I finished watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 at home this weekend, and I feel like the overall quality of the story has dropped badly.

The relationships are a complete mess. Maybe they crammed in too many characters, and ten episodes simply aren’t enough to give them nuanced emotions. Then again, maybe nobody in Night City cares about nuanced emotional stories anyway.

The character concepts, at least, are quite inventive. There’s a simp so deeply in love with his ex that his affection extends to her daughter, whom he’s willing to give his life to protect. A cold, ruthless father with a born villain’s face who would sell out his own daughter for the company’s interests (no wonder he made it to the executive ranks in this world). Then there’s the female lead, who’s into little boys younger than her and likes having short videos taken of herself. The little-boy male lead is so into photography that he runs around filming everything with a video camera (I personally consider him the main male lead, given how much screen time he gets). And there’s the second male lead, whose brain must have been caught in a door, mistaking AI’s abilities for his own (which does feel like a jab at the current state of Vibe Coding). Plus a handful of unimportant supporting characters. Everyone looks like they’ve got a story, but not a single one gets told… Maybe everyone was just too busy to give them all any attention.

On a scale of 0–10, I’d give it a 3. Purely for nostalgia. The ending doesn’t come close to the impact of the first season, and the finale starts big only to fizzle out, leaving you wondering what on earth is going on. The second male lead just drops dead. Also, with all those scenes of the little-boy lead filming this and that, I thought we’d at least get a final montage, quickly revisiting all the storylines from the first episode onward and giving us something to look back on. Instead, nothing… All that cutting between shots and filming amounted to nothing…

All in all, Night City’s story goes on, and an individual’s fight against capital always comes to nothing. All the destructive incidents and unrest in the city, and the lives of ordinary people, barely register in the eyes of the big corporations. As long as there’s enough profit in it, even firing missiles at the city is fine.

Finally, here’s a beautiful photo of the female lead.