Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

Yesterday, Netflix released yet another video game anime adaptation, though this one with a lot of baggage attached. That would be Cyberpunk Edgerunners, ...

The animation and character design here from Trigger is stunning, and the writing from the CDPR team who scripted the series is excellent as well. Everyone involved here, Netflix, CDPR and Trigger knocked it out of the park with Edgerunners. She introduces him to her crew, and his ability to withstand the installation of a stolen augment makes him invaluable to the team. I really felt like my time with the show was enhanced by the game, though I think you could probably also make the argument that the game could be enhanced if you watched the show first. The show is set in Night City and while it does not directly cross over with the game, that’s somewhat misleading to say. But through it all, you could tell that at the very least, the world they’d built was an interesting, engaging one, and that’s what Edgerunners is exploring.

Created by Rafal Jaki, the show follows David (Kenn/Zach Aguilar), a high school student who lives with his mother, Gloria (Yurika Hino/Gloria Garayua), in ...

Another time jump occurs, and we see Lucy on the Moon (is that a “Lucy in the Sky” reference?), which is a tourist spot, if it wasn’t clear before. So, Faraday apparently double-crosses Militech again and tells David to show Arasaka that he is the only one who can wield the Cyberskeleton by killing the oncoming soldiers. Since Lucy and David departed on a sour note, he doesn’t check up on her for a while and instead heads into the mission to get the Cyberskeleton. He thinks that he is built differently, as if he’s a “chosen one” character, and he is not going to meet the same fate as Maine (or any of the cyberware users). According to his agreement with Arasaka, Faraday kills Kiwi because she knows about the Cyberskeleton and starts to proceed towards the Arasaka HQ. Faraday uses Lucy to get David into the Cyberskeleton. Lucy is apparently in retirement because she hasn’t shaken off Maine and Dorio’s death, and the things about David’s past that she saw in ICE. Meanwhile, Arasaka wants Faraday to eliminate everyone who knows about the Cyberskeleton and bring in the netrunner (Lucy), who has been killing Arasaka’s netrunners whenever they get close to finding David’s identity. He keeps thinking that he could’ve done something to stop Maine from going over the edge, despite knowing the inevitability of it all. Maine is so formative to his growth that he doesn’t get to shake off the fact that his cyberpsychosis was inevitable. Something that is set up from the very first frame of “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” is the concept of cyberpsychosis. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that his romantic relationship is one of the reasons for David’s cyberpsychosis.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (Season 1) is a beautiful, bombastic homage to the world of Cyberpunk 2077, with an endearing love story at its center.

But David has no regrets before dying, as he has accomplished what he wanted to: he dies a legend while ensuring that Lucy is safe and is able to go to the moon, as he left her with half of the funds from the gig. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a beautiful, bombastic homage to the world of Cyberpunk 2077, with an endearing love story at its center. While David is tricked into doing this, he is heavily unstable, teetering on the edge of cyber psychosis, and his immunosuppressants are on the verge of running out. Meanwhile, Lucy is being dangled by Faraday in front of Arasaka executives, and David arrives on time to save her. David is also on his way to experiencing cyber psychosis due to the heavy use of the Sandevistan, along with other mods/implants in his body, which becomes more mechanized as time progresses. However, David has a heavy burden to carry: he’s haunted by the deaths of loved ones and needs to move up the ranks of edge running to make a name for himself. Cyberpsychosis is a mental illness that occurs due to an over-reliance on cybernetics, which drives the user to madness and leads to the irrevocable loss of humanity. Lucy is an asset for Arasaka, as her neural net contains key information about the old net from her net running stint for the company. After failed attempts to sell the cyberware for money, David decides to use the implant himself, which acts as a catalyst for the events of the series. Will David take the self-preservation route, or will he race toward the finish line in an attempt to become a Night City legend? As David is no corporate sellout but someone who does not fit into the accepted notions of society (also due to economic disenfranchisement), he has no option but to become an edge runner or mercenary outlaw. David Martinez is a street kid in Night City who lives with his mother and is geared towards becoming a corpo at Arasaka (a megacorporation with a hold over the city’s prime resources).

For those who aren't aware, “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” was released on Netflix yesterday. If you are one for gritty, dystopian science fiction told through ...

Overall, “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” looks like it will be one of the better Netflix originals released this year, but I’m not sure if it will get the attention it is expecting. This is apparent from the first few minutes of the first episode. As someone who had previously played the highly customizable and unique video game “Cyberpunk 2077,” I found this series to be just as enjoyable.

