Review of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
72/100
Synopsis: a young boy’s mom gets killed and now he has to fend for himself, and joins a gang in a futuristic cyperpunk world.
TL;DR: it’s mid.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners seemed to dominate anime discourse while it was airing, but based on google trends, the penetration it made in the normieworld was small — attack on titan and demon slayer were about an order of magnitude more relevant.
There isn’t really much to summarize here, as the story is fairly basic — a guy joins a cyberpunk gang and lives his life. What’s really worth talking about is the visuals.
Netflix went all out with the production design, it’s honestly some of the best visuals that I have ever seen. The only anime that compare to it are movies, which benefit from being shorter and therefore more easy to juice. The character designs are also very good — Lucy in particular is stunning:
Anime have the tendency to give characters unnatural hair colors for no reason, but Cyberpunk manages to subvert this by having the weird eye/hair colors be accessories. It’s not an Evangelion-tier deconstruction, but I guess it’s something.
To address the elephant in the room: Cyberpunk Edgerunners is mostly eye candy. The show itself suffers from a lack of originality, as the cyberpunk genre has already been overdone to all hell. The series also made some extremely unnecessary timeskips, which skip over the development of the two most relevant characters of the series.
A lot of people complained about the ending; personalyl I thought it was great. Not interested in going into the details, but they went for an avant garde ending which a lot of people found unsatisfying.
Normally I wouldn’t bring up something this subjective, but it altered my experience of watching the series substantially. I am very similar to the protagonist in appearance, which makes watching the series unnerving. It doesn’t help that we both went to a preppy private school and have similar personalities.
scoring:
Design (15/15):
Distinguishment: (5/5) - unique color palette, character designs, world
Animation: (2/2)
Sound: (2/2)
OST: (2/2)
Character designs: (2/2)
Backgrounds: (2/2)
Script (34/50):
Character Investment: (7/10) - invested in Lucy and David
Character Realism: (1/2)
Character Complexity: (1/3) - development is skipped, characters other that Lucy and David are two dimensional.
Plot solidness (4/5) - no notable plot holes
Plot complexity: (7/10)
Ending: (5/5) - avant garde and very underrated
Pacing: (1/5)
Stakes: (8/10)
Value (5/15):
Thematic elements: (0/5) - don’t remember a theme.
Skill: (4/5) - design is S tier, but plot/characters not so much.
Originality: (1/5) - cyberpunk is extremely overdone
Enjoyment (13/20):
Did I like it: (13/20)