After seeing the in-game ad for edgerunners hamfistedly shoved in I finally just decided to watch it. Overall I was really disappointed come the end. I was hoping that there would be that Trigger magic that would take the mostly emaciated punk of Cyberpunk 2077 and make something more out of it, but while the first few episodes were fine, it ended up feeling like there was nothing there. Honestly it feels like Darling in the Franxx where Trigger was just there to animate someone’s story with close to no creative freedom over where the plot goes
The anti-capitalist, anti-establishment nature of the punk in Edgerunners doesn’t go any deeper than as set dressing that creates the motivations for the characters but is then left behind. David is deeply wronged by the system that exists in Night City, but nothing is really done with it other than setting him further down the plot.
The story feels like it’s just retreading what the game already did. It’s just a retelling of V’s story but without the Relic and instead an even less nuanced look at cyberpsychosis. David tries to better his lot, like V, after living in the absolutely bleak Night City and the city ruins everyone for even trying. Jackie dies in the heist, Evelyn’s fate is worse than death, Dex is unceremoniously executed in a dump, V is left with a Relic that’s killing her and rewriting her personality. David similarly tries and ends up watching his adoptive family shatter multiple times with sad pitiful ends.
I get that it’s just basically the personal story of David and the people he meets and David is one flawed motherfucker that only wants to see other’s dreams through because he’s left traumatized after his mother died, but there wasn’t even a sad washed up rocker even talking about how the system itself is what fucked David.
It felt no different than those anime movies made for Dead Space years ago. Just a tie-in product.
TL;DR I was hoping for a proper Trigger show and I just got more of what the game already did.
The best anti-capitalist messaging in the game was in the background anyway. The TV interview with the guy who had his arms repossessed does more in like 3 minutes to express the new dimensions of hell opened up by techno-neoliberalism than all of Johnny’s drivel put together.
Randomly walked past a couple of Trauma Team guys talking about how they needed to get new brain monitoring implants or lose their job with one guy being like “this is fucked” and the other going “well I have nothing to hide.” The setting being a dystopia is fine if you’re primed to look at it but otherwise it’s just sorta going to get missed.
A lot of the cyber-psychosis missions do that as well.
Some guy went nuts because a corp sold him a mech shop but nothing in it, so he had to sell the shop to the corp at a loss so they could ‘evaluate the tools in it’, then buy it back at like 3x the price
Some actress went insane because she was actually poisoned as part of a tv show then had a ton of implants stuck in her when she was unconscious
A man lost his mind because the hacks who sold him some implants didn’t give him medication to treat the early stages of psychosis but instead decided they were going to try and chop him up and sell his parts
They do a good job of coloring in what an ancap hellworld it is
I think that’s why I like CP2077 despite its many flaws: the flavor. It’s not the best or most original cyberpunk world out there, but it is definitely the most sharply tongue-in-cheek. I’ve talked about the bleakness before but I think the appeal lies in how it’s so absurdly bleak that it comes back around to being funny in a fucked up way. Of course the powers that be in America would rather make most Americans eat literal kibble like dogs, so that most remaining farming infrastructure can be devoted to the gene-engineered wheat they use to make the treated ethanol fuel for gas-guzzling cars. And of course its name, CHOOH2, is just a marketing gimmick and the actual chemical compound is both proprietary and far worse for the environment than standard ethanol is. It just piles on this absurdity and plays it completely deadpan, and it spits out broken people who are incapable of analyzing the hell that they’re in. All they can aspire to is being remembered after they die horribly. Most people don’t even get that.
It’s a shame they don’t even try to make hopeful stories out of it. The best anyone gets out of the entire IP is probably Lucy, who achieves her dream of going to the Moon thanks to David. Sure, David was definitely right about it being a bleak as fuck labor camp and she’s probably going to get vented into space in her sleep as collateral damage on a cyberattack, but she did the thing! Alternatively, if you go the Don’t Fear the Reaper route for the ending, where V solos his way into Arasaka HQ and fucks it up so badly he effectively acts as an accomplice to Yorinobu’s deliberate efforts to destroy the company. There’s a newscast in the ending that talks about how shitty Arasaka is doing and how the other corps are eating their lunch. Then V goes to space, achieving his goal of being a high-roller merc and completely failing to grow as a person throughout his entire story.