Way back in 2022, when the first season of Netflix’s incredible Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime premiered, CD Projekt Red said that the show wouldn’t be getting a second season. In the three years since then, however, both the developer and the animation team at Studio Trigger said multiple times that they’d be open to a new Cyberpunk anime. Now, we’re finally getting one and it will, surprisingly, carry the Edgerunners name.
On July 4, CD Projekt Red announced that Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is now in development over at Studio Trigger, and will feature a new, standalone story told across 10 episodes. We don’t know much about it beyond that it will be some kind of revenge story, as the official description calls it a “raw chronicle of redemption and revenge.”
“In a city that thrives in the spotlight of violence, one question remains: when the world is blinded by spectacle, what extremes do you have to go to make your story matter?”
The next day, the company released a minute-long teaser that is mostly made up of footage from the first season, showing (spoilers) the original Edgerunners crew’s deaths. We then see silhouettes of what seems to be the new cast, with a lingering shot on what looks like a young child holding an old camcorder. I’ve seen some chatter suggesting that this girl could be the daughter of season one stars David and Lucy, but that’s just theorycrafting at this point.
While we still don’t know much, it does sound like Edgerunners 2 is going to be a bit of a bummer. At Anime Expo (thanks, Eurogamer), writer Bartosz Sztybor said that the second season will maintain all the feel-it-in-your-bones melodrama of the first season and of Cyberpunk 2077.
“But the other thing is that we are a company from Poland. I’m from Poland and people in Poland are sad. They are born sad, they die sad, so I just wanted to make the whole world sad.”
I’m always down for a trip back to Night City, and if the season is truly a stand-alone story that won’t trample all over the first season’s perfect ending, then I’m all for another round of Edgerunners. I still consider the first series to be one of the best game adaptations out there. Hey, maybe if this show is out before Cyberpunk 2 drops, we’ll get another tie-in update to Cyberpunk 2077, the game CD Projekt Red can’t seem to stop tinkering with.