What Cyberpunk 2 should steal from Edgerunners

Netflix and CD Projekt Red announced a second season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners at the 2025 Anime Expo, and it’s no surprise — the anime, which won the prestigious “Anime of the Year” award at the 2023 Crunchyroll Anime Awards, played a major part in making 2020’s Cyberpunk 2077 so successful following its troubled debut. 

Before Cyberpunk: Edgerunners debuted, Cyberpunk 2077 struggled to recover from bugs and backlash over a gameplay experience that fell short of the Grand Theft Auto-style sandbox many fans had expected. Sony Interactive Entertainment went as far as removing the game entirely from the PlayStation Store just a week after launch. Microsoft also issued refunds at the time, costing CD Projekt Red an estimated $51 million in lost sales and reimbursements, according to Ars Technica.

After its release in 2022, however, Edgerunners, produced by renowned studio Trigger (Gurren Lagann, Delicious in Dungeon), sparked a resurgence of interest in the property. Cyberpunk 2077’s player count on Steam never dropped to its previous lows, marking a turning point that transformed the game‘s narrative from failure to redemption. Developer CD Projekt Red, seizing the opportunity, released several iconic graphics, outfits, and references from the anime in a 2022 patch.

But if CD Projekt Red wants to retain the synergy the gaming and anime fandom have for this property in the upcoming sequel game, codenamed “Orion”, it needs to steal a lot more than references and cosmetics. 

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners blended a clear-cut coming-of-age narrative with the shonen-inspired tropes that define much of anime’s global appeal. The series centers on David, a gifted but struggling student whose life unravels after his mother’s death, a woman who dreamed of seeing him rise to the top through the prestigious Arasaka Academy. Left with nothing, David turns to the streets of Night City and implants himself with stolen military tech, joining a crew of “edgerunners” — mercenaries and outlaws — in search of purpose.

As he rises through the brutal mercenary underworld, David becomes obsessed with strength, pushing his body past its limits to meet the expectations of others, his mother’s dream, his love interest Lucy’s hope of escaping to the moon, and the loyalty he feels to his new makeshift family. But David never forms a dream of his own. Instead, he lets the ambitions of others define his path, sacrificing his identity piece by piece until cyberpsychosis — a condition deriving from excessive body implants — consumes him. His story is a tragic coming-of-age tale where love, duty, and the need to prove himself lead to a brutal end, because in Night City, living without your own dream means dying for someone else’s.

Bartosz Sztybor, creative director at CD Projekt Red, was also one of the writers behind Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Even after the anime’s success, he continued expanding the universe, penning a Hugo Award-winning comic set in the Cyberpunk 2077 world in 2023. Night City itself stands as more than just a backdrop—it’s a living, brutal force, like Arrakis in Dune or 1970s Los Angeles in Chinatown, with rules so unforgiving they eventually shape anyone who lives there. The key to telling a compelling story in this world lies in balancing characters who are new to the city’s chaos with those already shaped—or broken—by it. The games, comics, and anime each explore this from different angles, but Sztybor, having worked across all three, may be the only storyteller capable of uniting them into one cohesive vision.

David’s crew of edgerunners gave the anime heart, making fans care about more than just the flashy setting or the game and its celebrity cast. The sequel needs its own ragtag team, characters the audience and the protagonist can truly connect with, to bring that same emotional weight, so that their eventual deaths and loyalty inevitably come into question, because the setting of Night City dictates that people act only to benefit themselves, and screw over the ones who don’t think the way they do. “Heartbreaking” seems to be a theme from season 1 that will carry over in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 2, and it should be a philosophy going forward for any IP set in Night City or the greater Cyberpunk universe.

Nothing against V, the playable avatar in Cyberpunk 2077, but they are essentially an avatar for Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Silverhand, a much more interesting character. And someone to care about! Apart from Silverhand and the romance options like Panam, I never cared about any of the characters I met in 2077. To that point again, no matter how many celebs you throw into the mix, Reeves, Idris Elba, they will never be more popular than David has proven to be with fans, and it’s because of his intimate story.

In a world full of characters, the next Cyberpunk sequel could use more character-driven relationships. If it’s possible, the next game should open up David to being the new Silverhand, in terms of a mythologized character that can be explored more through various missions and lore drops. The more the game can remind us that 2077 and Edgerunners share the same universe, the better.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners opens the door to almost a cybernetic version of Grand Theft Auto, which, ironically, is what many non-CDPR fans expected from Cyberpunk 2077 before discovering it played more like Fallout. While light RPG elements could still work in the sequel, the developers would be better off leaning fully into an open-world, GTA-style experience. Doing so would support a more focused, narrative-driven story rather than a sprawling RPG bogged down by dialogue trees. To avoid retreading 2077, CDPR needs to build off what Edgerunners established: give us a fully realized main character, a cast of side characters we care about just as much, and a ruthless Night City where loyalty is always for sale.

Most importantly, the story has to hit hard and leave a mark — painful, unforgettable, and worth talking about. That’s what made Edgerunners resonate, and that’s the formula for turning the sequel game into a true redemption arc.