Cyberpunk: Edgerunners blows past Cyberpunk 2077 to be its own visually ecstatic ride

polygon.com:

As the names of its lead artists and production studio Trigger loudly announce themselves in splashy, Franz Ferdinand-scored opening credits, you more or less know what you’re in for with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, the anime spinoff of the troubled video game Cyberpunk 2077. There’s a funny redundancy in the title which feels like an encapsulation of the series’ ethos — in the world of the show, “edgerunner” is another word for “cyberpunk,” so in a sense this is called Cyberpunk: Cyberpunks. That indulgent doubling-down is indicative of what this all is: It’s Cyberpunk, but more. Better still — with the notable exception of all the jargon, knowledge of 2077 isn’t a price of entry for Edgerunners, which stands alone even as it folds in characters and concepts from the game.

Set in a nondescript year before the video game, its protagonist David Martinez and his overworked mother Gloria are at the bottom of the city’s ladder, with every aspect of their lives weighed down by exorbitant fees. David eventually has no other choice but to fall in with a gang of mercenaries — cyberpunks — after meeting a mysterious but sympathetic netrunner (a hacker, basically) called Lucy. He begins to run jobs in hope of making something of himself, and for something else that he struggles to define. Everyone’s mutual need to make something of themselves locks the populace into repeating cycles. But at least in this world, people are usually more honest about how they kill, immediate and bloody rather than the slow death of capitalism, which David experiences for himself.

Edgerunners goes all in on the vulgarity of Night City’s final boss version of capitalism, breaking down the various exploitative systems running their lives, from health care