Taking away the glitzy neon setting of the megalopolis called Night City — an over-crammed futuristic city of big buildings, excessive capitalism, rampant crime and cybernetic body enhancements — we have a familiar story of a boy who wants to be a man.

David Martinez, the pride and joy of a single mother who works as a paramedic, is a bright young student trapped in a world of hurt.

Excelling academically at a school for the elite that his mother cannot afford, he is an outcast bullied by the school’s rich kids. Because the city is brutal, David isn’t just beaten down; he is thrashed by Bruce Lee-like kung-fu moves, courtesy of expensive machine implants, by one of the students.

No one is without implants in Night City, or maybe, perhaps, the world. Small slits at the neck serve as ports for slim USB-like chips to download data, phone calls are made from the brain, and machine guns sprout from people’s arms.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners is a very adult tale of a wicked future society where love and relationships struggle to find breathing space

These visuals aren’t new for the cyberpunk genre, but it has grown from their somewhat subtle early days in literature and movies, when excessiveness wasn’t as prevalent. Cyberpunk Edgerunners — a standalone spin-off from the video game Cyberpunk 2077 (you can watch it without knowing anything about the game) — drowns itself in that very pool of excessiveness.

Taking cues from ’80s and ’90s cyberpunk anime, notably an amalgamation of Cybercity OEDO-808, Ghost in the Shell — okay, maybe even Akira and Blade Runner — Edgerunners has a nostalgic, authentic ‘classic cyberpunk’ vibe, with one big shortfall: a lack of synth-wave music, a staple of this genre since it vogued.

While the soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka, a noted composer of videogames and a few films, and the songs push one away from the ambience of cyberpunk (they have a pop-rock feel), the worldbuilding more than yanks you back.

Life in this world is unforgiving and single-mindedly capitalistic. Very much like the present, the world is run by money — i.e. Eddies, which is another name for Eurodollars. In fact, stripping away the technical entanglements, one can swap Night City for any of today’s bustling metropolises.

The animation company Studio Trigger (Kill la Kill, Promare), screenwriters Masahiko Otsuka, Yoshiki Usa and director Hiroyuki Imaishi, take a slow, methodical approach, to set up the world and then work on characters, which pays off in spades. Melancholic, detached and engrossing, Edgerunners takes three-episodes getting to a point where the characters start making sense… with what little sense they have at their disposal.

David’s mother is critically injured in a highway kill that was meant to take out a mega-corporate executive (the two companies Arasaka and Millitech are archrivals who give high-paying jobs to mercenaries and hackers by the bulk, it seems). While the rich have insurance — meaning privileged medical services and armoured security troops at their beck and call — the regular folks can’t even pay rent. David’s mother doesn’t survive the highway attack and this triggers the teenager into a rage-filled retaliation against the establishment.

Augmenting his body with a military-grade spinal cord that gives his body insane speeds, he rebels, soon joining forces with a colourful group of corporate mercenaries that run high-risk gigs.

As with every cyberpunk, there is a sad love story in the midst of chaos. Lucy, a silver-pink-blue-green-haired, plaintive, reserved young woman, catches David’s eyes and heart. A skilled hacker, Lucy, we learn very late in this 10-episode series, is an orphan who was trained by one of the megacorporation to hack into the Old Net, a lost technology decades after our time, yet decades before Edgerunners. While that story possibly leads to the Cyberpunk 2077, the videogame — which I have not played — it opens great possibilities for storytelling that Edgerunners doesn’t get into.

Mostly telling standalone stories of high-risk raids, with a pervasive message against unwarranted body surgeries and enhancements (if you peel away the technical babble and place the context in today’s setting), Edgerunners’ main plot deals with cyber-psychosis — the loss of one’s sanity after excessive augmentation of the body.

The depth of the heists, the corporate rivalry, the backstories of characters are secondary thoughts which both fit the genre, but nonetheless create a feeling of detachment. You can see these characters going off the rails by choice, with no chance of a miraculous feel-good save coming at the last moment. The stark, realistic brutalism is a part of the package, and Edgerunners deliberately takes that route…whether you like it or not.

Very good but not excellent animation and a unique colour palette give credence to this very adult tale of a wicked future society, where love and relationships struggle to find breathing space.

Spellbinding stuff… if you’re into animation for adults that prides itself on the excessiveness of gun-violence, gore and nudity.

Streaming on Netflix, Cyberpunk Edgerunners is rated suitable for ages 18 and older. Irrespective of the eye-catching visuals, don’t watch it with children

Published in Dawn, ICON, September 25th, 2022