When is the Netflix anime series Edgerunners set in relation to Cyberpunk 2077? Here's all the clues you might've missed.

[subscribe now](http://radiotimes.com/magazine-subscription?utm_term=evergreen-article) and get the next 12 issues for only £1. [video game release schedule](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/2020-10-07/video-game-release-dates/) for all upcoming games on consoles. [Radio Times Gaming on Twitter](https://twitter.com/RadioTimesGames) for all the latest insights. Cyberpunk 2077 is connected to Edgerunners in plenty of different ways, but it also stands alone as its own story. In episode 4, the main characters visit Afterlife, a club that is still going strong when Cyberpunk 2077 the game kicks off. Wakako Okada is another character from the game that shows up in Edgerunners, albeit for only a very brief cameo appearance. But for now, the Edgerunners anime is very much the centre of attention. So the show is taking place before the game, making it a prequel of sorts. However, despite that disconnect, you will spot familiar locations and background characters in the show. Swing by our hubs for more [Gaming](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/) and [Technology](https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/) news. And there you have it! With this anime being billed as a standalone based around a new character, you shouldn't expect the game's protagonist V (or key companion characters like Johnny Silverhand and Jackie Welles) to show up in the series.

Netflix's new Cyberpunk Edgerunners anime series is a big step up from the video game on which its based — and the early reviews are extremely impressive.

In many ways, this is the Cyberpunk story the Cyberpunk game wanted to tell and couldn’t." It’s still got plenty of flaws but it’s a far cry from the disastrous video game we were served up almost two years ago. It's important to note, the show doesn’t follow the protagonist of the 2077 video game but instead focuses on a new character named David (Zach Aguilar). All of this early buzz is pretty exciting because while Cyberpunk 2077 wasn’t quite the experience gamers were promised, there’s no doubt that the world of Night City is ripe for further exploration. [Cyberpunk Edgerunners](https://www.tomsguide.com/news/netflixs-cyberpunk-2077-show-looks-seriously-awesome-heres-your-first-look) is here, and it's seemingly aiming to atone for the sins of the controversial video game it’s based on. The series is enjoying some seriously impressive early reviews just 24 hours after it hit the big red streaming service.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners puts more focus on Cyberpsychosis, a mental illness that comes with Cyber implants.

David always believed that he had better tolerance than everyone else, and this disbelief of David was used by Arakasa and Faraday, who wanted to test their most advanced implant - Cyber skeleton - on the boy. David always thought that he was special in some way or the other, and he was constantly reminded of that by his known ones. Also, let's not forget that his endurance was a bit higher than the others. Some Cyberpsychos have to deal with split personalities; some become burglars and bandits, while some are seen becoming compulsive liars. One such term was Cyberpsychosis, a condition that many characters from the show had to suffer from, including the main character, David. Those who deal with this condition are known as Cyberpsychos, and they slowly start to lose their senses, ultimately leading them to their own destruction.

The new Netflix anime series by Studio Trigger and set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077 has a lot to say, and it reminds us of the 2022 indie video game hit ...

In centralizing the precarity of poverty, the pernicious predatory nature of privatized health insurance, and the importance of communities and friendships as support systems at the heart of David’s story, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners lives up to the potential set forth by those four guiding principles, culminating in a series that is not only visually scintillating but expands on the promise of Night City in ways that Cyberpunk 2077 never quite dared to. look to David not only to pull his weight as a member of their crew, but as a comrade in arms. All of this comes to a head the following day, when David is told by the hospital that his mother died due to a combination of her injuries from the crash and the physical strain of her work. To be clear: the Sleeper is emphatically not a gun-toting cyberpunk mercenary, just as David is not a digitized indentured servant on the lam, but what these two strange bedfellows share is a common appreciation for the bonds of friendship forged in the face of adversity. Aside from their shared focus on the physical and mental toll incurred through poverty, David’s and the Sleeper’s plights are similar in another aspect: the strain of maintaining an artificial body. In Citizen Sleeper, players assume the role of the eponymous “Sleeper,” a digitized human consciousness housed in an artificial body. [set within the same shared universe](https://www.polygon.com/e/23113399), Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Cyberpunk 2077 could not be more different in their respective depictions of poverty and social precarity. When David’s mother is taken to a run-down hospital for treatment, David is denied his request to see her, being told by the presiding physician that visitation rights are not covered by his insurance plan. David regains consciousness in their overturned car just in time to watch helplessly as Trauma Team — the series’ in-universe equivalent of privatized health insurance — passes over his mother’s motionless body to recover their actual client: a corporate policyholder. David doesn’t have much in the way of a stable home life. Worse yet, it can cost not only your life, but the lives of your loved ones and those closest to you. When audiences first meet David, he’s just a street kid from the Santo Domingo district of Night City, trying to make it as a student at the Arasaka Academy.

