Cyberpunk: Edgerunners boldly builds on 2077’s thought experiments

polygon.com:

There is nothing in life more expensive than being poor. It costs more than just money; poverty requires spending the one nonrenewable resource that everyone, in one way or another, prizes above all else: time. It costs energy and willpower. It consumes hopes, dreams, and the chance for opportunities that could otherwise lift someone out of bad circumstances. Worse yet, it can cost not only your life, but the lives of your loved ones and those closest to you.

David Martinez, the protagonist of Netflix’s excellent new anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, understands this intimately. The precarity of poverty, as well as the predatory nature of privatized health insurance, are the driving motivations behind his decision to become a cybernetically enhanced mercenary. It is those aspects that place the show as a whole more in line with Citizen Sleeper, one of this year’s most critically acclaimed indie titles, than it does with its own action-RPG namesake, Cyberpunk 2077.

[Ed note: This article contains spoilers for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Cyberpunk 2077.]

When audiences first meet David, he’s just a street kid from the Santo Domingo district of Night City, trying to make it as a student at the Arasaka Academy. The specter of poverty looms ever-present in David’s daily life, be it in the form of a malfunctioning washing machine that leaves him without a uniform, the armored gunships filled with private paramilitary paramedics that flank his commute to school, or his wealthier peers who scorn him for his background.

David doesn’t have much in the way of a stable home life. His closest apparent “friend” is a lecherous ripperdoc with an affinity for explicit “braindance” tech, and his only parent is his mother, Gloria, an