For those who aren’t aware, in 2020, a company called CD Projekt Red came out with a video game known as Cyberpunk 2077, based on a series of tabletop RPGs that nobody remembers – “Cyberpunk”, usually referred to as either Cyberpunk Red or, ironically given when the video game dropped, Cyberpunk 2020. While most folks seem to like 2077 well enough now, at launch it was something of a buggy mess.
But maybe that’s because CD Projekt Red had other priorities, famously getting Keanu Reeves for a major role in their game and, relevant to this blog, enlisting Studio Trigger to… not exactly adapt the game to anime form, but instead to produce a series in the same setting. That would be Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
Honestly, if the bug fix money went to Keanu and Trigger, I can’t really blame them.
The first thing you have to know about Edgerunners, before I even get into summary, is that this show has kind of aptly hijacked the name of an entire genre, because it lives and breathes with the heaviest of Cyberpunk auras.
I’ve addressed Cyberpunk on the blog before, but I don’t think I’ve ever really defined it. In short, Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction that features social stagnation, regress, or growing pains centered around emerging technologies. Like most genres there are fuzzy edges: the Necromunda sub-brand of Warhammer 40,000 is often considered Cyberpunk despite being part of a larger setting that’s deep in the far future rather than the typical near future venue of the genre. I called Beatless “Cyberpunk”, but while it has the emergent and philosophical aspects of most of the near future stuff, I’ve also heard it aptly described as “cyber without the punk” since it depicts a happier and more functional future society than most Cyberpunk stories would even flirt with.
Edgerunners, on the other hand, is anything but an edge case. It uses all the most core and classical tropes and styles of the genre, hitting a bullseye on what the most central identity of cyberpunk is. Why am I putting what sounds like part of my typical summation work at the start rather than the end? Because this means it revels in that “punk” side. Edgerunners is a show that pulls absolutely no punches with violence, gore, and taboo. If the MPAA were rating this, it wouldn’t be R on a technicality like a lot of anime I’ve reviewed, it would be a hard R and it uses that in what feels like every last minute or its running time.
We’re about to take a trip into a land of sex, murder, and body horror, choom. There are going to be some internals becoming externals with shocking rapidity and horrific clarity, degradations of the human condition, and not a lot of hope to be found. I probably could have given this kind of warning for some other shows I’ve reviewed, but I wasn’t using screencaps back then so there was no risk that I might actually show you something truly horrific rather than just saying it.
As another Trigger production put it: “If you want off this ride, now’s your chance.”
Appropriately enough, the show starts with a massive bloodbath, as a “Cyberpsycho” with massive superhuman capabilities carves through basically anyone who gets in his way before finally being brought down in a massive display of firepower and urban violence.
Watching this via recording is our main character, David Martinez. David is the poor punk of a genius presently attending the rich kid school bound to the megacorp Arasaka, the corp itself being the de facto ruler of Night City, contested only by other powerful corporations. David causes a bit of a problem by trying to save some of his single mom’s non-existent money by declining a cyberware upgrade required by his school in favor of having the local “ripper doc” give him a hack to keep up instead. This fails basically at once, not just embarrassing David but also damaging some school tech.
Mom gets called in to apologize to the principal, now on hook for higher fees, and as the two are driving home, having something of an argument, they end up in the middle of a brutal shootout on the highway, with their car taken out as collateral damage. The trauma team, of which his mom is an employee, arrives fast enough… but wouldn’t you know it, mom’s not a paying member, so she has to wait for whatever picks up the pieces that Trauma doesn’t. This leads to her getting the only medical care their family can afford, and leaving David alone with shocking rapidity.
The bad news doesn’t stop. David has bills to pay, ranging from corpse disposal (at least he can afford cremation; we see Mom’s urn a few times as an important touchstone for David’s resolve and humanity) to rent, none of which are going to relent for a little thing like his mother’s death. His school bullies aren’t terribly sympathetic either, beating him up and breaking him down.
Thus, at this low point, David finds the relevant plot trinket among his mom’s effects: a cybernetic implant known as a Sandevistan – extremely powerful, extremely rare, extremely valuable, extremely dangerous… and pretty dang illegal as well. Doc may be willing to buy, but not for a price that would make things worthwhile. After some trials and tribulations, David chooses option B and has Doc install the thing into him instead, with the deal that if he can’t handle it (as Doc feels he won’t be able to) and needs it removed, Doc will get it for free. Spoiler alert, that’s not happening.
