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.
I watched it when it was first getting big, so my memory might be kind of fuzzy, but my copium thought-deeper-than-thought reading of it was:
This story is David's happy ending under capitalism. It sucks a fuckton, but that's because every other ending sucks a fuckton. One guy on his own was not going to start the revolution. But you know what he got? He didn't have to bow his head as deeply to the shitty and abusive system as everybody else. He got to hit it back, even. He got to keep his humanity right up until the end. He got to live as part of a (small) community in a real and meaningful way. He got friends who put their lives on the line for him and who he put his life on the line for. The dream he wanted to grant to Lucy was essentially what she convinced herself she wanted rather than what she actually wanted, marketing having told her it would fill the hole in her self. That doesn't matter to David, though. He got to give the 10/10 knockout girl he was crazy over her dream. Compare his life to most anybody else around him. You think the guy hooked up to the vacuum blowjob fleshlight drooling out of his slacked jaw next to the train station has a better life? The rich corpo kids who will live without ever feeling a genuine connection to something greater than themselves in their whole lives, driven insane by the unjustified violence their class position demands that they inflict? David died a painful, awful death. So did most of his friends. But it's the only real end that could come from a life lived to the fullest under his circumstances.