Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

Name: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
Genre: Action, Sci-Fi
Released: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00
Rating: 8.62

サイバーパンクエッジランナーズ

8.62(697,869)

Rank#94

#180

ONA10 ep.Finished Airing25 min per ep

Dreams are doomed to die in Night City, a futuristic Californian metropolis. As a teenager living in the city's slums, David Martinez is trying to fulfill his mother's lifelong wish for him to reach the top of Arasaka, the world's leading security corporation. To this end, he attends the prestigious Arasaka Academy while his mother works tirelessly to keep their family afloat. When an incident with a street gang leaves David's life in tatters, he stumbles upon Sandevistan cyberware—a prosthetic that grants its wearer superhuman speed. Fueled by rage, David implants the device in his back, using it to exact revenge on one of his tormentors. This gets him expelled from the academy, shattering his hopes of ever making his mother proud. After witnessing David's newfound abilities, the beautiful data thief Lucyna "Lucy" Kushinada offers to team up with him, handing him a ticket to salvation. However, associating with Lucy introduces David to the world of Edgerunners—cyborg criminals who will break any law for money. Edgerunners often lose their lives, if the cyberware does not break their minds first; but in his fight for survival inside a corrupt system, David is ready to risk it all. [Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Recommendations

Reviews(20)

ReplicantFromRio

September 13, 2022

Recommended

One of the best animr ever. It's intense, full of action and emotion. The anime is an adrenaline injection and the same time there are emotional parts that made me cry. The animation is a masterpiece, studio trigger is incredible. The story is very surprising, you don't expect some things are going to happen with the main characters. Cyberpunk is a very unique genre of science fiction, and I have to say, this anime has all elements of a very good cyberpunk story. We have the social critics, the femme fatale persona, the nihilist characters, the rock music, thr hight tech - low life ambienceetc. The characters are not easy stereotypes, the are people like us, with flows and strengths. But it's a cyberpunk story, it's very difficult to resist the temptations. I think people will love it, there is a lot of slangs from the series universe to learn, but it will be a easy job to learn during the watch time. Cyberpunk Edgerunners is definitely an amazing show. I recommend.

