After seeing the in-game ad for edgerunners hamfistedly shoved in I finally just decided to watch it. Overall I was really disappointed come the end. I was hoping that there would be that Trigger magic that would take the mostly emaciated punk of Cyberpunk 2077 and make something more out of it, but while the first few episodes were fine, it ended up feeling like there was nothing there. Honestly it feels like Darling in the Franxx where Trigger was just there to animate someone's story with close to no creative freedom over where the plot goes
The anti-capitalist, anti-establishment nature of the punk in Edgerunners doesn't go any deeper than as set dressing that creates the motivations for the characters but is then left behind. David is deeply wronged by the system that exists in Night City, but nothing is really done with it other than setting him further down the plot.
The story feels like it's just retreading what the game already did. It's just a retelling of V's story but without the Relic and instead an even less nuanced look at cyberpsychosis. David tries to better his lot, like V, after living in the absolutely bleak Night City and the city ruins everyone for even trying. Jackie dies in the heist, Evelyn's fate is worse than death, Dex is unceremoniously executed in a dump, V is left with a Relic that's killing her and rewriting her personality. David similarly tries and ends up watching his adoptive family shatter multiple times with sad pitiful ends.
I get that it's just basically the personal story of David and the people he meets and David is one flawed motherfucker that only wants to see other's dreams through because he's left traumatized after his mother died, but there wasn't even a sad washed up rocker even talking about how the system itself is what fucked David.
It felt no different than those anime movies made for Dead Space years ago. Just a tie-in product.
TL;DR I was hoping for a proper Trigger show and I just got more of what the game already did.
Shadowrun is loaded with hope and small victories as a recurring theme, and it has magic and fantastical creatures and a big part of the US got forcibly returned back to the First Nations.
In my experience, people that hate Shadowrun and call it silly or "for babies" or otherwise shit on it for having magic and the like while also being Cyberpunkerino fans tend to be abrasive assholes that I don't want to play tabletop games with anyway.
This is really funny to me because cyberpunk "tech" is all very unrealistic and basically scifi magic, but it has a veneer of technology so of course people think it's better than fantasy magic. ๐
That's exactly how I feel about it. It's about "sciencey" vibes, not scientific plausibility.
And the magic is cyberpunk af! Making pacts and alliances with spirits to fight back against corporate greed! There are spirits of manifest pollution and corruption! There's sufficiently analyzed magic and magitek, it's all integrated in to the cyberpunk world. It's not what people usually think of as cyberpunk, it takes that basis and expands it in new and interesting ways that open up new avenues to explore cyberpunk questions.
The spirit of punk is in the spirits themselves.
Arguably, what's missing from the Cyberpunkerinos setting by contrast (especially the CDPR version) is that spirit. It's absent, both as a literal spirit and as a metaphorical spirit. The corporation is invincible, things suck, nothing really gets better, time to be a Legend of Night City(tm) by beating up people for the police, protecting the president, and serving the alphabet agencies!
God, it's so gross. Several times I forgot about the cops thing and my friends mentioned they were doing some cop related thing and i was like "Oh how hard are the cops to kill?" and they were like "I'm working for the cops" and that pretty much sums up why I'm not interested in the game.
"Presenting something doesn't condone that thing, though you're expected to present yourself as condoning that thing."