his ass summarily beat by a just-barely-introduced video-game tie-in boss still feel triumphant.

It says a lot that knowing how Edgerunners turned out did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for throwing it on to watch again soon after. I daresay having an understanding of the kind of story this is and where it's going only made me appreciate where it started even more. Tragedy, as a genre, is pretty well defined by knowing how things are going to turn out, but the best of those understand that seeing how one lived is so key to watching how they die at the end.

Another great entry to Trigger's catalog that I'm grateful we got this year! I'll drink to that!