AngryAlchemist

September 21, 2022

Every now and then, an anime will come along that walks across a tightrope. And, depending on which angle you view it from, it either falls off spectacularly, or miraculously makes it to the other side. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is one of those anime. And that’s because, at the end of the day, what you take from it will be highly dependent on how much you can connect with a work that is fundamentally struggling to maintain equilibrium. Or rather, wasn’t even trying to maintain it in the first place. Either because of its short ten episode run time, its roots as a spin-off to agame which is already a spin-off of a novel, or because of its various Triggerisms, Edgerunners isn’t really trying to be a complete package. It’s trying to get in, get out, and leave you with the message carried by its world, its narrative, and all the themes that accompany it. Does it succeed at this? The answer will differ from person to person, for it's a little complicated… Perhaps the greatest benefit to Edgerunners is how it uses its cyberpunk roots. When dissolved to its very core fundamental nature, the genre is essentially a dystopian view of the future in which entities - usually corporations but not exclusively so - have taken control of the world, in a sort of emblematic portrayal of late-stage capitalism gone berserk. Yet, when you examine how cyberpunk has been interpreted in pop-culture, rarely do we see a focus on the perspectives which are most largely affected by the suffocating nature of this socioeconomic oppression. We don’t see the perspective of the oppressor or the oppressed, instead we almost always view the world through the eyes of a bystander - a “third party”, one who usually has good intentions and wants to make the world a better place, but doesn’t really fit the lower or higher end of the socioeconomic ladder. Bladerunner and Ghost in the Shell are traditionally the biggest names in cyberpunk film history, and they are testaments to this - both feature characters which have more power than the average citizen, but despite that aren’t really active parties in the continued oppression of the lower class. Bladerunner comes close to commenting on this, but it muddies it by focusing on the oppression of Replicants rather than an entire social class (which, for various reasons, wouldn’t really work as a metaphor). Even Akira, which is probably the closest thing to Edgerunners on paper, barely counts as cyberpunk - it has that sort of imagery in the beginning of the film, but almost none of its themes relate to technology or the consequences of technological advancements. It just happens to take place in the future (relative to its release) with some cool imagery that has been very influential to the genre, but that’s about it, it’s almost entirely a psychological tale. That’s not to say that any of these stories aren’t valuable, they’re just different. This is what makes Edgerunners so compelling - it’s a cyberpunk show where the central focus is a cast of characters struggling to survive day by day thanks to the oppression of the society in which they live. David, the main character, is a poor dropout barely scraping by. His only way to fight against the system is to cyberize himself further and further, and even when he does eventually rise up from his roots as a bottom feeder of society, he can’t sustain the lifestyle that allows him to be free. As if out of a Shakespearean tragedy, every time a character finally manages to get out of the place they’ve been forced into, there’s a consequence. Every time a character chromes themselves up further, they become less redeemable, less sane, less human. The most dystopian aspect of the world of Night City isn’t its rundown neighborhoods, shadowed alleyways, or crooked thieves waiting to bleed you dry, it’s the fact that every time you manage to make something of yourself, you either end up a disfigured inhuman monster, or worse off than when you started. The dramatic irony of the show is all too palpable - David’s only form of liberation is in the very technology that created the society around him, the same society that allows corporations to profit ad infinitum, and the same corporations that make the back-alley deals that give the edgerunners their jobs. It mimics real life in a way that’s all too, well, real - you spend all of your time trying to make something of yourself, that you either end up forgetting who you are in the process, or burnout entirely. The edgerunners accept the potential physical and mental consequences of fighting against the system to an almost ridiculous degree, because they hate where they’ve started to such an extent, that they don’t stop to ask if it’s worth where they’re going. This sort of subtlety or thematic depth isn’t something that’s typically found in your average anime, but