Night City has never had much of a retention policy. Its residents arrive, bolt on as much military-grade hardware as their nervous systems can stand, and leave either in a blaze of glory or in several bin bags. So it is no great surprise that Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, which lands on Netflix on 20 October, has cleared the decks and brought in a whole new crew to be ground through the machine. Studio Trigger is back on animation duties with CD Projekt Red, and the ten-episode series is pitched as a standalone, which is either a kindness to newcomers or an admission that there’s nobody left alive from last time.
If the embed won’t play, the premiere-date teaser is also here on YouTube.
The headliner is Weak Kingsley, a former Edgerunner legend who has lost his cyberware and now lives in the shadow of his own reputation. In a city where your worth is measured in chrome, an Edgerunner without implants is simply a runner, and probably not a fast one. Alongside him comes D, a nomad netrunner and the sole survivor of the Snake Nation, who is out for revenge and has wandered close to some corporate secrets – which in Night City is roughly as healthy as wandering close to an open reactor. Talia Yang is a corporate-raised kid who has ended up running with Maelstrom, the gang that treats the human face as an optional extra. And then there’s Roman Carax, a young cinephile hunting for real stories in a city that has abandoned the cinema for braindances. His surname, one suspects, is a nod to the director of Holy Motors; his habit of filming the carnage rather than joining in makes him the first character in the franchise with a sensible survival strategy.
The family tree here is a long one. Before the game, before the anime and before the much-memed launch of 2020, there was Mike Pondsmith’s tabletop RPG, first sold in 1988 to players who had read Neuromancer and wanted to roll dice for it. Edgerunners was always the old gaming term for those who live fast on the wrong side of the corporations, and it is pleasing to see the label still attached to something people actually watch. The first series, directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi in 2022, did rather more than that: it sent players flooding back to Cyberpunk 2077 in such numbers that the game’s reputation enjoyed a resurrection worthy of a Trauma Team call-out. Few marketing departments get to claim they cured a video game by making people cry.
Behind the camera this time, Kai Ikarashi directs, with Ichigo Kanno leading the character designs. CD Projekt Red’s Bartosz Sztybor, narrative director on the first series, returns among the producers, as does Trigger chief Masahiko Otsuka. Netflix’s own synopsis promises family, obsession and legacy, which is marketing for a great deal of shouting followed by a funeral.
The earlier teaser, released in June, is also here on YouTube.
That 90-second teaser plays to Trigger’s strengths: the neon-acid palette, the slightly unhinged energy and enough property damage to bankrupt an insurance underwriter. The studio that gave us Kill la Kill and Promare, founded by the people who made Gurren Lagann, has never really grasped the concept of ‘tasteful restraint’, and on this evidence it hasn’t been taking night classes.
Anticipation is not in short supply. Edgerunners 2 came top of Anime Corner’s poll of the most anticipated shows of the autumn season, narrowly edging out The Apothecary Diaries – a contest between a show about a poison-tasting palace apothecary and a show about a city that is itself a slow-acting poison. The real question is whether lightning can strike twice. The first series left a good many grown adults sobbing into their noodles, and any sequel that skips straight to the fireworks without earning the tears will be found out by the same audience. Pack the tissues anyway. In Night City, the chrome may be optional, but the heartbreak comes as standard.
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