Cyberpunk has been around for decades thanks to Mike Pondsmith’s tabletop game, but it gained popularity due to CD Projekt Red’s take on the universe. With the release of Cyberpunk 2077, the franchise has only been gaining more traction with comic books, an expansion, and even a Netflix anime series titled Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which brought good publicity for the franchise and increased the sales and the number of players on the game.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 isn’t a direct sequel to Edgerunners and instead is a standalone sequel. You can jump right into this series without worrying about not understanding what the hell is going on, but for the people who did watch Edgerunners, you’ll be handsomely rewarded for your time.
After being lost in the world of Night City and thinking you’re done playing the video game, Bartosz Sztybor can’t help but put his little magic into the story, which immediately makes you want to hop back into the video game and relive that experience with V and Johnny Silverhand. From the jump, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is incredibly different from its predecessor. As fantastic as Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was, it struggled with its pacing with all the characters it threw at you and its abrupt timeskip.
There’s four central characters that we follow in this story: Roman (Valeria Rodriguez), a 12-year-old boy who’s fascinated with film; Weak Kingsley (Clancy Brown), an Edgerunner who’s forced to retire when he survives a close call with cyberpsychosis. Talia (Kimoy Lee), a rebellious young girl that has mixed in with the wrong crowd and is trying to find herself. D (Nazeeh Tarsha), a netrunner seeking justice from the people who slaughtered his nomadic clan. Within the first two episodes of the show, we’re introduced to them and their dynamics with each other.
Their stories are separate, with Roman and D tagging along beside each other, and Weak and Talia, who have more in common than they realize. Both their stories intertwine, but as that happens, Sztybor still manages to make sure that the overarching story doesn’t take away from the individual story arcs that we follow. The story this time around leaves you engrossed because when the characters cross paths, it feels like it happens naturally.
Roman is a character that I’ll protect until the ends of the Earth. He understands how important film is, and I can tell he’d hate to see where our current world is heading with studio execs and creatives so fond of using AI for their projects. In Night City, Braindances rule the streets, but Roman says, “There’s no craft or soul in BDs.” There is not a moment where Roman isn’t filming what’s going on, whether it be a cyberpsycho attack or a woman performing acrobatics.
The beauty of Roman’s character is that you can see the effect cinema has on the people around him. From bringing them to tears as they’re able to relate the film to their past or finally being able to see the beauty in themselves. Roman is just a kid in a world that’s full of blood and murder, and yet, he’s somehow able to see the brightness at the end of the extremely dark tunnel.
Edgerunners 2 is a gutwrenching show, but Roman is the heart of it that tries his best to hold everyone together and have them connect in a world where there’s no hope and a lack of a happy ending.
While Edgerunners saw a zero-to-hero story take place with David Martinez, Edgerunners 2 sees that entirely flipped with Weak Kinsgley, formerly known as King. He suffers a cyberpsychosis attack, but thankfully, due to having Trauma Team Plat, it stopped Maxtac from taking him down. The unfortunate downside for him, though, was they had to strip him of all his chrome, and if he uses any cyberware again, he’s as good as dead.
People recognize Weak on the street and know of him from his Edgerunner days, but without anything to protect him, he’s a pushover. Weak is unable to fight back and is also unwilling to continue living. In the world of Cyberpunk, it shows how reliant people are on their cyberware to continue living and what happens when it’s taken from them. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners showed how the addiction to wanting extensive cyberware upgrades will lead to your death, and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 briefly shows how having that all stripped away from you also strips your identity and life away. There’s no happy ending, except Weak finds a reason to continue living. Avida (Cesili Williams), an old fling, and Talia, who’s supposedly his daughter.
Talia’s story is tragic, as since she was a kid, she hadn’t been dealt a fair hand. She’s run away from her corpo parents and has found herself hanging around the wrong people, such as Maelstrom, a gang that’s fascinated with extensive cyberware and is willing to upgrade anyone’s chrome (while they’re conscious). With Weak, she holds similarities that she doesn’t realize. She’s fully chromed out and is nearing the point where signs of cyberpsychosis may appear. Without Weak trying to reveal their lineage, he’s trying to protect her from a brutal end that he almost found himself in.