it's especially surprising coming from Trigger, a studio which has largely rested on its laurels since Little Witch Academia in 2017, and hasn’t really had this sort of thematic framework since Kill La Kill all the way back in 2013. Some might say that giving too much credit to Trigger would be a mistake given that so much of the subtext of Edgerunners is inherently part of the pre-established world it inhabits, but I would say that’s a ludicrous notion. It’s not like the show barely acknowledges these aspects or that the way they are used is an afterthought, they’re given a lot of care and attention and are put front-and-center. The writing quality in terms of characterization and character dynamics is surprising, as it's one of the greatest assets that Edgerunners has. Trigger has somehow been able to make a cast which feels perfectly non-anime yet anime at the same time, down-to-earth yet larger than life when needed. If you’ve seen even a decent amount of anime, you’ll probably come to appreciate how real to life some characterization feels, either within the context of the Cyberpunk universe or within our own. There are so many examples of this: When a particular tragic event happens in the beginning of the show, David does not have an overdramatic response meant to elicit emotions within the viewer. When comrades-in-arms die in front of others, nobody makes a lengthy ordeal out of it, they simply accept it for what it is: a part of the social contract they’ve signed when becoming edgerunners. This type of characterization is done so frequently that I can honestly see this being off putting to some people; the show almost denies the emotional catharsis of overdramatizing traumatic events. It could come off as if someone forgot to create a scene or two, if it wasn’t so clearly intentional. And yet, at the same time, this is a quality that could be easily overlooked or underappreciated, because it's one of the more subtle aspects of the show. The central cast in general is something I really grew to appreciate, because while none of the characters here are great, they all manage to be likable without coming off as completely unrealistic. In such a harsh world where stabbing the back of your friends would leave you with a hefty profit, this crew of thieves and bandits somehow finds a perfect middle ground between the idealism of anime friendship and the realities of living in a dystopian future. One of the reasons why I can appreciate the simplicity of the cast so much is because the character designs are just that good. Given that the talents of Yoh Yoshinari, the designer for Little Witch Academia, were used to create these designs, it shouldn’t be too surprising. Yet this sort of visual dynamic isn’t something that’s felt completely captured by a Trigger show since Kill La Kill, and now Edgerunners has picked up the torch and ran with it. Every character looks visually distinct and detailed, but not overly complicated. No one character looks remotely similar to another, and they're all so readable that you can get a general idea of who these people are just by looking at them. It’s honestly insane just how much this has been knocked out of the park, because to put it in caveman terms, Yoshinari did not have to go this hard. For all of the good the show does though, there are definitely a lot of negatives. I mentioned how great the character designs were, but honestly the overall presentation is a mixed bag. The visual quality of the show usually straddles somewhere between very good and great, but there’s some parts that are just not up to par. Particularly, the action direction came off as very uninspired for the majority of its run. Yes, it’s Imaishi, yes, he’s a legendary action director, but the worst here has no sense of space or flow, and a lot of the best here just feels like Trigger spinning its wheels - which is ironic, given that the only impressive action sequences involved characters driving cars. In contrast, the slower more quiet moments of self-reflection, where characters are given time to breath, have comparatively consistently great directing. It’s a confusing contrast in a show that really needed to exceed on both fronts to sell its narrative. Thankfully the visual aesthetics of the show, including the fantastic color work, can usually make up for this, but there’s some other odd choices. The music selection is something I came to appreciate more and more as time went on, but even then I couldn’t get over how poorly placed some of the tracks were. Certain scenes are downright obnoxious because of this, and the final scene is perhaps the most bizarre in terms of the soundtrack not really meshing with the tone. It seems to have gone down well with the majority of fans given how much praise “I really want to stay at your house” has received, but while I understand the sentiment, it just didn’t work