The trailer opens on Night City in golden light, the Arasaka logo glowing on a tower. Then it drops straight down a dark stairwell, where a blond kid in a puffy purple jacket hangs off a railing high above the drop, a camcorder pressed to his eye. The official trailer for “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2” premiered at IGN Fall Fan Fest on Wednesday, October 14th, less than a week before the ten-episode season arrives on Netflix on Tuesday, October 20th. It is a new standalone story, produced again by CD Projekt Red with the Japanese studio Trigger. Kai Ikarashi, who storyboarded and animation-directed “Girl on Fire,” the sixth episode of the first season, now directs the whole thing. Nothing in the footage tries to pretend that this is the same show, and that might be the smartest decision anyone has made about it.
That is a big call, because “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” was a very hard act to follow. The 2022 series, directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi, followed David Martinez, a street kid who turned himself into a chrome-heavy edgerunner. It ended with David killed by Adam Smasher, while Lucy, the netrunner he loved, made it to the Moon without him. The series went on to win Anime of the Year at the 2023 Crunchyroll Anime Awards. The new trailer leans on that, spelling out “THE ANIME OF THE YEAR RETURNS” across the screen one word at a time. But Netflix’s own description says this season follows a fresh group of hired guns, voiced by an all-new cast, and nobody from David’s crew turns up anywhere in the trailer. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the ending of “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” and for everything shown in the “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2” trailer.
Nothing in the footage tries to pretend that this is the same show, and that might be the smartest decision anyone has made about it.”
The new crew is four people with very little in common. Weak Kingsley (Clancy Brown) was once known as “King,” a veteran edgerunner at the top of his game, and the official synopsis says he is now forced to live without chrome. D (Nazeeh Tarsha) is a Snake Nation netrunner who, in the official character description, “hunts the killer who wiped out his clan.” Roman Carax (Valeria Rodriguez), the blond kid with the camcorder, is a young cinephile chasing real stories in a city that has abandoned film for braindance. Talia Yang (Kimoy Lee) was raised in corpo towers before the Maelstrom gang got its hooks into her. Those are the English voices, and the Japanese cast is Kentaro Tone as Weak, Koki Uchiyama as D, Momoka Terasawa as Roman and Akari Kito as Talia. Netflix also put out a new key visual the same day, and Crunchyroll’s report on it notes a cluster of supporting characters gathered around the central four.
After the stairwell, a tiny figure tumbles through a bright blue sky while streaks of light cut past. The CD Projekt Red and Trigger logos then land over a washed-out, almost square frame of a figure stretched across a balcony. A face peers out from a spiked purple helmet. Then the camera sits behind a dark-haired figure in a white collar trimmed in red, looking toward a flight of stairs littered with trash. A crowd of black silhouettes stands against orange flames as a voice says, “They’re all still here.” Over a lone figure in a field of glittering static, it goes on, “They come to me in my dreams asking for help, but I never can.” The face that follows has red streaks across it and green eyes peering over a blue sleeve. Given D’s dead clan, the line seems to belong to his story, although the trailer never shows who is speaking.
The next stretch belongs to Weak, and it is the closest the trailer comes to a scene. A neon sign reading “Tom’s Diner” glows over a nearly empty street. Then Weak, recognizable from Netflix’s character art by his round red eye implants and his goatee, stares ahead while a screen floating above him shows a body sprawled on a floor. The screen fills the frame, a pink-haired figure slumped among debris with a woman’s blue-lipped face laid over its edge, as a voice says, “We’ve got more in common than you think. I know exactly what’s been going through your mind.” Weak turns in profile, eyes wide, and the answer, “We have nothing in common,” plays over a blond man with an eye patch and a scarred, wired face, his mouth hanging open. What’s on Netflix watched the first seven minutes at Anime NYC and described Weak hallucinating a woman named Anita, talking to her in a diner scene from an earlier trailer. That would fit what is on screen here.
Roman gets a brief extreme close-up of his own, green eyes and blond hair lit by the sun. Then a figure stands alone in a street of yellow rain under a neon sign, while a hunched shape crouches with blood on the ground beneath it. An extreme close-up of an eye ringed in red paint follows, a thin red line slicing across the iris. A figure in a blue jacket walks down a filthy corridor, and a gloved hand pulls a small red chip out of a bald man’s head. Somewhere in that run a voice asks, “Is your revenge worth this mess?” A close-up of black hair over a pale face cuts to a hand on a glowing red blade, one green eye lit up in the dark behind it. That edit answers the question about as clearly as the trailer answers anything.