So it is with great excitement to proclaim that Studio Trigger's collaboration with CD Projekt Red is exactly the salvation this franchise needed. FEATURED: CD ...

If anything, it's a way of living that he fights for in spite of the hardships, trying to figure out how to do it right. The way that phone calls were written and visualized on screen led to line reads that sounded more like dictation of text-to-speech than a natural conversation. The only time the performances seemed to suffer, whether as a result of the directing or the script, was in one of the last episodes. The vocal performances across the board are on par with the vocal talent in Cyberpunk 2077, a blessing considering how vulgar and dark the dialogue can get. This is to say nothing of Lucy, the deuteragonist and romantic partner to David, who is the catalyst of David's most important lesson, one that doesn't get learned easily. [Edgerunners presents itself as a character study](https://gamerant.com/cyberpunk-edgerunners-2077-possible-connection-night-city/), watching as the city and its dogmatic narratives of success and worth build up and chip away at David, his friends, and his relationships. And in 2077's defense, such a plot point may not have been necessary for the story they were telling, where the protagonist was a "Solo," a cyberpunk working mostly alone. The more implants and the less flesh, the quicker the mind begins to go. Life is life, and being a merc in Night City is just like any other job, but it leaves one feeling as if they've actually accomplished something more meaningful, as macabre as the means are. Its story was one that sought to strike at the heart of what being a Cyberpunk means; it's about legacy, dreams, and living in spite of capitalism's venomous miasma. The only solution is to become a Cyberpunk himself, chip up some experimental hardware in his body, and start carving a name for himself. [that have continued to plague the game](https://gamerant.com/cyberpunk-2077-npc-building-fall-glitch-bug/) and its reputation since launch, Cyberpunk's story was one that resonated with players, and not just because of Keanu Reeves (though that helps).

Netflix's "Cyberpunk: Edgerunners" brings viewers to Night City, and there are more than a few Easter eggs to the hit video game "Cyberpunk 2077."

Seeing as the Studio Trigger anime is a prequel to "Cyberpunk 2077," one might assume that the series might feature a cheeky cameo from V, Johnny Silverhands, Jackie, Panam, or any of the game's beloved characters. The character provided V with several main and side quests in "2077," so it isn't surprising that the underground criminal crosses paths with Martinez. "Cyberpunk: Edgerunners" makes excellent use of the larger world created by Mike Pondsmith and CD Projekt Red. After years of anticipation, the anime series has finally been released on Netflix, making it the first non-gaming project in the larger "Cyberpunk" multimedia franchise. In Episode 4, "Lucky You," Martinez visits the iconic Afterlife club, where he brushes shoulders with the owner Rogue, who was once Silverhand's ex-lover. [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/09/14/netflixs-cyberpunk-edgerunners-is-absolutely-incredible/?sh=7bcf04cd5285) as "absolutely incredible," the writer described "Edgerunners" as "a beautiful, haunting realization of Night City" that captures the authenticity of the CD Projekt Red game. "Cyberpunk: Edgerunners" is set before "Cyberpunk 2077," though the Netflix series isn't specific as to how much time takes place between the two. ["Cyberpunk 2077"](https://www.looper.com/296119/small-details-you-missed-in-cyberpunk-2077/) proved to be a massive success, selling over 13 million units during the first two weeks of release (via [Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/cyberpunk-2077-sales-top-13-million-2020-12)). Adapting Mike Pondmith's tabletop game of the same name, the studio released "Cyberpunk 2077" in 2020. Indeed, one of the highlights of the Netflix anime is how it recreates the world of Night City for the small screen. "I've always loved cyberpunk as a genre, but always found it difficult to create as an original work," said Studio Trigger CEO Masahiko Otsuka in a 2020 statement (via Perhaps the biggest instance of cross-promotion was the studio teaming up with Netflix to work on an anime series set in the world of "Cyberpunk 2077."

For those unaware, Cyberpunk 2077 is a futuristic action RPG that takes influence from the cyberpunk genre. The game is set in a dystopian future where ...

