Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is back with a new season on Netflix on October 20, and today IGN's Fall Fan Fest featured a new teaser to remind you why you'll want to set aside some time for a serious Netflix binge as soon as it drops.
Season one focused on David Martinez, a student with a talent for tolerating cyberware enhancements and netrunner Lucyna "Lucy" Kushinada as they tried to survive Night City as part of its criminal underworld. Season two introduces a new story from the Edgerunners world with Roman Carax, a kid with a taste for old-fashioned movies, and Talia Yang, who is part of a cyberware partial criminal gang called Maelstrom.
After a special fan screening of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 at Anime Expo IGN got to put some questions to CD Projekt Red's Bartosz Sztybor the VP of Franchise and Saya Elder, Executive Producer - Anime about continuing the story after David and Lucy, how the New French Extremity style of horror influenced the games gorier scenes, and which character is the creator's love letter to cinema.
Was the success of season 1 encouraging or terrifying?
Bartosz Sztybo: Both. I’m a person that is never one hundred percent happy with what I wrote. So the success of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was on one hand encouraging — that the stories I write can resonate with so many people. But on the other hand: “Oh, shit. I will never write anything that good again.” It was similar on other levels. From CD PROJEKT RED’s perspective and for Cyberpunk 2077 as an IP, it gave us a lot of confidence that people want such things and we have the strength to do them. But also — how do we top that?!
Saya Elder: It certainly gave us motivation! And confidence to fight for more anime projects.
With David gone, what was the biggest challenge in writing a completely new crew of mercenaries for an audience that got so attached to the first?
Bartosz Sztybo: The biggest challenge was to stop thinking about David and Lucy, and not get into a trap of artificially repeating things that fans fell in love with — or trying to create something extremely opposite. Of course, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 touches on similar things. It also rhymes with Edgerunners; there’s a dialogue between those two, but only to stay true to core principles of the Edgerunners franchise. The good thing was that I already had a few ideas while writing Edgerunners, so I just had to split my writing brain in two — one half to analyze Edgerunners and be able to stay true to it with Edgerunners 2, and the other half to keep unbiased, get back to the old ideas, and have new ones that will be something fresh.
Were there any areas you knew, sitting down to plan season 2, that you had to explore in the Cyberpunk 2077 world and hadn't had the chance too with season 1?
Bartosz Sztybo: I rarely think about the locations when I write or plan stories. I mostly think about themes and characters, so “unexplored areas” for me were not buildings, streets, or districts, but braindances and people working in that industry, backstories and private lives of corporate workers or again the edgerunners lifestyle but from a different perspective. Sometimes I have glimpses of scenes when I start thinking about the story and I search for visual metaphors when talking about or writing a scene, so then some places popped out, but I don’t want to spoil anything.
Incredible head pulping scene in that first episode. When it comes to gore, is there a something that let's you know you've nailed it when you see a scene, and have their been points when you've gone "ooooh too much"
Bartosz Sztybo: I’m a huge fan of David Cronenberg, Takashi Miike, and Julia Ducournau. I was super impressed in the early 2000s by the French new wave of horror, aka New French Extremity — Martyrs, Haute Tension, Trouble Every Day, À l'intérieur, and Frontier(s). Evil Dead is one of my favorite horror series of all time, so when you ask me about gore — I will always say more is better and I’m so happy that Kai Ikarashi digs that too. We understood each other perfectly, to sometimes go into exaggerated gore and sometimes show violence in a very cold, unemotional way with Cormac McCarthy and Michael Haneke as a reference. For real, in Edgerunners 2, you have never seen violence shown in such a way in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe!
Saya Elder: Gore and sex are areas where we typically give TRIGGER room to explore the scene organically during the storyboard phase. I've seen Sztybor try to convey the ideal level of violence in the scripts through onomatopoeia, like, “his head goes CRUSH” or "the building goes BOOM”, and maybe throwing out some wildly grotesque ideas for inspiration here or there. TRIGGER usually takes that and amplifies it in a way only they can.
Roman must be protected at all costs - how did his obsession with filmmaking shape the story of season 2?
Bartosz Sztybo — Everything was very organic. There was this old idea to include braindances in Edgerunners 2 and we started conversations with TRIGGER and Kai Ikarashi that led to certain narrative and visual choices. So Roman shaped Edgerunners 2, but also Edgerunners 2 created and shaped Roman. It’s inspired by the 90s when cinema was different than it is today, which led to an idea of a kid that thinks there’s value in the past, in a cinematic experience versus being plugged into a braindance. That led to many interesting visual ideas that you will see in the show.
Saya Elder: I actually fought so hard against having a child protagonist at first — I knew the audience would string us up by our thumbs the second anything happened to this baby! But Night City doesn't take it easy for anyone, not even a literal child. Roman is motivated by his desire to capture stories through his camera, and that motivation is the reason he keeps ending up in places where no child should ever be.
I loved the line about why stories matter, was that a theme you discovered early on? It feels very true to the CD Projekt Red ethos.
Bartosz Sztybo: Good stories are CD PROJEKT RED’s ethos, that’s true. And Roman is in a way a self-referential character — he’s my, Kai Ikarashi’s, and Masahiko Otsuka’s love letter to cinema. There’s also some of our experience there, when we dreamed about being filmmakers. And finally, it’s a metaphor for cinema's condition.
Saya Elder: Thank you! One of the themes we wanted to explore throughout the series was the generational loss of storytelling methods and technology. I remember talking to my younger cousins and realizing they had no idea what a VHS tape was. As someone who was raised on Disney and DreamWorks tapes, that was shocking and a little bit alarming. In the same way, old film and cinema represent a form of storytelling that is disappearing from Night City. We wanted to explore that in Edgerunners 2.
Speaking of themes, did the season's darker theme of revenge have any effect on the way you wanted the art style or animation to look to reflect it?
Bartosz Sztybo: The art style and animation are connected to a few things. They’re definitely linked with those 90s inspirations. But also some visual ideas, and the way violence is shown in some places, are sometimes meant to be uncomfortable. That’s not connected to revenge, rather to pivoting into a more realistic approach. And finally, Roman’s character gave us the opportunity to play with different points of views and different ways of visual storytelling.
Saya Elder: D is a character haunted by his past, and that surfaces through nightmare sequences and moments of trauma. TRIGGER portrays this in a very specific way. I won’t speak too much about the art style, since that’s TRIGGER’s domain, but one detail I love in Edgerunners 2 is how sweat is animated. It's very wet, and heavy, and unpleasant to look at. There's something deeply uncomfortable about watching characters break out in a cold seat.
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