entirely. I’d also be remiss if I failed to mention how uniquely bad episode 5 looked. It’s an episode that plays to almost none of the strengths of the show - it has little animation despite being one of the episodes that needed it most, the colors are mostly dark, there’s a lot of really bad shot composition where the camera is way too close to characters’ faces to cut down on animation, and the action can be really hard to follow. There’s a scene that just focuses on David’s face for a full 18 seconds, and the only thing that happens in that entire time is that the camera starts zooming in on him more and more, despite the fact that it was already too close to begin with. It’s so baffling how much that episode was screwed up compared to the rest of the episodes, that I imagine this had something to do with production constraints, which is odd given the short episode count and the long production time. The biggest problem with Edgerunners however is that the second half is a significant step down from what came before. Not in the sense that you might expect, it’s not as if the quality of the show becomes worse. Moreso, it just stops trying. No longer content with exploring its ideas or concepts in meaningful ways, it resigns itself to being the action schlockfest that everyone expected it to be to begin with, no longer burdening itself with the weight of trying to be something greater. By the beginning of episode 6, the curtains call, and you can see everything that is going to happen in the next 4 episodes onwards. I don’t want to seem disingenuous and imply that the first half is some great sophisticated masterpiece; it isn’t. But what it is is earnest: an earnest attempt at exploring themes and concepts in a format which relays the Cyberpunk world’s overwhelming cynicism, all while simultaneously wrapping it in a neat package filled to the brim with pop sensibilities. Yet just as the show goes past the halfway mark, it gives up on doing almost anything of note. I could see a counter argument being made that the ending solidifies everything the show setup thematically, and that because of that the second half isn’t worse at conveying its message. This doesn’t make sense as a defense, given how overtly obvious the outcome of the story is long before it happens, and given how insignificant its time frame is relative to the rest of the second half. What’s really baffling is that even if you don’t care about any deeper meaning or subtext, the plot just starts to lose momentum really fast. Up to episode 5 we’ve been with David every part of the way, we’ve seen him grow as a character, we’ve seen him struggle, we’ve seen what he’s been through. All the sudden there’s a timeskip and he’s a significantly different person. We don’t know how he got there, what he did, how he became so confident. It’s not that the transformation is unbelievable, but rather that it’s something we needed to see for ourselves. The more Edgerunners focused on making its main narrative epic and powerful, the worse it became. We start to lose focus on why we originally cared and instead are supposed to get behind an incredibly generic plot about stopping an evil villain. The show was always going to go in this direction for its finale, and that in and of itself is fine. It’s an easy and sensical way to end the story. But what is absurd is how much something so mundane takes away from the show's focus and runtime. Now would be as convenient a time as any to blame Netflix for only greenlighting 10 episodes, but really I don’t understand why the writers had to go in this direction in the first place. The first set of episodes give you the sense that things might actually follow a fairly logical progression despite the series’ short runtime; it's not until episode 5 that things start to get worrying. If your story can only fit within a certain timespan, don’t make it the story for an incredibly limited series. Four years after Devilman Crybaby, Netflix has found another show which will capture the hearts and minds of its general audience, but dissuade others and leave them entirely unconvinced of its merits. At the very least, Cyberpunk will certainly be a less controversial or divisive event, but it certainly feels like a spiritual successor to what has come before. I might have come off as overly harsh to the series, but despite how it may seem I can’t say I was disappointed with the final product much at all. What I got from it was a level of intrigue I wasn’t expecting in the slightest, and I’ll carry its lessons, ideals, themes and world with me for a long time. Its value in breaking away from the pre-established norms cannot be overstated, and I cherish it for that. Whether you can learn to love it or not is dependent on how much value you can get from something which is not even remotely trying to smooth out or hide its various rough edges.