[Cyberpunk: Edgerunners](https://twinfinite.net/2022/09/10-cyberpunk-2077-characters-we-want-to-see-in-edgerunners/)? Players who bought the game on the PS4 and Xbox One got a free upgrade to the next-gen version. Cyberpunk: 2077 is currently 50 percent off on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1091500/), Playstation, and Xbox.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is out, and it seems the adaptation is an unmitigated success. It wasn't long ago fans learned Netflix and Studio Trigger were ...

– [IGN](https://www.ign.com/articles/cyberpunk-edgerunners-review) [prev](#6) – [GameSpot](https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/cyberpunk-edgerunners-review-a-hugely-successful-netflix-anime/1900-6417956/) [prev](#3) [next](#5) [Cyberpunk: Edgerunners](/category/cyberpunk-edgerunners/) tips the scales in a significant way toward proving that, when the right people are behind a project, the streaming service can be a force to be reckoned with in the anime sphere." Cyberpunk Edgerunners is a phenomenal series, taking the potential of CDPR's Night City and running wild with it in a gory, sexy, strangely sad and compelling action series that I would recommend to absolutely anyone (uh, anyone over 18, that is)." But, in addition to the repetition on all those game's names, there's also a funny redundancy in the title of the animated series itself which feels like an encapsulation of the franchise's ethos – in the world of the show, "edgerunner" is another word for "cyberpunk," so in a sense this is called Cyberpunk: Cyberpunks. Its story was one that sought to strike at the heart of what being a Cyberpunk means; it's about legacy, dreams, and living in spite of capitalism's venomous miasma. [Cyberpunk: Edgerunners](/category/cyberpunk-edgerunners/) is good. The 10 episode series from Studio Trigger (Star Wars: Visions, Promare) arrives on Netflix on September 13, and for an anime series taking place in the world of a video game, it has no right to be this good." "The 10 episodes of Edgerunners run anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes each, and the show does a nice job of fitting a satisfying amount of action, storytelling, and world-building into each chapter without feeling overstuffed. "Despite myriad technical problems that have continued to plague the game and its reputation since launch, Cyberpunk's story was one that resonated with players, and not just because of Keanu Reeves (though that helps). With a slew of hits under its belt, the team at Studio Trigger gave hope to millions that And of course, ComicBook's own [Evan Valentine had nothing but love for the release](https://comicbook.com/anime/news/cyberpunk-edgerunners-review-netflixs-best-anime-series-to-date/).

The funny thing about creating a "living, breathing" videogame world is just how easily it comes unraveled. You spend five years and $300 million trying to ...

But it's still better than I expected from a show that begins with a cyborg dude emulsifying 15 cops just to set the tone. This is not a particularly deep revelation (if you want a cyberpunk anime that truly has things to say about the blurring lines between humans and AI, watch In the game, leaving your apartment and seeing the same NPCs, the same bits of dialogue, just reinforce the artificiality of the world—eventually they're just background noise to sprint past on your way to the next mission. They drive home how fucked up Night City is in a way that Cyberpunk 2077 can't, when you're the one instigating them. [Cyberpunk: Edgerunners](https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/7706533/type/dlg/sid/pcg-gb-9505765395252113000/https://www.netflix.com/title/81054853) (opens in new tab), Netflix's new anime spin-off based on the show, doesn't have to deal with any of those problems. [crashes into the same street corner](https://twitter.com/screencuisine/status/1336878002618073089?s=20&t=6hu1IN3FCyLLieoUEyaQLg), or that children are just [weirdly shrunken adults](https://twitter.com/tanisthelesbiab/status/1344370157804654592), or that the police just [magically appear](https://www.pcgamer.com/cyberpunk-2077-cops-are-such-dirty-cheaters-they-dont-even-need-cars-to-catch-you/) when you do crimes.

Netflix released the first season of its new anime series, “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” yesterday. The show — debuting with 10 episodes — is based on the ...

The show is an immersive experience into the world of “Cyberpunk”. Viewers do not have to play “Cyberpunk 2077” before watching the anime adaptation. Last year, Netflix released “Arcane,” a 3D-animated adaptation of “League of Legends.” While the show received critical acclaim, some non-gamers found it hard to enjoy. Netflix released the first season of its new anime series, “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” yesterday. The highly anticipated series strongly appeals to players of the Cyberpunk game. February’s “Uncharted” being the most recent example, although it does have a 90%audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.