The Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime series coming to Netflix looks really good

As part of its Geeked Week festivities, Netflix just showed off a teaser for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, an anime series produced by Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red and Japanese animator Studio Trigger. First announced back in 2020, Edgerunners is a 10-episode series about a Night City street kid who turns outlaw—in other words, a cyberpunk.

The teaser is only about a minute long, but there's still quite a lot to see, including some fantastic shots of Cyberpunk 2077's Night City in anime form, combat with guns and cyberware, a nice look at several of the characters, plus a thumping score. It also serves up a release window—Cyberpunk: Edgerunners will release on Netflix in September.

While I'm not personally an anime fan or even all that much into Cyberpunk itself, this still looks pretty dang good. Studio Trigger co-founder Hiroyuki Imaishi (known for Gurren Lagann, Kill La Kill, and the 2019 film Promare) directed the series. The score is by Akira Yamaoka of Silent Hill fame.

In addition to the teaser, Netflix also released a short but eventful clip from the series, in which a shady deal with the Maelstrom gang looks like it's actually a setup for a rescue mission:

In the clip, a hostage is released from a safe as part of some sort of agreement, but things go sideways quickly. A few mantis blades pop out of a few forearms, a number of gang members lose their limbs, someone else's entire head goes splat, and then the good guys all share a collective thumbs-up. Violent, sure, but somehow pretty heart-warming at the same time. Teamwork makes the dream work.

I can't help but notice there's no dialogue spoken either in the teaser or the clip, and there are no voice actors listed on the show's IMDB page. Is Edgerunners a show with no spoken lines? That would be pretty interesting (and it would spare us from having to hear the term "choomba.") I'm sure we'll learn more about Cyberpunk: Edgerunners as the September airdate gets closer.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.