REVIEW: ‘Cyberpunk Edgerunners 2’ Offers Big Emotion Held Back By An Overextended Cast

We’re back in Night City with the sequel season to the anime joint production between studio TRIGGER, CD Projekt Red, and Netflix. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was some of TRIGGER’s best work. It also established itself as one of the best ways to adapt a video game IP: by telling a story in its world. Because of that, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 had a high bar to meet. 

Could Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 still work without David? Could it hit the emotional highs and balance romance with tragedy? The answer is somewhere in the middle, with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 aiming to tell a story across a much larger cast of characters, whose unique storylines begin to mix and affect one another. 

While this sequel series captures the same vision of Night City as the first, the sections that we see are much more polished as we switch focus to the daughter of corpo scientists named Talia, who is on the verge of cyberpsychosis, and the family around her, including her mother Avida and her family friend Weak; a revenge-seeking man named D looking to strike back at the corpos who killed his family; and a boy named Roman who is more in love with the old tech of movie making than any chrome.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 diverts from expectations with a large ensemble.

For his part, Weak is a washed-up netrunning legend who approached cyberpsychosis and lived to tell the tale. In love with his best friend Avida, he’s trying to pull Avida’s daughter away from the ledge as she attempts even more chrome upgrades. With yearning still in his heart, Weak serves as a role model, a mentor, and hopefully someone who can reach Talia when she rejects everyone else. 

But Talia’s life isn’t made easy, with her father’s role at Kang Tao, which led her to be a piece of his experiments, though always for her own good. She is a sad girl, a rebellious girl, and ultimately someone seeking chrome upgrades for personal improvement, not some spiritual cultic belief in its superiority. She wants to be strong. Talia wants to be healthy. 

Outside of these two, a deadly nomad named D is trying to figure out the corpo secrets that led to his family being murdered in cold blood. One of the last survivors of his clan, he has only one clue to follow: corpo greed, as Kang Tao comes into focus. Why did they kill his family? The answer matters less than finding out who is responsible. 

Roman, a young pre-teen with a camera glued to his hand, is documenting it all. First with D, as he becomes part of his life, saving him from one bad situation after another. To him, film is capturing life in motion, not replacing it. For him, technology’s progress has removed the beauty of capturing a life you’re not physically experiencing. 

By taking video and uploading it online, Roman becomes D’s shadow, following him as he pursues the secrets Kang Tao keeps trying to hide. Until he finds a chip with a program named Capri loaded onto it. With Capri, D finally doesn’t feel the sting of depression or focus on his trauma. He has strength and power, and no one can hurt him. But he’s also a murderous, devastating force for anyone even remotely connected to any corpos. 

As D finds himself verging on being in love with Capri, even if he blacks out, Roman doesn’t know what to do. But as he runs through the streets, he meets Talia, and the storylines begin to mingle, unpacking the obsessions, tragedy, love, and legacy pulling them all together through Kang Tao’s destructive choices. 

Each character in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 has a story to tell, even if they talk over each other.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is a standalone series, so audiences won’t need to watch the series’ first season before hitting play. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t connected within the same timeline as what we saw when the original series first dropped. That said, worrying about how the second season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners fits into David Martinez’s story distracts from its own place in the Cyberpunk canon. 

That said, these connections aren’t the only thing that can be distracting. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 captures its larger theme of family, choice, and choosing a path without destruction in the back third of its 10-episode season. But the road there is winding and can be more distracting than anything.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 aims to be more ambitious than its last outing, mainly because of the story’s scope. The expanded cast lets TRIGGER explore even more ambitious animation in Season 2. Above all else, the series is beautiful, and its expansion of the franchise’s lore can’t be overstated.

That said, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2’s narrative is also muddied by the weight of every character, asking the audience to be moved by them even with little time to get to know them. Each episode bounces between storylines, giving this standalone series a different approach to last season’s tragic love story, which focused on David Martinez’s trauma and romance with Lucy. 

Corpos remain the bad guys, but the dangerous, desperate world of Cyberpunk makes it hard to track how each character moves and chooses their path. The end of the series, specifically its last two episodes, is filled with action, but they’re also emotionally dense, with relationships taking shape, being defended, and even abandoned. The payoff is more than there for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2’s finale, but the messy episodes that begin to wind each thread together that precede the ending leave much to be desired. 

The entire cast in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is endearing and easy to fall into. By the end of the series, I wanted more of Weak, Roman, Talia, and D. The series’ choice to choose hope over pure tragedy felt like it was asking its audience to hope for more as well. Still, part of me wanted more from the characters in this season of the series because each episode feels too narratively thin to make anything feel like true closure. 

Spectacle comes first in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, flexing TRIGGER’s animation muscle. 

Everything is there for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 to tap into the same special emotional vein the first season did. But too many good characters can be a bad thing, especially when some feel more like tropes than fleshed-out characters with motivations and desires that make sense.

Yes, every character gets depth and dynamic emotional choices, but some of those choices feel empty because each story thread has to be clipped so quickly to fit the episode order. More episodes or fewer characters are needed for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 to reach the same height as Season 1, but that doesn’t mean this sequel is bad or even basic. It just means that there could have been more.

This season could have been about Talia and Weak. It could have explored their background, their connection, and more of Kang Tao. It could have been about D and Roman, which would have made his quest for revenge feel more like something you can get behind, instead of just seeing him as a murderous man blinded by anger that is hard to sympathize with.

But by tying them together, both are done a disservice. While the series’ larger story may be its strength, its erratic character focus hurts it overall. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is a story about hope, but its focus on the spectacle over substance wounds its larger narrative. 

Still, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 continues to highlight Night City’s depth by showing audiences another side of it. Here, TRIGGER and CD Projekt Red focus on hope, love, and the choice to keep going instead of self-immolating for two ideals you’ll never truly get to embrace. 

If the first series was about sacrifice, this one is about continuing on. It’s about the grief and guilt in different measures, but it’s also about accepting your mortality without giving up on life. Avoiding spoilers, discussing Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2’s ending, which is its greatest accomplishment, is difficult. But by the end, the chrome and name-drops don’t mean anything, and the violence means little more than to tell you you survived. 

Ultimately, though, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is still gorgeous, action-packed, exciting, and, by the end, emotional, even with its bloated cast. This is a well that CD Projekt Red and TRIGGER should keep coming back to, if only they take a more focused approach to its storytelling. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners as a series has been about what to do after something terrible is done to you, and in that, it still finds its importance. 

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix. 

Cyberpunk Edgerunners Season 1 |