Talia later in the show mentions that she likes Roman, and personally, this comes from a place of her being thankful for him being able to show her what she really looks like. Until meeting Roman, she had never been captured before, but with his camera, it unlocks a whole new layer for her character that she can finally see herself in. There’s a beauty in what she does and in how she looks, which before was unrecognizable to her.
Although Edgerunners 2 has numerous points of view, the character that it feels like it centers itself around is D. He lost his entire clan, the Snake Nation, to a fire, and he’s been unable to let go of it. D wakes up with nightmares of it every night and is on a quest of vengeance to find everyone involved and make them pay for it. The problem with vengeance is that sometimes, it takes control of people who don’t have a clear head. It begins to go out of control, and D finds himself repeating the cycle.
A friend of his that we meet later on tells him that “revenge doesn’t fix everything,” and Edgerunners 2 shows how destructive revenge can be when you lose a sense of what you love. This show asks the question of if getting justice and vengeance is worth it in the end. If it will fix your problems or make them worse. A character towards the latter half of the show even asks, “Why is everyone so obsessed with revenge, anyway? Is getting revenge fun?” and this alone highlights how the theming of revenge is the crux for this entire story.
This urge for revenge gets further corrupted when he meets Capri (Brittany Lauda), a digital entity trapped in an Arasaka shard. This relationship and storyline immediately reminds you of V and Johnny Silverhand, but it sets itself apart, delivering a story that’s fresh and unique to Edgerunners 2. It further explores the lore that was built upon in Cyberpunk 2077, which the original Edgerunners didn’t do as much of. Capri serves a major part in this show, getting herself involved with certain characters, and despite being a digital entity, she’s without a doubt a standout alongside D.
Romance doesn’t play a massive factor in Edgerunners 2 like it did with its previous story. In Edgerunners, it was clear as day that there was a love story between David and Lucy while Rebecca also had romantic feelings for David. The only clear indication of a romance taking place is between Avida and Weak. Whatever they had between them in the past is something that Weak has been unable to let go. While he was in cyberpsychosis, he couldn’t stop seeing her. Avida is all he thinks about, and it’s clear that he’ll do anything for her.
There’s hints that there’s something going on between D and Capri, and even Talia teases Roman by calling him his boyfriend, but by the end of the show, it all reads off as platonic. Talia has her reasons for why she makes attempts at exploiting Roman, and although it’s an extremely odd direction to head in, it highlights the corruptive nature of Night City.
Studio Trigger remains one of the best animation studios in Japan, and they continue to prove with Edgerunners 2 why they’re held highly. Edgerunners 2 takes a completely different art direction that still feels familiar to Edgerunners but also fits in theme with this new story. It has this retro, 90s anime and VHS effect to it that feels like an old film that’s been found that we’re just watching.
It’s a visual feast that highlights the beauty of a city that only knows violence. While Edgerunners was filled with scenes that took place during the night, this standalone sequel highlights how gorgeous the city can look during the day and how lively it can be. Just like Weak, Roman, Talia, and D, Night City is its own character that every other character revolves itself around.
When Edgerunners first released, I couldn’t stop listening to “I Want to Stay at Your House,” and its effect within the show itself is powerful. CDPR and Trigger ensure that the music of Edgerunners 2 remains a vital and dominant part of the show. Rico Nasty finds herself on the soundtrack with “You Can’t Run From Me,” which was an indication at any time that shit was kicking the fan and that it was about to get chaotic. It felt ripped straight from a 2000s action movie. There were many other tracks that flowed with the momentum of Edgerunners 2 and played with the heartstrings, but as of writing these reviews, it’s difficult to pinpoint which exact tracks these were.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 has the slight advantage over Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, as it arrives with a narrative structure that manages to introduce all these new characters and keep you engrossed in their individual challenges that all come together by the end. The Edgerunners franchise is proof alone that more stories are needed within the Cyberpunk 2077 franchise and that there’s no limit to what Bartosz Sztybor can achieve. It manages to further connect itself with the rich lore from the game, which makes Edgerunners 2 a more fascinating story for fans of the game to get themselves lost in.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is everything you’d expect from a sequel to Edgerunners. It’s a bittersweet, brutal, bloody, and, heartwrenching story about how revenge can consume somoeone and how the violence and coruption that takes place in Night City can affect people, but also how connection is paramount and might be what saves our lives at the end of the day.
