“Why you can trust Digital Trends – We have a 20-year history of testing, reviewing, and rating products, services and apps to help you make a sound buying decision. Find out more about how we test and score products.“
Animated adaptations of video games are in a surprisingly good place right now — particularly on Netflix, where shows like Arcane, Castlevania, and even Carmen Sandiego have delivered rewarding extensions of their respective franchises. That continues with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which serves up a wild anime adventure set in the world of 2020’s Cyberpunk 2077.
Directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi (Gurren Lagann) and Hiromi Wakabayashi (Star Wars: Visions), Cyberpunk: Edgerunners follows a teenage boy pulled into a dark world of high-tech mercenaries known as “Edgerunners.” As he’s drawn ever deeper into the world of body modification and corporate espionage, David (voiced by Zach Aguilar in the English version of the series) soon finds himself struggling to figure out what’s truly important and where to draw the line when it comes to his cybernetic implants.
While much of the Edgerunners world is a shiny metropolis sitting among dark streets and dirty alleys, the series doesn’t shy away from covering all of it with a gory mess of blood and viscera. The ultraviolence in Edgerunners gets started early, but the series never devolves into a nonstop symphony of brutality. Between bouts of frantic action (and the occasional, explicit sex scene), Edgerunners also delivers a fair share of quiet, contemplative moments as David ponders the increasingly bleak turns his life takes.
The10 episodes of Edgerunners run anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes each, and the show does a nice job of fitting a satisfying amount of action, storytelling, and world-building into each chapter without feeling overstuffed. Cyberpunk anime often has a difficult time balancing those elements, with many series collapsing under convoluted, fictional networks of corporate and criminal drama. Fortunately, Edgerunners mostly avoids getting mired in the weeds of its own complicated lore by keeping the focus on its characters.
Anyone familiar with the cyberpunk worlds that fill William Gibson stories and the Shadowrun franchise will recognize the major players in Edgerunners, as they tend to fall into the usual archetypes of the genre. Hulking muscle-heads with exaggerated cybernetic musculature operate alongside shadowy hackers and unhinged, walking armories wielding comically large guns, taking on missions for sinister, suited executives angling for an advantage over their corporate competition. It’s a cadre of characters you know, but they’re still fun to watch as they bounce off each other in the grim environment they operate within.
Maybe most importantly (for the game studio that financed its production, at least) is that Edgerunners makes the dystopian world of Cyberpunk 2077 both accessible and appealing to those who haven’t played the game. Like fellow Netflix adaptation Arcane and the League of Legends game that inspired it, you don’t need to be familiar with Cyberpunk 2077 to enjoy Edgerunners, but the show is so intriguing you’ll probably want to give the game a look after the season ends.
That’s not the only quality Edgerunners shares with Arcane, either. The cyberpunk series also features a memorable opening theme — This Fffire by Franz Ferdinand — that manages to capture (or perhaps set) the tone of the series while also being amazingly earwormy in all the right ways.
Although it isn’t as philosophical or self-aware as more prominent cyberpunk anime (for example, Ghost in the Shell) or as beautifully polished as the aforementioned Arcane, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners still measures up well in the genre and as an extension of the game that inspired it. The series might not break any new ground, but that’s not the intent. What it does deliver is a satisfying standalone story that leaves you hopeful for future one-off tales set in its blood-drenched world of neon and chrome.
The entire season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is available on Netflix.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.