By Luke Henry Thomas, November 3, 2026
If the debut season of “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” was a testament to how a strong focus can benefit a show, Studio Trigger’s follow-up is representative of the consequences of the lack of a clear one. Heavy-laden with an extraneous plot and bloated with too many characters that detract from its best themes, “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2” is a limp continuation that ends up feeling disconnected from the city it’s building off of.
Focusing on events almost entirely unrelated to the first season, Roman Carax (Momoka Terasawa) is also disconnected from his city. The young boy is still a traditional film purist, choosing to record with handheld cameras instead of creating the full-body sensory braindances that became the norm almost 60 years before his time. Already acquainted with documenting the grimy violence of Night City, he gets mixed up with filming the netrunner D (Koki Uchiyama), who’s vigorously hunting down any leads on who burned his clan down, though he’s restrained enough to spare anyone not directly responsible.
In his attempts to obtain a 35mm camera, Roman also simultaneously gets involved with filming teenager Talia Yang (Akari Kitō). Due to a medical condition that pushed her into making excessive cyberwear modifications, Talia’s become wrapped up with the transhumanist gang Maelstrom in spite of the resistance of her mother and Weak “King” Kingsley (Kentaro Tone). King was an edgerunner mercenary until his own violent cyberpsychosis incident forced him to end that career.
Their four paths are continuously intertwined by the appearance of a personality construct, specifically an extremely anime embellished personality, named Capri (Aoi Koga). Her outlandish telepathic powers and traits seem perfectly suited for aiding D’s plight of vengeance or supporting Talia’s declining medical condition as her impish interest jumps between the two.
But there’s not enough time in the show to properly manage what writer Bartosz Sztybor wants to do with these five characters, plus the allies who keep them from falling over the edge and the corporate overlords seeking to manipulate their situations. The production’s choice to repeat the first season’s short length of 10 episodes limits this season’s ability to build up its characters.
A lot of D’s story feels like a loose retread of David Martinez’s from the first season, now a netrunner instead of an edgerunner getting in over their head from a seductively powerful piece of cyberwear. What varies with D’s story instead taps into a very overdone theme of the cautionary tale of revenge and the speed at which D betrays his commitment to mercy when faced with Capri’s alluring abilities makes him a far less compelling character.
Being pulled along with D’s plight for vengeance and desire for Capri, Roman also doesn’t end up getting much of a story of his own. The show tries to frame it as him being a necessary observer for D’s struggle, but Roman acts too passively for it to work. D’s development instead gets pushed along far more by a feverish film producer and a fellow gang member later in the show instead, leaving Roman with scraps.
It’s Talia and King’s stories that come out the least scathed from the runtime. Talia’s struggle with the dangers of her obsession with chrome holds strong due to her compelling angst toward her inevitable situation, despite show’s need to accommodate eventually tying into D’s story by forcing her own to repeat itself through continuous hospitalization.
King is meanwhile secondary to Talia, but “Edgerunners 2” does a good deal to show why that is deliberately the case because, crucially, it explores why King also internally feels secondary to her. He’s a washed up edgerunner that’s lost his purpose after his cyberpsychosis tore his team away from him and finding a way to save Talia gives him something real to pursue outside of his own self he already gave up on.
With the overlap between these characters’ stories, there are a number of connections that are brought into the occasional limelight despite how underdeveloped they are, specifically Roman and Talia. The show suggests a closer dynamic between the two of them, spurred from Talia’s desire to be seen by Roman’s camera, but it’s backed by mere minutes of prior interaction. There is a hypothetically important connection between them that should exist here of one youth living in the excess violence found in every corner of the hazy city and the other filming it, but there’s not enough room for it to fit into the season’s many existing threads.
If there’s something that wouldn’t be improved with an extended runtime here though, it’s how the world of these characters here doesn’t especially feel like Night City.
Strangely plagued with empty streets, the visual presence of the city lost its identity, reduced to pretty but plain recreations of its specific locales, save for the sight of Talia sitting alone in an unfurnished hospital room backdropped by the blurred lights of the City of Dreams’ neon skyline, a shot that came close to evoking the vibrant artificial sheen that defined the first season of “Edgerunners” and Cyberpunk 2077.
The sounds of “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2” are likewise relatively muted. Despite the inclusion of some decent though unmemorable music, there’s a notable absence of the game’s radio tracks that permeated throughout the first season, with no equivalent alternative here to set a tone other than desolate.
Capri especially feels nothing like the technology from the city she’s from. It’s absurd how she’s even slightly supposed to be the same technology that put 2077’s Johnny Silverhand in V’s head. She is evidently wholly Trigger’s creation, with her animated stylization especially reminiscent of Trigger’s early works like “Kill la Kill.”
Speaking of Trigger, its usage of limited animation is also far more noticeable this time around. But those few moments where the studio’s stylization can really let loose are great, especially with the brief glimmers of Talia’s distinctly slick movement that elevates her visual presence of striking outfits and extensive cyberwear augments, at least until she’s forced back to hospitalization.
“Edgerunners 2” ends up feeling too much like a Trigger work and not enough like a “Cyberpunk” work, with it frequently acting on the studio’s worst tendencies of poor pacing and an excessively over-the-top central gimmick, and climax, abrasively to the setting’s detriment.
The season is not without its merits, but the ones that exist within Talia and King’s stories are brought down by the additional weaker plotlines that bloat its episodes with a lackluster depiction of its central city. “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2” is a purposefully different revisit but noticeably inferior to the first season’s stellar embodiment of Night City’s treacherous allure.