Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Is A Bloody Wild Ride
Video game adaptation must be really hard, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many bad ones. Appealing to a wide audience while avoiding decisions that would alienate the core fanbase seems to be a nearly impossible task. So many movies and shows either abandon the source material in favor of a more conventional story, or reduce everything down to its most essential parts; abandoning the nuance and complexity that made the world, characters, and themes unique and interesting.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunner, the anime series from CD Projekt Red and Studio Trigger coming to Netflix next week, has the latter problem - at least at first. The show follows David, an impoverished, cyberware-obsessed teen attending the prestigious Arasaka Academy. A Streetkid at a Corpo school? What a precarious position for our hero to be in! Edgerunners approaches the class themes of Cyberpunk 2077 with the subtlety of a marching band, ensuring that the uninitiated will have no trouble clueing into the different factions and social dynamics in Night City. The problem is those that are already familiar with the genre will feel like they’re being talked down to.
The first episode uses the simplest, most obvious Cyberpunk tropes to quickly establish the kind of capitalist hellscape we’re dealing with. When Trauma Team shows up to rescue David and his mother after they were caught in the middle of a highway shootout, a medic scans them and announces “They aren’t members, let’s leave them for the city meat wagons to deal with.” There are a lot of Cyberpunkian concepts that get introduced quickly and efficiently, but if you’re already familiar with eddies, ripperdocs, and braindances, there’s not much new here to sink your teeth into. By the time Franz Ferdinand
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