Sequels to anything successful are often more volatile, pushing the envelope in ways their predecessors did not and endeavoring to branch beyond the confines of what came before, as if they were hell-bent on taking more risks. As such, the best-case scenario is for a sequel with a polarizing, rebellious, rough-around-the-edges vibe compared to its progenitor. Worst-case, they’re a shameless cash grab of weaponized nostalgia. Anime Expo, where the first episode of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 premiered to a modest 6,000 people at the Crypto Arena ahead of its fall release on Netflix, was a secret third thing compared to how we expect sequels to typically wind up.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2’s premiere was hedonistically paradoxical: it’s both a sequel that expands itself outward, weaving a bigger, bolder, ambitious tale, while also feeling viscerally intimate and small-scale. What’s left is the start of a beloved anime series that’s far and away the most grounded we’ve ever seen Night City, while being the most consequential and bombastic. Translation: It was absolutely preem, choomba.
One thing that makes Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, animated by TRIGGER and returning writers Bartosz Sztybor and Masahiko Ōtsuka, stand out from its predecessor is that it doesn’t deign to resign itself to being a second part to previous protagonist David Martinez’s tale. It’s no follow-up, but an entirely different beast unto itself.
As if living up to Sztybor’s pre-premiere panel sentiments like Apollo’s gift of prophecy, if the first of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was a Michael Bay movie—flavoring Night City through a romanticized viewpoint of what it means to be a living legend through David’s eyes—Edgerunners 2 is a more grounded, Martin Scorsese-like depiction of the city that always wins. It’s a second glance that interrogates what sacrifice looks like, and most poignantly, posits what it means to be human in a commercialized, post-transhumanist world.
To get us there, CD Projekt Red and TRIGGER didn’t have just one main character. We’re following four new chooms from four vastly different walks of life, liable to traumatize us more than the last season did. There’s Weak Kingsley (Clancy Brown), an Edgerunner existing as a shadow of his former self; D (Nazeeh Tarsha), a Netrunner for the Snake Nation nomads with tons of unchecked emotional baggage; Roman Carax (Valeria Rodriguez), a young cinephile documenting everything wrong in Night City; and Talia Yang (Kimoy Lee), a chromed-out woman from the Corpo walks of life hanging with the gonked-out Maelstrom gang.
Despite having more proverbial plates to spin, telling a tale from four different perspectives coalesces in such an interesting way, even in this premiere, that the furthest thing from one’s mind is our previous heroes and where the surviving crew wound up. It’s this new group’s time to shine, and they’re all I can think about after having witnessed the first of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2‘s ten-episode second season on the biggest screen possible with an arena full of strangers.
It’s clear from the premiere’s opening moments that this is a love letter to cinema from CD Projekt RED and TRIGGER. Not the big summer blockbusters we’re used to seeing referenced to death, but cult classics and deep cuts that you catch yourself reminiscing over and carry with you throughout your daily life. It’s the anime equivalent of Léon: The Professional, and more pointedly, it’s giving City of God.
The same can be said for its anime aesthetics, which bring throwback designs like big hair vents and distinct, lanky silhouettes. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is a 90s-baby-feeling anime if there ever was one. It also takes viewers on one of the most strikingly, exceptionally singular visual journeys the medium has seen in a long time. Appropriately, the way in which we see this grotesque, gruesome, and utterly FUBAR depiction of Night City thus far is through the lens of Roman’s camcorder.
During his guerrilla documentary escapades around Night City, we meet the rest of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 ensemble in the most LiveLeak ways possible. Of them, Weak—an edgerunner who never quite became a legend but certainly lived in infamy as someone far more pitiful—was far and away the clear fan-favorite from everyone in attendance at Crypto Arena.
Regardless, the entire ensemble not only rivaled but eclipsed the intrigue of season one’s cast in a single episode, and left fans wanting more, even if that more meant not growing too attached to their fast favorites for fear of the traumatizing horrors Sztybor and Ōtsuka have in store for their characters and their audience.
Even though the premiere only gave a brief wink at how its quartet’s lives intersect through the diminutive perspective of Roman, the episode treats every minute as sacred in just over 20 minutes. No moment of lines in motion felt wasted. Each narrative beat fills in the gaps with a wealth of information, so you instantly get a sense of each character’s vibe and sit forward in anticipation to see how they interact when put in the same room.
Likewise, the premiere is chock-full of the most ultraviolent depictions of brutality. This cinematic look extends beyond the Roman’s grainy camcorder as he gallivants around Night City. The very corners of every shot in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2‘s already cinematic stage production take on an almost embossed, shiny celluloid texture, pushing its opulent and at times indulgent anime bedlam into absolute cinema. All the while, Trigger does what it does best, injecting adrenaline straight into the viewer’s eyeballs with a bombast of stylistic mayhem we’ve come to love from the anime juggernaut.
Zooming out from the content of the episode itself, it’s clear that the creatives behind Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 did not want to be subservient to sequel syndrome or guardrail themselves into what vision a second look at Night City could be, as evidenced by their initially turning down the possibility of a second season.
As fate would have it, there is a wealth of stories left in this universe to tell—a statement that’s even shown to be truer, not only in its collaborations with other games, but in its own prequel manga, which found a way to tell an interesting story despite readers already knowing how it’ll inevitably end.
And that’s honestly the part that makes Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 so exhilarating. It’s a new campaign in the world of Night City that doesn’t just shake the box of its first season and shake out reference fodder. It weaves a new tale. As someone who felt Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season one told the story I wished for in Cyberpunk 2077, the Edgerunners 2 premiere blew me away. It’s lush, breathtaking, and uncomfortably grotesque in a way that threatens to make you look away while beckoning you to look deeper into its abyss and witness how far it can unspool its characters as they desperately search for an answer to what makes us human in such a far-gone, insane world.
And that answer will hopefully live up to the blistering heights of the six thousand strong wanting more, as well as the rest of the series’ growing fandom when the anime returns this fall on Netflix.
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