The anime-of-the-year card is broken up by flash cuts, a hand with glowing blue lines running across the fingers, a wide-eyed Roman with flames behind him, and an eyeball whose iris has opened into a ring of teeth. A small figure in red goggles, teeth bared, climbs over a metal bench in black and white. A red loading bar fills up under the Arasaka logo, and Roman raises his camcorder to his eye in front of a bright window. There is a top-down shot of a cramped bedroom, a red-tinted hand pressing down on a blue sleeve and sneakers sprinting past a smear of light. Then D crouches on a rooftop ledge against an empty blue sky, in a shot that looks designed to end up on a poster. A voice in this stretch admits, “Whatever she did to me, it felt good,” but the footage gives no clue who is talking about whom.
From there it turns into the kind of violence Trigger is known for, explosions in the rain, a body coming apart in red, and Talia, pink hair over her mask, slashing through a burst of sparks. A woman with blue lips cries, and a gloved hand holds a pistol. The trailer then lines its people up in quick close-ups, a girl in a cap, Weak, Roman, Talia and D, as a voice warns, “You keep this up, it’s going to kill you.” Over Talia, half lost in a flare of light, a voice asks, “Am I going psycho or not?” A blue-tinted kiss follows, then a frightened Roman beside Talia’s curtain of pink hair, as a voice says, “I’m worried about you. You haven’t been yourself lately.” Roman and Talia share the frame again before a black and white close-up of Talia’s eyes, and someone shouts, “Talia!” over a black screen. Roman then stands in a street under hovering vehicles, and armored soldiers raise heavy guns.
The last card reads “YOU CAN’T OUTRUN YOUR MIND,” broken up by the goggled figure grinning straight into the lens, D throwing up a hand in terror, and a man firing a pistol in a red haze. In front of a wall of corporate towers, a man in a black high-collared coat raises one hand, a blond man in sunglasses behind him, as a voice says, “You can begin.” What follows is the fastest cutting in the trailer, an explosion inside a machine, a body falling through blue lightning, Roman’s camcorder screen and a man’s head bursting apart. Then comes a quiet run of the city glowing gold at sunset, the “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners II” title and an end card that reads “ONLY ON NETFLIX OCTOBER 20.” It is a trailer that wants to unsettle more than it wants to explain. The gamble is that viewers will trust those flashes enough to sit through ten episodes with a crew of strangers.
The people making the show have been surprisingly open about what they changed. Bartosz Sztybor, the CD Projekt Red writer who is again the showrunner, told Animation Magazine that the first season was “mostly David and Lucy and their relationship, a love story, and his rise and fall.” This time, he said, “I like to say it’s a Pulp Fiction approach here now, because we have six or even eight different characters and different storylines.” He also described where Weak came from: “So I thought, what if David didn’t die in the first season? He’s now like 40 or 50, he’s an old Merc, and what would happen then?” Kotaku was at Anime Expo in July, where the first episode screened. It reported that CD Projekt framed the change this way: if the first season was a Michael Bay movie, the second is aiming for Martin Scorsese.
Roman is the riskiest piece of it. Saya Elder, the executive producer for anime at CD Projekt Red, admitted to IGN, in an interview published alongside the trailer, that she “fought so hard against having a child protagonist at first,” because she expected fans to turn on the team the second anything happened to the boy. She added that “Night City doesn’t take it easy for anyone, not even a literal child.” Sztybor told IGN that Roman is his, Ikarashi’s and Masahiko Otsuka’s “love letter to cinema,” and he named the filmmakers behind the gore: “I’m a huge fan of David Cronenberg, Takashi Miike, and Julia Ducournau.” Otsuka, who co-wrote the first season’s scripts, is back as the scriptwriter, Ichigo Kanno designs the characters and Tsuneo Imahori composes the score. The Cure’s 1978 song “10:15 Saturday Night” is the opening theme, and Petite Meller’s “Watson” closes each episode. Animation Magazine reported that Ikarashi drew on “Léon: The Professional” and the look of the ’90s, and that shows in the trailer’s camcorders, square frames and smeared light.
All of this lands in a busy month for the franchise, with CD Projekt Red also co-producing a live-action “Cyberpunk 2077” film in development at Paramount Pictures. The second season has to win fans over with characters they have never met. The trailer suggests Trigger and Ikarashi would rather go stranger and uglier than repeat the first season’s formula. There is a real chance that this splits the audience that made David a legend. A show built on four or more storylines could also feel scattered across ten episodes. That is a fair worry after a first season that stayed so tightly focused on a single love story.
What Do You Think? Is D the voice saying his dead “come to me in my dreams,” and is the bald man with the chip in his head part of the trail to his clan’s killer? Who is the woman Weak keeps seeing, and is she real or a symptom of the life he lived as King? With a child at the center of the story, do you trust “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2” to keep Roman alive for ten episodes?
See you on the next binge!