With his newfound power, David decides to take on some of his former bullies. He was ready to take his expulsion over the earlier incident anyway, rather than apologizing and paying up, so he takes the chance to get a little payback, utilizing the Sandevistan’s bullet-time powers to give at least as bad as he got in the punching department.
After that, before David really has a chance to consider his lack of purpose or direction, he runs into Edgerunners’ seemingly most memorable character, Lucy.
Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time the audience has seen her. There were some weird scenes and cuts earlier where Lucy would be somewhere else in the scene, David would seem to sense something, and we’d get a transition that would highlight where she is (or was), including some really weird techniques like having her shiny hair float out of the scene like a jellyfish. But here, they finally meet, when Lucy tries to use some tricks to steal from him and he uses his Sandevistan to catch her.
They talk out their issues – she only steals from Arasaka, and while he may still have a student ID, he’s done with that world, so they team up to rob the rest of the commuter train they’re on blind. Of course, none of this goes off without a little violence and excitement. Threats, coercion, riding a medical stretcher down the highway like a go-kart…
After that, the two head back to Lucy’s pad, where she shows him a good time (in this case meaning a “brain dance” – basically a full dive VR experience she has on hook, this one of going to the moon as she dreams of doing for real) and then seemingly betrays him as a gang of thugs show up looking to claim the Sandevistan, even if they have to rip it out of his body and not leave much behind.
The leader of this band, Maine, softens up quite a bit when he actually hears David’s name since it turns out that David’s mother was Maine’s supplier, and he didn’t even know she was dead. This explains both how she got enough money to put her kid through insanely expensive schooling – selling cyberware harvested from the dead on the black market – and why she “stood him up” and he didn’t get “his” Sandevistan. For the kid of somebody Maine clearly considered a friend, he’s willing to bend a little, and thus at David’s request he lets David show his stuff and join the criminal crew.
The crew gets their primary jobs from a “fixer” named Faraday, who is currently focused on seeking out certain secrets of Arasaka, with the ranking executive father of David’s old bully in the crosshairs. They make… halting progress on that front, but David proves himself to Maine and the gang along the way. Maine isn’t the only one impressed, though: news of David’s use of the Sandevistan gets back to Arasaka, and the corporate scumbags start to see him as a valuable test subject, due to his apparently high resistance to cyberpsychosis.
There are quite a few members of the gang, but because anyone in this show can, and frequently does die, I’m not going to go into too much detail. Other than Maine himself and Lucy, the ones to remember are Lucy’s hacker mentor Kiwi, and Rebecca – a heavily chromed sweetie with the temper of a bottle of nitroglycerin. It’s pretty strongly implied she’s got a thing for David, but he’s only got eyes for Lucy so at most that lets her show her softer moments when acting as a caregiver or voice of reason to David, much like how Maine ends up taking on a rather fatherly role.
A series of blood-soaked qualified successes and profitable failures ultimately leads to the gang kidnapping the mark they were supposed to investigate, in order to extract the valuable information from him directly. At the same time, Maine starts taking a turn for the worse, and I suppose it’s finally time I actually talk about cyberpsychosis.
Cyberpsychosis is fairly poorly defined for the pivotal role its existence in the setting plays for Edgerunners. At its most basic it seems to be that trying to live with too much in the way of cybernetic body replacements, aka chrome, especially high-spec stuff, will eventually erode the user’s mind and cause them to degenerate into an irrecoverable and violent insanity. There are early stages, or perhaps warning signs, and victims can be pulled back from the brink, but once somebody goes “over the edge”, they’re gone.
The thing is, cyberpsychosis seems to hit everybody differently. We see characters that have their whole bodies replaced, or very near to it, who also seem to be ultimately stable while at the same time folks on the streets can seem to descend into madness with relatively minimal augmentation. One of the gang members, Rebecca’s brother, gets killed in an extremely sudden and brutal scene by a bum on the street who nobody realized was a cyberpsycho until he attacked. David’s case establishes somewhat that there’s an element of a person’s character (or other not visually obvious trait, perhaps) that can influence things, while comments from characters like the ripper doc suggest that physical attributes play a part.
In all honesty, knowing that this ultimately traces back to a pen and paper RPG from a particular era, there’s a meta level on which cyberpsychosis almost certainly exists to stop arbitrary player characters from buying and installing all the fun chrome and becoming unstoppable death machines without spending some kind of balancing resource on it. Once this is introduced as a setting detail, npcs and enemies can be psycho or not based on the game master’s needs. Random encounter with a crazy bum? Sure, he’s a psycho even though he doesn’t have much chrome. Cool final boss acting as the corporate strongman? He can have whatever stats the gm wants to give him and never has to roll to see if his brain goes kaput. This sort of thing is pretty common in RPGs that live in a cyberpunk/scifi sort of space where body augmentation is possible, again as a balancing act. I think in Shadowrun trading out body parts literally costs you pieces of your soul. You get the idea.
