ANNOUNCED in 2012, the videogame Cyberpunk 2077 would take eight years to be developed and then released. In that timeframe, with each latest reveal and trailer, marketing drove the anticipation and hype to astronomical levels, especially after actor Keanu Reeves joined the project.
Developed by the Polish video game company CD Projekt Red, 2077 was sold as the next step in gaming and video game storytelling.
It was a game sold on a single core idea: players would enter the fictional world of Night City, where humans have begin to augment themselves with high-tech cybernetic implants, and be and do anything they wanted.
When the game finally released in 2020, almost entirely unfinished, riddled with game-breaking bugs and glitches, well, “disappointment” might have been the understatement of the year in the world of videogames.
CD Projekt Red, known for the storytelling in their The Witcher games, failed to tell the story they wanted, as the core story of 2077 was marred beyond recognition by the broken gameplay.
Now, two years later, developed by Studio Trigger, a premier Japanese animation studio, CD Projekt is finally able to tell the story they wanted with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
For an adult audience
Set sometime before the events in 2077, the 10-episode limited series follows the story of David Ramirez (Zach Aguilar) in Night City, as he goes from being a high-scoring student to being on the wrong side of the law as an “edgerunner”.
Along the way, Ramirez falls in love with Lucy (Emi Lo) as he attempts to navigate the dangerous world he is suddenly thrust into.
As an Edgerunner – mercenaries equipped with black market cybernetics – Ramirez employs a “Sandevistan”, a military-grade implant that is gruesomely fused into his spinal cord.
The equipment – when cerebrally activated – gives its user superhuman reflexes and the ability to slow down time.
While first popularised in films like The Matrix, under Studio Trigger, the Sandevistan sequences in Edgerunners burst into eye-popping, neon visual spectacles that push the limits of the anime format in ways not often seen.
Another aspect that distinctly makes the series unique is the language; for once, it is not recommended to watch an anime in Japanese.
Night City is a melting pot ethnicities, and this is best reflected in the English dub of the Edgerunners. In the Japanese dub, the Japanese voice actors speak Japanese with Japanese accents, while in the English dub, the voice actors hail from different cultural backgrounds.
The latter group’s characters have their own accents and personalities, and the English voice actors bring their A-game.
Edgerunners also boasts over-the-top violence that firmly cements it as adult-oriented. Limbs are constantly blown off in gunfights. Punches and kicks look as though people are being hit by freight trains.
Like squeezing a grape between our fingers, heads in Edgerunners are just as easily obliterated by bullets and preposterously-sized rockets fired from robot arms.
Action sequences are kinetic and animated in obsessive detail, as Studio Triggers walks the razors’ edge of balancing what is human and what is a piece of machinery melded into stumps that were once human.
A city on fire
Under the vision of Studio Trigger, Night City is a cesspool unlike anything seen in 2077. Everyone is walking around with some form of cybernetic implants. Residents of the city escape the gutters they’re in either through crime or VR adult fantasies.
A running gag is Ramirez walking his usual route, and a man can be seen wearing a VR headset and performing thrusting motions, in broad daylight, in public.
Night City is a city where a majority of the population are looking to escape their poverty, but as unwitting tools for the ultra-rich to trample and abuse, no is able to leave. The city is a grave, drowning in neon-bathed light.
Accompanying Ramirez and Lucy’s story are an eclectic set of characters who play into the “edgerunning” story, each with their own distinct personalities and story arcs – there’s an underage Edgerunner girl that runs around shooting dual machine guns – that tie into the series’ overarching tragedy.
Though Ramirez’ Sandevistan and the other characters’ reliance on various high-tech cybernetics provides them with superhuman abilities, the cost of using such a demanding hardware on their mind and body results in a condition called “cyberpsychosis”; they go crazy.
Throw in the politics, corporate espionage and militancy of weapons manufacturers such as the Arasaka Corporation and Militech International, and the tragedy of “lesser folk” such as Ramirez and co. are amplified tenfold.
There is no happy ending for most of the people living in the fictional, dystopic future that Edgerunners takes place in, and in some way, perhaps it mirrors mankind’s future trajectory in the real world.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is currently available for streaming on Netflix.
