Our man on the ground, T.R. Racki, watched the world premiere of the second season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, the first episode of which screened at Anime Expo 2026. The series drops this fall.
Visceral. Chaotic. Traumatic.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 throws the audience immediately into a high-stakes heist that goes violently, spectacularly wrong. There are no clear heroes or villains here, only shades of gray, desperate choices, and people scrambling to survive.
Bodies pile up quickly. Some deaths are sudden. Others are rendered with such graphic specificity that looking away felt more appropriate. Decapitations, dismemberments, and exploding heads arrive with the kind of excess longtime Cyberpunk viewers may expect, but that does not make them any easier to watch.
“Don’t get attached to anyone,” warned the series writer, Bartosz Sztybor.
“Don’t get attached to anyone.”
For viewers familiar with the original Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, this new installment delivers the same shock value and emotional brutality that defined the first series. But beneath the violence and profanity is a story seeking a more interesting question: what is humanity in a hyper-technological world?
What does it mean to be human when everything that once formed your identity has been taken from you? Your job? Your wealth? Your reputation? Your family? Your body? Sztybor explained that these are among the questions the ten-episode season will explore.
Edgerunners 2 is not a continuation of the original series. Instead, Sztybor described it as the start of a new D&D campaign set in Night City, with a fresh cast of original characters forced into impossible decisions. While the series shares some thematic similarities with season one, its perspective will be harsher and less romantic. If the first Edgerunners could be seen as a tragic, almost seductive look at the edge-running lifestyle, season two presents that life as shorter, uglier, and far less glamorous, an emotional story within the backdrop of hyper violence.
The first episode introduces characters who exist in varying states of physical humanity. Some remain mostly organic. Others have replaced so much of themselves with cybernetics that the line between human and machine blurs, becoming nearly impossible to draw. One character has pushed that evolution so far that he suffers a complete psychological breakdown, requiring his advanced prosthetics and implants to be removed before they destroy him entirely.
That is where the episode becomes most interesting.
In Genesis, God creates mankind in His image. Wisdom. Kindness. Morality. He declares it good.
In Edgerunners, humanity is often treated as something inferior. Something weak. Something to be erased. Evolution, in this world, does not mean becoming more human; it means becoming less. The final stage of that process is cyberpsychosis: the loss of individuality, restraint, and moral agency. A person becomes impulse-wrapped in chrome. A cybernetic demon.
Whether scripted intentionally or not, I find this deeply poignant. The further mankind drifts from God, both in body and mind, the more it begins to resemble Lucifer: powerful, beautiful, self-directed, fallen, then ultimately isolating and self-destructive.
The episode captures that seduction well. Talia’s aerial acrobatic routine is graceful, elegant, and almost mesmerizing. For a moment, the cybernetic body looks beautiful. But once she lands and begins moving on all fours, the image shifts. The same body that seemed liberated now appears diminished, more animal than human. That tension may be the most compelling idea in the premiere.
Regrettably, it is difficult to engage with the emotional core of the series when the violence is so relentless. Some of it serves the world. Some of it establishes stakes. But much of it feels gratuitous. The episode rarely implies when it can go full on. It rarely cuts away when it can display. Some creators tell stories with bright colors or delicate lines. Edgerunners 2 paints in crimson.
Meanwhile, Studio Trigger renders all of this with impressive skill. The animation is sharp, kinetic, and stylish, carrying a retro 90s anime aesthetic.
God gives mankind free will. Edgerunners 2 presents a world where that freedom has been used without restraint: violence without mercy, profanity without pause, sexuality without reverence, and humanity treated as disposable material. Sztybor warns viewers that the series may traumatize them. That may have been partly a joke, partly a sales pitch, and partly an honest warning.
Based on episode one, all three may be true.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 streams on Netflix later this fall.
All screencaps taken from the official website.