In a storytelling sense though, it’s amazing how well cyberpsychosis works in Edgerunners… because it really shouldn’t. The arbitrary nature, by all rights, should reveal the hand of artifice and cheapen the situation when it threatens a major character, as happens with Maine. But the scenes are done very artfully. We see, from Maine’s point of view, how he begins to hallucinate, and is taken to a place removed from the present experience in Night City itself… and we see from others how this just looks like him spacing out, causing them to worry, but not overly much. Even if the underlying rules are inconsistent and arbitrary, the portrayal is excellently designed to create an emotional experience.
Thus, the last attempt to dive into their prisoner’s brain (done by Lucy) and the incoming raid on the hideout when security is tripped turns into Maine’s last stand, as his mind and his life both slip away from him, leaving several members of his gang dead and the cohesion of the survivors shattered.
From here, we have a time skip. David is the new gang leader. Lucy, despite being in a romantic relationship with him, is on sabbatical, deeply shaken by her experience diving and unwilling to take the task back up, leaving Kiwi on the “brain interface to computer” support role while David, with Maine’s old cyber arms and a new buff body to go with them, leads from the front.
David, like Maine before him, is also starting to not do so good.
They end up back on Faraday’s case, but Faraday’s situations have changed. He schemes a betrayal of the team and his old employers at rival megacorp MilTech in order to join team Arasaka. This involves both kidnapping Lucy – herself an escaped experiment to create a super-hacker – and setting up the rest of the gang with a raid on a transport containing Arasaka’s latest ultimate weapon, the cyberskeleton. Kiwi is part of the betrayal as well, since the goal is to guide David to it and then force him to install the thing, so that Arasaka can get some live test data against MilTech forces baited onto the scene.
This works out basically as Faraday had planned, with Lucy managing to get a desperate call out just a little too late to stop what’s left of David from being installed into the cyberskeleton. Now knowing that Kiwi and Faraday are traitors and that Lucy is being hauled to Arasaka Tower, David decides to use this newfound power (even as it pushes him to the very brink of psychosis) to kick ass and hopefully take down the real enemies responsible for his woes.
Thus, our final arc sees David and the remains of his gang break out of the MilTech encirclement, with David flipping tanks and pasting infantry basically at will, and race into the city in order to hunt down Faraday. They even get a little help from Kiwi, who had one last knife for Faraday’s back when he decided to burn her. Rebecca does her best to hold David together (since at this point it’s basically just her and the getaway driver), and… this sequence is exactly what you want, one big action scene tearing up the environs of Night City and wrecking police and Arasaka grunts with reckless abandon, until David finally makes it to the hangar high in Arasaka tower where Faraday has just touched down with Lucy.
However, rescuing Lucy is not as easy as taking down some helpless corporate suits. They’ve brought their own muscle, an individual so suddenly introduced you know he’s got to be from the game, Adam Smasher. This is Arasaka’s mercenary full-body cyborg, with pretty much nothing but machine left and the cold intellect that goes with it rather than common psychosis.
As David fights Smasher, he manages to get Faraday dead and exit the building (via a long fall) with Lucy. It seems like he’s gone over the brink doing it, but David’s bond with Lucy brings him back to his humanity and lets him control the landing, meeting up with Rebecca and the getaway driver. Rebecca talks some extra sense into David, having a moment and getting him ready to flee into the sunset… right before getting stomped like a goomba into a smear of gore by Smasher entering the scene from above.
Back when I reviewed Quadelia Code, there was a certain scene for which I had a long direction, in which the pretty girlfriend character gets extremely suddenly killed by something slamming down from above and squishing her. In that show it was badly done, so much so that it came off more as surreal comedy than an emotional character death. It also wasn’t actually what it appeared to be, but that’s neither here nor there. A lot of what I said there is… pretty important to me, since there are lessons I’ve learned from my own writing and hopefully applied to create powerful character deaths, but perhaps because I’m a novelist and not a screenwriter I’ve never exactly gone for the “extremely sudden” kill done right. That sort of thing works better in media where time is an inherent component, such as film, television, audio dramas, or so on.
I feel like I should take a moment here to Plug My Book. You wanna see me put my money where my mouth is and tell a young adult story in a setting that’s kind of cyberpunk with magic for an anime-inspired outing? You can! Book 2/3 in the series should be out soon!
