The funny thing about creating a “living, breathing” video game world is how easy it is to unravel. You spend five years and $300 million creating an extremely compelling, compelling city, and then someone comes along and notices that every NPC crashes on the same street corneror that children are just strangely shrunken adults, or that the police magically appear when you commit crimes. It’s easy to break the illusion, especially in a game that promises a lot, is impossibly ambitious and is pushed out the door two years before it’s ready. That’s Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk: Edge Runners (opens in new tab)Netflix’s new anime spin-off based on the show has none of these problems. With no worries about immersion or reactivity, it rushes forward through the ultra-violent life of a random choom, in the process making Night City exciting and alive again.
Edgerunners keeps its cast tight: It spends most of its time on young street urchin David Martinez and the crew he eventually rolls with, including elite hacker Lucy, and Maine, the Hulk-sized mercenary who takes him under his wing. takes. It’s your classic dystopian tragedy: Angry, desperate for money and purpose in life, innocent David decides to lead a life of crime – he happens to do it with a military-grade cybernetic spinal implant that makes him faster than a bullet.
The animators at Studio Trigger, famous for shows like Kill La Kill, are gleefully indiscriminate. Edgerunners is full of heads exploding into thick shards of bone and brain and flabby flaps of skin. The two women with the most screen time, both hackers, easily get naked every time they perform a hack, and then a few more times for good measure. The animation has a sleek, modern smoothness, but its approach to violence and sex is as trapped in the 80s as Cyberpunk itself.
However, the ultra-violence is mostly fun, and at times bleak and obnoxious right when it should be – there wasn’t much of a chance this spin-off series would tackle big questions about the cyberpunk genre. But I was surprised by how much the little snapshots of life in Night City drew me in. Early on, David saunters through his block on his way to school with the precision of someone who’s stepped over the same drunk, dodged the same pile of vomit, and taken the same shortcut a thousand times; it immediately reminded me of leaving V’s apartment in Cyberpunk 2077, but it’s so much more effective to watch than to play.
In the show, a few seconds of David walking the same route shows his swagger despite the misery he lives in and wrapped in moments of background comedy, like random dudes in VR headsets going to town on cyber Fleshlights. When he hits rock bottom, walking that familiar route is a turning point: the moment he decides something has to change. In the game, leaving your apartment and seeing the same NPCs, the same bits of dialogue, just amplify the artificiality of the world – in the end it’s just background noise to dash past on your way to the next mission.
Heist scenes on Night City’s monorail made me want to fire up the game, jump on a train and watch the city go by through the window (I’m still bitter that 2077 doesn’t have a working subway system, though modders do their best to get there. add one). Even the slang I rolled my eyes in Cyberpunk 2077 – every bit of dialogue with choom or gonk or shorthand like company or preem—surprisingly it didn’t bother me in Edgerunners, maybe because I was watching it in Japanese with English subtitles instead of hearing those words spoken out loud. I was immersed in the world in a way that I couldn’t be in 2077, when I just wanted to fast forward through dialogue to be able to play again.
Even the sudden, unexpected deaths on the show hit differently. They drive home how shitty Night City is in a way Cyberpunk 2077 can’t, when you’re the one turning them on. Even knowing that, watching these characters die out made me want to search for vignettes in the city that I never found in my aborted few hours with the game in 2020.
The smartest thing Cyberpunk: Edgerunners does is build its story around the threat of cyberpsychosis, a psychological condition mentioned in the game but never really focused on. Cyberpunk RPG lore says that cyberpsychosis is the violent madness that results from too many augmentations, where the brain loses itself to body trauma and turns poor chrome chooms into deranged killers.
It’s the perfect kick-them-while-them-re-down twist for a dystopia: The only way for David to get out of the gutter is to increase in size and size of his body, but too much will cause that he his mind.
The characters eventually inject immunosuppressants to stay healthy, increasing their dosage as they replace more body parts. Edgerunners makes it clear that for characters like David and Maine, it’s not the drugs that are addictive: it’s the magnification and thirst for power that comes with it. This isn’t a particularly deep revelation (if you want a cyberpunk anime that really has something to say about the blurring lines between humans and AI, check out Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (opens in new tab)). But it’s still better than I expected from a show that starts with a cyborg dude emulsifying 15 agents to set the tone.
With the news that CD Projekt Red plans to overhaul its magically responsive cops and have an expansion next year, I don’t think it’s the right time for me to play Cyberpunk 2077. I hope a few additional patches will help Night City maintain the illusion that it’s a real place, and that the expansion’s stories will be able to shine without a cloud of launch day bugs getting in the way.
Edgerunners doesn’t exactly have a happy ending, but it first made me optimistic that Cyberpunk still has a city worth exploring.
0 Comments