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This definitely is one of the best anime in recent times and you should watch it! With that out of the way, this is my conclusive review of: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
As a series it did not only fight an uphill battle, but a losing one. Even with Trigger as the animation studio, not a lot of people I know hoped for much because the game it’s based on is basically the punching bag of the internet in terms of catastrophic game releases. But with time, CDPR tried to pull their game and reputation out of the ashes with bug fixes and patches. Nowadays it certainly ... is playable and while you could have a great deal of fun when the game was released, there were a lot of bugs that just broke your immersion and in some instances even made emotional moments not feel right because of absurd bugs. That’s not the case anymore. The game just runs better, many of the immersion or game breaking bugs are fixed and in classic CDPR-fashion you can craft your ending by how you play the game.

So, why do I keep talking about the game instead of the animated series? Well, we did not get any good video game adaptations for a long time, until recently. Castlevania, Arcane and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners proved that it can be done - just not in the way it was done before. Some video game adaptations used to take one possible route through the game, use some of the dialogue and basically make an abridged version of it and put it in the cinemas. Leaving you with a replay of a game where you just don’t have any choices. Making it arguably just straight up worse. Some tried to make their own thing with an adaptation, but didn’t succeed, because they did not fully understand what the game and its world were about. The team behind Cyberpunk, the game, did have an amazing world, full of detail; meticulously crafted and polished. Although the game didn’t reflect that in its early stages. So, the team behind Edgerunners had a good basis to build on, took their time to understand the setting, its intricacies and then made their own version. They didn’t just take a lot of the characters that players of the game already knew and made a fan service series out of it; they created their own set of characters, all of which really felt like actual characters in a dystopian cyberpunk world. The series also features gore, nudity and explicit language, which didn’t feel out of place at any point, but be warned if you planned on watching this with your family.

With the trailer Trigger presented to us, I expected the show to fall short in the story department while giving the viewer a lot of action with nice animation, but I certainly was wrong in assuming that. [SPOILERS for the first episode and general outline of the show]
The show starts off with us watching a hulking man geared up with cybernetic implants and weapons built into his body mercilessly slaughtering several of Night City’s policemen before being stopped by MaxTac, a special ops division focused on stopping the rampage of cyberpsychos. What exactly those are and how they become like this is explored further in the show, but I guess you can somewhat piece it together. In this scene however, we aren’t really watching that man directly, instead we are seeing a braindance together with our protagonist. A braindance is a projection of someone’s memories together with their emotions and sensory experiences that are being played back to you. The show doesn’t explain too much to the audience about this, which is both a positive and a negative. Information that you as the protagonist are supposed to know is not being repeated back to you, for the sake of not making the dialogue feel forced or unrealistic. That’s the only thing, apart from some little easter eggs, where you have an advantage over others if you played the video game. So now, what’s the deal?

In a dystopian future full of rotten people in a rotten world, we are following David Martinez, who is a good student at the renowned Arasaka Academy, but is struggling for money. For this fact, he is looked down upon by his classmates, all of which were born into rich corpo families, while he is a street kid whose mother, Gloria, is trying her best as a paramedic to offer her son the education that she feels he deserves. In a recurring theme of David feeling like he needs to live and fulfil other people’s dreams, he follows his mother’s advice, until a certain accident takes place. After this, his struggle for money becomes even greater and greater and so his frustration rises more and more. He struggles to sell an implant his mother left him which could bring him a few months worth of figuring stuff out, but after a bout with one of his classmates, he decides to have this implant installed instead of selling it. One thing leads to another and he finds a group that can offer him money and a purpose, should he be able to prove himself. In an intense rollercoaster of emotions we follow this group through their successes and hardships, concluding in a spectacular finale.

It is not without fault however. This is very mild, but necessary, criticism for a show that can without a doubt be labelled as an overachiever in all other aspects. This show feels a bit cut short, especially in its exposition. With an agreed up amount of episodes, the show has to take at least some sorts of shortcuts, but decided to take it in the first episodes. You are supposed to care for a character’s death within the first episode, but that just doesn’t work in the short amount of time given to the viewer. You can imagine its impact for the character that is afflicted by it, but cannot feel it yourself. What is done well though is the impact it had on everyone else: none. Night City doesn’t care about you, there are no words of condolences from bystanders and that is made very clear. With just one exception that you will experience if you decide to watch the show. But let me also make one thing clear: if the one criticism I have for a show is that there just isn’t enough of it, it sure as hell is a damn good show.