In any case, Rebecca’s death right at the end of this show, turned into a spatter effect mid-sentence, is more or less what that moment wants to be. Rebecca wasn’t quite as central, being the also-ran to Lucy rather than the actual female lead, but she was someone who the audience was likely to care about. It happens fast… but not too fast. The motion itself is incredibly quick, as are a lot of the deaths in Edgerunners, but the second before Rebecca turns upward, gets a few words out in anger mode, and even tries to fire her gun. We see Smasher come down, and the gore after. The moment before that was, also, at best a tiny chance for the audience to catch its breath, something that (metaphorically speaking) we hadn’t even quite accomplished when it turns back. So there is this shocking motion back to the life-or-death battle, but at the same time we hadn’t quite left. It’s not a big, mournful death for Rebecca since, unlike with Maine’s last stand there’s not really any time to process it, but it does work.
David… actually doesn’t get a thrilling final battle on screen after that. He tries, and lets the getaway car get away (the driver honoring David’s last wish to ensure Lucy’s safety) and Smasher says David entertained him, but most of what we see is pretty one-sided since David is at the end of his rope. We end with David, wholly dismantled by Smasher, but able to die as a human, spitting in Arasaka’s face one last time.
With everyone but Lucy dead, we end with her seemingly having made it to her wish, to go to the moon for real, but clearly feeling it’s a little hollow with everything and everyone she’s left behind. That’s it – Cyberpunk Edgerunners. If you wanted a happy ending, you came to the wrong genre.
Edgerunners is a tight experience. It’s only ten episodes, and it uses every minute of its time well. It’s loud and crowded, but that’s part of the experience: it’s never rushed and it’s never stretched. For all its action and gore, it doesn’t fail to also build character. True, the vast majority of that effort is placed on David, who is the main character in just about every regard, but they also do some work with Maine and Rebecca that makes them more than one note each.
As for Lucy, she was a bit of a late bloomer. If I have any problems with Edgerunners, the biggest (which isn’t saying a lot given how high the quality bar here is) would have to be around Lucy. For the role they ultimately give her, serving as both the damsel in distress and David’s dream in wanting, out of love, to do what’s best for her in many ways as his mom sacrificed her life doing what was best for him? She stays the cold, enigmatic mastermind a bit too long. When we do get more of her story, her facts at least work out, giving her a grudge against Arasaka and establishing where she comes from and how she makes her way in the underworld, but for as naive as we’re supposed to believe she is in some scenes, she’s a fair bit too worldly in others, making it hard to get a read on her.
It wouldn’t be too bad, having a hard time getting a read on a character in a cyberpunk story (where betrayal and secrets are the air many characters breathe). It would even be okay for the leading lady and romantic interest of the main character, if what she was hiding was interesting and her persona grew in a sensible direction from that enigma. There’s been more than one dangerous dame in Cyberpunk with a dark secret. But Lucy is, ultimately… too vanilla for the way she’s built up. Her introduction is dynamite, wondering if she really bonded with David or if she was just playing him as a part of Maine’s gang, not being sure how much of what she revealed was her bearing her true self and how much was a calculated lie. But then she just sort of resolves easily, having this taciturn voice but otherwise acting as the pretty girlfriend. In essence, she horns in on Rebecca’s territory. Rebecca is sweet and earnest, even if her earnest side also includes letting loose her rage. Lucy was, or should have been, a contrast with that – calm, controlled, but probably more dangerous. Like a viper, as opposed to a loud but loyal dog.
Being somewhat disappointed that Lucy’s mystique was never really leveraged to make her scenes more interesting, letting David trust her 100% and as the audience never really doubting that his trust was well-placed, treating her grappling with the fallout of Maine’s last stand as a shaken girl… this is a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things. It’s just that I like to find something to complain about even for good shows and on that front Edgerunners gives me little to work with.
With that, I don’t think I can really offer Edgerunners less than an A+. Is it for everybody? Hell no. Could it maybe have gotten more philosophical as a lot of Cyberpunk stories do? Maybe, but it makes sense that David’s not really a philosophical character. That’s not this show’s method of operation, we’re more shoot-em-up than psychological thriller and that’s fine. But I do consider this one of the best-constructed anime I’ve watched. In the pantheon of shows to which I’ve given an A+ Grade, Edgerunners may not be the longest lasting or most masterful, but its nearly flawless execution of its premise and devotion to its vision mean that it’s earned the grade fairly.