CYBERPUNK: EDGERUNNERS season 1 review - They got me

(Reviewed by Melody Werner)

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a 2022 anime co-produced by the renowned Studio Trigger and Poland's own renowned-for-lying-about-crunch-and-generally-everything, CD Projekt. Distributed by Netflix, it is a 10 episode series based on the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk, created by Mike Pondsmith, as well as CD Projekt Red's infamous Cyberpunk 2077. Immediately, it was met with nigh universal critical acclaim and fans have surrounded it en masse. Now, I may be a noted mocker of Cyberjunk 2077, but I did not come into this show with malice. While this is my first time watching something animated by Studio Trigger, I am well aware of their earned reputation and have always been interested in them. I also enjoyed greatly another animated series based on a video game I don't care for and ridicule the studio behind for their work culture too—Arcane—so I just strapped in for a good show. And that is what I got, as much as it still has me shaken up how hard it had me spooled along.

That Edgerunners comes so soon after Netflix's gutting of their animation department should be a sign that, um, that was perhaps a poor decision. Edgerunners offers far more visual excellence, storytelling, and style than a smorgasbord of Netflix's live action affairs, and I cannot see how anyone would deny this. Edgerunners looks amazing and the animation is so expressive, dynamic, and spectacular. There is some imagery here that, man... is gonna be lodged in my head for decades. And, oh boy, if you like ultraviolent action sequences, this show has them in abundance. Edgerunners shows that there are manifold creative ways of separating one's many bodily parts from each other and is always finding even more hidden in the couch cushions. If I did have to level a critique of the animation, and I do, I don't think this show really needed to be so over-the-top with the flashing lights all of the time. The fact that most photosensitive people cannot watch the show without endangering themselves, for instance, is not a good reason to obliterate my eyes in the opening credits sequence every episode by having the director credit undergo an exorcism each time.

All told, however, the writing is just as marvelous as the animation. Or, at least, once the training wheels get kicked off—the first episode has some really stiff dialogue, but this evens out as you start to grow accustomed to its fictional slang and the characters open up more. Speaking of the characters, damn, I love a bunch of them so much... the show knows this, and is evidently taunting me. This is a show where, if there is not a major character death in an episode, you're getting 57 of 'em next time around. Without spoiling... don't think anyone is safe. They are not. And, for as tragic as these deaths may be (and some of them gutted me), they aren't there purely for shock. As more characters die, those close to them gain new perspectives which make them develop in interesting ways.

I think my favorite character is Rebecca. She's a ball of energy; she is so much, all of the time, but she never gets on my nerves. Especially when she grows to become one of the more emotionally mature and complicated characters in the ensemble. She's also the funnest character, by far, and the vocal performance by Alex Cazares is much of why. Often with anime with English voices, you can wind up with mediocre performances just by virtue of those providing any VO having to match mouthflaps which were made with another language in mind. You do get some wooden line deliveries here and there in Edgerunners, but not enough that I wouldn't praise the voice actors overall. You get a lot of really great performances here.

For the most part, the soundtrack underpinning the show is fire. This is a natural and highly clever segue into Franz Ferdinand's opening credits track, "This Fire". This is the band in rare form, something they haven't had in a long time. You also have Rosa Walton's "I Want to Stay at Your House", which is not something I would typically listen to on its own, but it scores some of the most emotional scenes brilliantly. There are other, less prominent tunes throughout, including even some tasteful implementations of some death metal? A track I didn't enjoy entirely was this one that plays a few times when David (the main character) walks around Night City. The groove of it is pretty infectious, but the vocals are so slackerish that zoom from capturing an attitude of a nobody with nothin', to being so boring that I am annoyed.

I think the thing that most folks will immediately notice about this show is its breakneck pace. It rockets through its narrative with a blistering speed. Once the show kicks those aforementioned training wheels off, this unrelenting nature has you flying by the seat of your pants along with the show until it crashes into its pristine finale. When you're still getting accustomed to the show and its eccentricities, it can make the show feel weightless. Especially when very important narrative beats early on don't get enough time to feel like they have the gravitas they'd ought to. My other worry is that this show doesn't have a single queer character of note, from what I could see; which is such a missed opportunity in a transhumanist setting in which people can basically have a custom character creator IRL. I obviously don't think that such a setting would be good for queerness, but you'd sure think it'd make it more visible and "normal".

In the end, Edgerunners had me enjoying it almost as much as Arcane, with the minor hitch being its first 1.5 episodes or so. It's an exhilarating watch that really benefits from being seen all in one breathless sitting. And, by the end, there were a few moments where I thought I might actually cry. Which, y'know, was really impressive and unexpected for me; to an extent, I just expected some really awesome action scenes with a blank main character thirsting over an anime waifu. The only thing that was true about that impression was that the action scenes really are some killer stuff. If they do, do a season two, I hope (and am pretty sure that) it will be very disconnected from this one. Cuz, erm, I am not sure how you could do much more with this particular band of misfits, let me put it that way. I'll give this season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners a 9.5/10.

Must-watch

Summary:

Edgerunners is so good, it got me to enjoy something Cyberpunk-related. I'm still not falling for 2077, though.