Story: 9/10

The animation, imagery and symbolism in this series is truly an outstanding feature with lots of passion and attention to detail. Fight scenes with swift movements are choreographed smoothly while carrying heaps of momentum resulting in impactful blows, be it hand-to-hand combat or gunfights. In every fight scene you have multiple characters moving in sync with each other and rarely get the feeling of someone disappearing and reappearing out of nowhere without expecting it. Every shot and blow has only one purpose: to blow the opponent’s brains out in the most graphic fashion possible. But it is not only the action that gets all this attention. The lighting, facial expressions, colour palette and again, detail is just amazing. Cars are driving over imperfections in the roads, which you cannot only see, but hear. And that’s only one thing I can remember off the top of my head.

Animation: 10/10

You, as well as our cast, are not just thrown from action scene to action scene, but actually get some breathing room as well. Our protagonists get to share experiences and thoughts and bond with each other, with most of it just flowing naturally. Scenes are happening on a whim, but don’t feel out of place in the slightest. Everyone in our main cast has their own past and motives, which is perfectly reflected in their appearance, actions, expressions and way of speaking. They get time to develop, which is such a significant factor for making the audience just care that much more if anyone does eventually pass on to the afterlife.

Characters: 9.5/10

The setting this series is presented in is just extraordinarily fleshed-out, nuanced and bold. You are presented with a gross world full of selfish people, social inequality and people dying left, right and centre of hunger, curable diseases and non-fatal wounds, just because they cannot afford proper healthcare. While others at the same time reach never before seen lifespans and run around at inhuman speeds, performing impossible feats, fully packed with cybernetic implants. This society reaches the lowest of lows and highest of highs at the same time. While some are sitting in the streets, enjoying a braindance and getting jerked off by a device linked to their braindance-headset, others are living the high life, residing in suites towering above the city, taking trips to the moon and working for big corporations, figuring out how they can exploit the residents of Night City even more. The atmosphere doesn’t end there though: People talk with actual slang used in this city that just felt like a natural development in language. Many other shows that tried this just strung together pseudo-technical and futuristic sounding phrases, disturbing the flow of dialogue, making it hard to understand or just straight up nonsensical and having you cringing in your seats, dumbfounded by the sheer absurdity of the words muttered by these characters. Still, there are bits and bobs of dialogue that are silly and unintentionally make you laugh at times, the vast majority of it has a natural flow and won’t make you raise an eyebrow.

Setting: 10/10

The well composed soundtrack with the best bits of the game and a hand selected portion of songs results in a new score purposefully crafted for this series. I am truly impressed by the overall ambience and emotion this music carries. This certainly is the best Trigger ever had to offer for an anime. I’d even go further and say that not only the music, but the whole sound design is up there with the best of the best. The choice of background music was outright genius and really set the tone for the show. The sheer diversity of genres ranging from EDM, to rock music, to country, to techno and back, is thoroughly splendid while also fitting in every scene from start to finish. I, as a huge audio guy, was more than satisfied with just this, but even the sound effects are intertwined with the action in a way that just feels right. Big impacts feel big, fast movements feel fast. You hear background noise in a way that almost feels too real for an anime. Tires screeching, people talking, mechanical noises, music playing from where it should and not just overlaying the whole audio track from all directions all the time. It really is something.

Sound Effects: 9.5/10
Music: 10/10

This is a standalone that is truly worthy of the initial hype the game generated. What actually rose from the ashes was not only Cyberpunk 2077, but the trust people put in CD Projekt Red. Studio Trigger also showed that they are still able to deliver their A-game, after a recent history of more mediocre shows.
The impact did not only reach that far though. After the show’s release, Cyberpunk 2077 reached the top 10 concurrent players list on Steam. There is already a ton of fanart featuring mostly Lucy and Rebecca. Cosplayers are making costumes featuring their favourite characters. There are tons of positive reviews and the show is among the best rated shows on Netflix.

If you are still wondering if you should watch the show: YES! Just do it! For everyone searching for an adult anime, this is it and will be one of my top recommendations for people wanting to get into anime.

Scores:
Story: 9/10
Animation: 10/10
Characters: 9.5/10
Setting: 10/10
Sound Effects: 9.5/10
Music: 10/10
Overall: 10/10

For those interested: I watched the show in Japanese with English subtitles and I played the game for 100+ hours prior to watching the show, but that was quite a while ago and I actually went back to it after the most recent update for 30 hours or so.