JizzyBizzy

September 13, 2022

RecommendedFunny

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is easily one of the greatest anime ever made. I knew this was gonna be good – it just had to be! An anime made by my favourite studio set in a sci-fi urban setting in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe??? Sign me up! Obviously I had high expectations, but this surpassed all of them easily. I’ve been waiting for this for two years straight but I had no idea that it was actually all gonna pay off like that. Let me explain why it’s so great and why you should go watch it immediately (after it gets dark) Animation and art style – 10/10 This issimply the most gorgeous anime ever produced. I’ve never seen any piece of media look this good. Every single frame in the show is wallpaper-worthy. Not most frames, all of them. That’s because the backgrounds are meticulously crafted by the Trigger workers, who I am convinced are just as genetically-enhanced and inhuman as the characters in the show. I’ve always been a lover of city skylines, particularly at night, and it’s even better if they are futuristic, but this brings it to a whole new level. Most textures are extremely photorealistic to an extent I’ve never before seen blended well into an anime. Add on top of that the fact that all lighting is with beautiful vibrant neon lights and top it off with excellent fluid cartoony animation a la Trigger and you have yourself a delicious serving of orgasmically beautiful art style and animation. Oh yeah, and the fight scenes are lit, too. Bloody and gory, too. Trigger was the perfect choice for this as the studio has been particularly good with colours, but they’ve really outdone themselves here. The character designs are great, too. This looks like Ninja Slayer, if it was given a gigantic budget and it took itself seriously. I love the transitions, too. They are perfect for this internet-fueled world and make you appreciate just how truly little time you need to spend in a scene to take it all in. As expected with Hiroyuki Imaishi’s work, it’s as fast paced as it needs to be. At no point is there even a hint of a feeling that it’s dragging on. I found myself actually pausing just to appreciate the beauty of each shot and the amount of detail that went into making it. I gotta say that you MUST watch this at night in the dark to fully appreciate the beauty and the neon colours. Watching this in a bright room with a dim screen is just an insult to the show and the team behind it. Experiencing this in the dark will definitely show you why I couldn’t possibly give it any less than a 10/10. Music – 10/10 The visuals aren’t the only thing that really stand out as excellent in this series – the music was something unique. It has a decent OP and ED, but what I’m really interested in is the background music. It always fitted the scene perfectly. Some extremely sad melodies for the end of episode one, cool pop rock for the cyberpunk city, epic battle music for the fights and some really unique tracks. The music that plays when they’re in a bar is exactly like what you would hear in a real late night bar in the west. I gotta say I didn’t expect to hear (Hungarian? Polish?) rap or some head-slammin’ pig-squeelin’ death metal in an anime series…an anime by Trigger in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe with insane production values. We truly live in the strangest timeline, huh? Story – 10/10 It’s not just the outside of this anime that’s beautiful, it’s also great on the inside. The basic synopsis goes something like this: David Martinez is a troubled highschooler who lives with his mom in poverty, struggling to pay the bills for his school gear or even the public washing machine. He gets picked on at his high end school for things that aren’t really his fault but continues to struggle on because he knows he’s doing it for his mom, who singlehandedly raised him by working all day every day. It is not explicitly stated, but is strongly implied that she works as a prostitute or something equally shameful in a world where sexual satisfaction comes with the click of a button and placing of the VR set. One day their normal life comes to a halt when a gang warfare on the highway ends with a car crash, injuring him and his mother gravely. From then on, he vows to take revenge on those who’ve wronged him and rages against the decadent city that has abandoned him by acquiring a robotic spine that allows him to travel at super speeds for a brief period of time, in exchange for exhausting his body and slowly turning him mentally unstable. He meets a girl that pickpockets for a living who forces him to join her criminal gang. One thing leads to another and before you know it, he’s done some pretty fucked up things. What’s genius is that at (almost) no point in the show does he have much of a choice. It is difficult to blame him for what he becomes when you consider how little control he ever had over his own life. Similar to a show like Breaking Bad, this anime shows how the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. The moral dilemmas in this show are amazingly well made. Should he let himself be viciously bullied or should he fight back in an unfair match? Should he stay loyal his friends in the gang who provide him with money and necessary medication or spare the life of the father of his bully, that wants to bring him back to the academy? Should he give himself in to the cops? Is there turning back from the criminal life? How long can this gang life last and does he have any future now? It all leads to a very intense and satisfying ending. Characters – 9/10 David is just an example in how to write a good protagonist. He goes to an elite academy, but isn’t an elitist or a smartass, he is a delinquent but not an asshole or a dumbass, he’s poor but not a lowlife, he’s talented but not overpowered, he’s awkward but not cringy, etc. Above all, he’s a believable teenager, period. Something that's hard to come by as far as most anime are concerned. Lucy gives off some very intended Blade Runner vibes and has an interesting role throughout the entire show and backstory towards the end. Even someone like Maine who seems like a simple brute early on is surprisingly nuanced. Overall – 10/10 This was something else. An amazing experiences from beginning to end. Every episode was a 10 and went by extremely quickly, every moment looked absolutely stunning, every action scene was blood-pumping, every edit and plot turn was on point. There are very few shows that I know are gonna be in my top 5 just from watching episode 1. There are also very few shows that force me to watch till the end in one sitting, even deep into the night. Kudos, Trigger has done it again. They’ve once again forced me to change my anime rankings. I don’t know how I could possibly give this anything less than a 10 or how anyone else could, either.

