Polygon Review Praises Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 as Strong Return for Netflix Anime

Night City makes it easy to confuse becoming a legend with having a life worth living. Mercenaries replace their flesh with increasingly powerful chrome and take gigs they have no business surviving. They hope somebody remembers their name after it all goes to hell. The first season of Netflix’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners turned that bargain into a devastating romance. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 continues the anthology series on Oct. 20 and finds something far more hopeful in the same brutal world.

Over 10 episodes, director Kai Ikarashi and the teams at CD Projekt Red and Studio Trigger deliver another spectacular collision of corporate cruelty, dangerous technology, and people pushing past their limits. The ingredients are familiar, sometimes a little too much so. Still, an extraordinary ensemble and the relationships that grow among its members make this return to Night City richer, more rewarding, and simply better.

Night City’s loneliest people find each other

Edgerunners 2 first looks like it will repeat its predecessor. It opens with a heavily augmented man succumbing to cyberpsychosis after a gig goes south, and he goes on a grisly killing spree. Another rampage? Another warning that too much chrome is always a bad idea? This time, the man at the center of the carnage has a life to navigate afterward. Once a celebrated edgerunner known as King, Weak Kingsley (Clancy Brown) emerges as a shell of his former self. Frail robot limbs have replaced his hulking arms, and they make C-3PO look buff. A burnout who lived, instead of getting obliterated by Militech, gives a familiar setup a compelling new direction.

That shift matters because the first season of Edgerunners, for all its visual brilliance, left me emotionally frustrated. Lucy beckoning David Martinez across a simulated lunar landscape still puts a lump in my throat. But I believed in their happiness far more than I believed in his compulsion to endanger it through ever more extreme cybernetic augmentation. Season 1 focused so tightly on the doomed romance that it left little room to invest in the supporting cast. Even Maine’s breakdown in “Girl on Fire” delivered some of the series’ most spectacular animation without that investment behind it.

The sequel gives its ensemble room to build relationships that are equally worth caring about. Weak’s story is only one of four initially separate threads that writers Bartosz Sztybor and Masahiko Otsuka weave together. The 12-year-old filmmaker Roman Carax (Valeria Rodriguez) records Weak’s violent breakdown. He has the soul of an artist and believes braindancing has made most of Night City kind of braindead. His attachment to handheld cameras and his lack of chrome feel quaint. He wants to capture something real, and Night City offers plenty of real things that can kill him.

Roman tracks down Maelstrom, a gang obsessed with extreme cybernetic augmentation. At their hideout, he sees Talia (Kimoy Lee), a young woman who is more chrome than ‘ganic flesh, dancing across wires suspended inside a tower. Her movements are enchanting, but the brief encounter leaves Roman at the mercy of gang members who want to force implants onto him. The vengeful netrunner D (Nazeeh Tarsha) attacks at the perfect moment and saves him.

D becomes a much more promising subject for Roman. His entire Nomad clan was wiped out, and he lives only to see those responsible pay for it. He recognizes something in the kid’s compulsion to keep filming. “You want footage? I’ll get you footage,” he promises.

The exchange starts a friendship that becomes one of the season’s greatest strengths. Roman has found someone whose exploits demand to be documented. D has found someone interested enough to keep looking at him.

At first, the central characters seem to belong to entirely different shows. Weak is a battered veteran trying to exist after the life that defined him has fallen apart. D hunts the people who massacred his nomad clan. Talia embraces the power chrome gives her, while Roman follows his camera wherever it leads. A call from Weak’s old flame, Avida (Cesili Williams), pulls him back toward old relationships, just as Roman’s encounters start linking the younger characters.

Each intersection gives the characters another reason to care about someone beyond themselves. The relationships show different sides of each character and gradually raise the emotional stakes. As Roman grows closer to D, and eventually Talia, he becomes embedded in the stories he wants to record.

The season also makes explicit connections to the first Edgerunners. They establish that the story takes place after that season, but likely before the events of the game Cyberpunk 2077. The finer details of the timeline don’t feel forced. They build on an already expansive world in meaningful ways.

When Weak’s story crosses Talia’s, he sees in her the same intoxicating pursuit of power that nearly killed him. Chrome can make someone feel extraordinary, and sometimes they really are. David Martinez’s exceptional tolerance for cyberware was central to his rise. But that doesn’t make anyone invincible. Everybody has an upper limit, however fiercely they insist otherwise. Both Edgerunners seasons care deeply about what people can withstand when it comes to cybernetic enhancement. David’s cautionary tale looms large: How far will a person go before it destroys them?

By pairing Talia with someone who has already crossed that threshold and survived the consequences, the writers give the familiar warning new emotional weight. Weak’s concern for Talia comes from bitter experience. Brown grounds his performance in the exhaustion and wounded pride of a man who remembers being powerful, while leaving room for tenderness and wisdom. Knowing exactly where somebody is headed doesn’t mean knowing how to make them stop.

Capri gives Edgerunners a wild new spark

D’s loneliness takes a stranger turn when he and Roman track down an experimental chip. It introduces him to a digital entity called Capri (Brittany Lauda). Their first encounter is a struggle over control of his body. What emerges is an impish ghost companion that only D can see, and her presence expands the visual possibilities of nearly every scene she enters. Edgerunners 2 renders her as splashes of neon pink and green, with jagged shapes constantly morphing across the screen. Against the gritty, realistic backdrop of the series, Capri looks as though she wandered in from another show entirely.

Ikarashi and Trigger make her visual incongruity part of her appeal. Even standing beside D, she seems to follow different rules. There’s something of the Cheshire Cat in her playful menace. Her childlike whimsy makes her delightful company, and it also makes her alarming, given her ability to manipulate technology on a wide scale with crackles of red lightning. By the end of episode 3, you can’t help wondering whether she’s the most dangerous thing to ever exist in the history of Cyberpunk.

Yet Capri brings out something unexpectedly joyful in D, who regularly crashes at Roman’s home throughout the series. Early in episode 3, Roman films D drinking as he tells his young friend about the nightmares he has every night. His dead friends visit when the stars come out. Tarsha’s low, rough delivery gives D’s grief a heaviness that makes his later delight with Capri all the more striking. Roman’s camera captures both the haunted man and the person capable of absolute joy. That range gives their friendship real substance beyond the convenience of pairing an action hero with a cameraman.

The music is just as essential to that emotional range, and it’s as good as season 1’s iconic soundtrack. The needledrops repeatedly carry exhilaration and sadness at once. An action sequence can feel momentous while loneliness or desperation stays close to the surface. I came very close to tears at multiple points during these 10 episodes, mostly thanks to the songs. The soundtrack makes moments of connection feel precious amid all the noise and violence.

Those moments give Edgerunners 2 its remarkable warmth. In many ways, the sequel repeats the elements and general trajectory of season 1: secret technology, corporate exploitation, the seductive promise of power, and the danger of believing you’re special enough to survive it all. But the relationships among these characters give the chaotic world meaning. Their joy can be reckless, ridiculous, and fleeting, and it still matters so much.

Night City is still a terrible place to look for a future. Even so, Edgerunners 2 makes the desire to find one feel irresistible. Beneath all the spectacular violence is an earnest affection for people who still want to love, create, connect, and see what tomorrow brings. Becoming a legend might make a good story, but finding someone worth sharing a life with makes this one unforgettable.

Source: Polygon