Wuthering Waves X Cyberpunk: Edgerunners opens the 3.4 update with a beautifully meaningful story that sees Edgerunners Lucy (Emi Lo, Neverness to Everness) and Rebecca (Alex Cazares, Fallout 76) arrive in Lahai-Roi with an old enemy in pursuit. Rover (Jane Jackson, Arknights Endfield) and several other familiar faces will have to band together to solve the mystery surrounding them and help them find their way home safely.
I have had high hopes for this collaboration for a long time. Kuro Games does a great job of putting character first, a trait that goes perfectly with the key element that made Edgerunners so loved. On top of that, CD Projekt Red has shown great care in past collaborations. Lucy became a guest character in Guilty Gear Strive last year, and it was clear there that they found someone who was going to care for the character. Despite my high hopes, my expectations were exceeded at nearly every turn.
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Wuthering Waves X Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has big impact and meaning.
The biggest hurdle the update manages to avoid, and the one I thought most likely to derail the proceedings, is how well it handles the first encounters between the two worlds. The writing manages to strike a good balance between making its characters suspicious enough that they don’t feel stupid for just going along with an outlandish premise, and bogging the opening down with overly lengthy explanations. A convincing number of questions are asked, and convenient narrative tools like Lucy’s netdiving Lahai-Roi’s archives help circumvent the rest of the explanations.
While clearly not holding any canonical place in Cyberpunk 2077 lore, Wuthering Waves X Cyberpunk: Edgerunners delivers a story with enough impact and meaning that one would suspect that no one told that to the writers. The events of the original Edgerunners series are addressed and handled with the greatest of care. And how the story follows up on those events feels fantastic and meaningful.
As one would assume, Lucy stands at the center of the plot. Pursued by a nightmare Tacet Discord that assumes the shape of the notorious Adam Smasher, it is her pain in the wake of the original series that serves as the central fuel to the story’s fire. In between battles with TD corpos, Lucy slowly opens up to Rover as the duo visits a Somnoire version of Night City.
The story gives Rebecca a chance to shine on her own.
The pacing of Lucy’s process as she unravels the emotional knot left in her heart is fantastically done. Paired with incredible writing and voice work by Lo, the character’s biggest moments are gut-wrenching and beautiful all at the same time.
Even as Wuthering Waves X Cyberpunk: Edgerunners lets Lucy process her grief, it elevates the story further through its use of Rebecca. Despite being a fan-favorite character in the series, she never had much time on screen. The narrative makes the fantastic choice to separate the two edgerunners in the second act of the story, giving Rebecca a chance to shine on her own. Pairing her with the likes of Rover, Lynae (Elsie Lovelock, Anno 117: Pax Romana), and Sigrika (Maya Lindh, Final Fantasy XVI)allows fans to learn a lot about the character’s personality through plot beats that are frequently uplifting, while still bearing some melancholy to them.
The path players take as they weave between story sequences further embraces the cyberpunk aesthetic. Hackin’ mini games and high-speed chases pull the story fully into Night City’s world. The only downfall is a couple of annoying, but not overtly troublesome glitches that can distract from the moments. Plowing through solid obstacles on your bike, or watching characters interact with objects that never loaded, happened occasionally, with distracting results.
The ending keeps the recent streak of tear-jerkers alive.
While minor technical hiccups distract, the eye-popping beauty of the cyberpunk metropolis is never harmed. Every shot of the futuristic city looks gorgeous. Whether walking between shops at street level or gazing out over the cityscape perched on a balcony, the city is as capable of taking your breath away as it is of ruining your life. It’s sometimes hard to understand why such locations are depicted as being places people will flock to; a few of these views could almost make me consider it.
Despite how hard it is to talk about without spoilers, I must address Wuthering Waves X Cyberpunk: Edgerunners‘ ending. There is no shortage of tears being shed these days in the Wuthering Waves fan base, and this ending keeps the recent streak of tear-jerking finales alive. Painful and beautiful, the final scenes go places many will be shocked by as it wraps up its journey in the best way possible. The choice of location is particularly impactful, as it brings everything full circle and creates a visually stunning framework for its emotional climax.
The final piece that makes this collab nail its world is the gameplay. Looking at the new boss character, Adam Smasher, he is just as intimidating here as he is in his home franchise. Smasher hits hard and even uses the Sandavistan to speed around the battlefield, with multicolored afterimages in full effect.
Wuthering Waves X Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is possibly the best collaboration out there.
The playable pair of new characters brings just as much coolness and fun as their villainous counterpart. Lucy’s hacking and Rebecca’s trigger happy cmbat style are brought to stylish life, allowing both to fly around the battlefield. Working in tandem together, Lucy unleashes her monomolecular whips as Rebecca lays down a hail of bullets, leaving no corpo standing. A true visual feast that is equally fun to execute.
There is one small stumble that harms the gameplay experience around the duo of new characters: getting their level-up materials. While it makes sense for both of them to need materials farmed from the new Adam Smasher fight, having to fight him so many times in order to get both leveled up turns a great fight into an annoyance pretty quickly. If players could pre-farm the boss, this wouldn’t be so bad. As it is, Kuro would’ve done a solid service to its players by having one of the two connected to a boss that may make less sense, but keep the grind down a bit more.
Wuthering Waves X Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is possibly the best collaboration I’ve ever experienced. The reverence it handles the lore and characters of the visiting universe allows it an incredible amount of meaning. A story that explores grief and loss, while also finding a way to have fun and celebrate the meeting of two loved worlds.
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