jaliscojackson

September 22, 2022

Not Recommended

At first, I thought this show could’ve benefited from an extra episode or two. Then, by the halfway point, I figured it could’ve benefited from having no episodes at all. I spoil a tiny bit in this review, but just a little bit from the first two episodes. Cyberpunk Edgerunners takes place in a world where everything is monetized to hell, bastardizing every social interaction and invading even the most private space, leaving crime as the only true avenue left for survival for many. It almost made me believe it was set in the modern day. Unfortunately, any meaningful criticism of capitalism stops right there, makingthis show a complete failure in the realm of the cyberpunk genre, whose entire purpose is to critique capitalism. Visually, this is Trigger’s least interesting production. There are so many static shots where the composition and colours are an afterthought at best. Even the coolest action scenes suffer from lethargy, like the show is tired of itself. Like it expects us to marvel at the concept, at the promise of delivery, without actually delivering. I’ll say now that I’m strongly biased against the neon cyberpunk aesthetic. It makes me sick to my stomach, and I can’t put a finger on why, but even then, I can see that this possesses none of the visual flair of Kill la Kill and the Little Witch Academia short films. Sonically, this has to be the worst soundtrack I’ve heard in a long time. The show seems proud of its song choices. It blasts them at every opportunity it gets. You will get sick and tired of the soulless garbage it pushes into your ears. I guess I should give Edgerunners points for representing the death of music under capitalism. The worldbuilding? Don’t get me started. Edgerunners loathes worldbuilding. It hates the idea of looking inwards at itself, of looking at humanity, which is the very core of science fiction (of most stories, tbh). Getting cybernetic augmentation makes you go crazy. Why? Why in the hell does getting strong robot arms installed slowly turn you into an insane person? This seems like an important question to answer, but Edgerunners takes it for granted. The show more focused on being a fun romp, which is not entirely a bad thing. I wouldn’t mind a cyberpunk story that goes hard into the fun and leaves the rest to implication, but this show is boring as dogshit, so it doesn’t even fulfill that promise. Edgerunners is satisfied with the surface. It shows us everything we expect of a cyberpunk story, and nothing more. And it seems to have a distaste for doing even that. Honestly, my biggest problem with the show is the lack of humanity. David’s mom’s death feels less like an actual event in David’s life that he needs to get through and more like a catalyst for the plot to move forward. It’s fine for the event to be the latter, but it’s not fine that it lacks any of the soul it pretends to have. David seems more invested in Lucy, who he meets for the first time immediately after his mother’s death. I’m not saying the guy has to mourn for the requisite 20 episodes, but it doesn’t even feel like he’s had a life before the first episode of the show. None of the characters do. The dynamic between David and Lucy makes for the most boring romance this side of Sukitte Ii na yo. It’s not just that “newbie kid gets taken in by hot girl and shown the ropes” is played the fuck out. If it was just that, there wouldn’t be a problem. Taking established tropes and executing them strongly is a great way to tell a story. It’s that Edgerunners does not care about its characters in the slightest. Once Lucy comes to terms with her feelings for David, she instantly loses whatever character she had. Then the story tries to fool you by having Lucy infodump her entire backstory to David on a big rock outside the city, as if backstory is a substitute for character. Her backstory also doubles as boring last-second worldbuilding that adds jack shit to the story. You don’t understand her better after learning her backstory. It’s the kind of tragic shit you come to expect from stories like this. In a way, it’s fitting for the entire area immediately outside the city to be completely barren wasteland. It’s almost like a metaphor for the fact that the writers didn’t think about anything beyond the scope of these ten episodes. At the end of the day, a lackluster cyberpunk story is the perfect evidence for the failure of the made-to-order anime production model. I’d be surprised if the staff had enough time to even work on this. It’s ironic. A story with its roots in criticism of capitalism ends up falling prey to the system it mocked so relentlessly. Edgerunners is satisfied with the same surface level critiques of capitalism that its investors are. It can’t go deeper because if it did, it would scare the investors off, funding would get pulled, and the staff would go hungry another day. So instead of a work of art, we get a 10 episode walk in which we’re taken sightseeing like tourists, along a road where we are made to look at familiar events and plot points that we’ve seen a hundred times in a hundred other stories, like deaths and first kisses, and we’re asked to feel emotions at these scenes because we felt emotions at the ones we saw in the past. TL;DR Cyberpunk Edgerunners is not a good anime. It’s a glorified checklist made to satisfy investors.