Just got done watching the second season of Cyberpunk Edgerunners and I’m gonna leave a quick review while it’s still fresh. Objective Score: 6/10 Subjective Score: 6/10 More thoughts below. SPOILERS Objective Critique: To be plain from the start, this is just an overall weaker effort compared to season one. It both felt like it was rushing and dragging its feet, but in places where it was less tolerable overall. The ending especially felt like they just wanted it all to be over with, which left its overall more “we’re gonna struggle and make it” theming feel jaded in a way, which is something that clashes with what they clearly wanted to convey. The plot itself feels much more scattershot as well, with essentially two A plots running in tandem with their own B plots along with a C plot that was meant to tie them altogether, but just made it all feel cluttered and lacking focus in the end. D is the character that gets the most focus overall, and while I think his “revenge is bad, m’kay” is execution is better than a lot of recent attempts at the theme, it just doesn’t tread ground where we haven’t heard this a thousand times before. Were this more balanced with the other “main cast members” I think I would have tolerated it more, but it wore out its welcome because it started to make the other cast members feel extraneous at points. Roman, Talia, and Weak all feel really underutilized overall, which is crazy because that’s three of the people on the poster. Roman and Weak both feel like total bystanders for the most part, and that may have been the point, but where they’re lacking is the total amount if interaction that you would assume this cast. D only interacts with Roman in a meaningful manner and has like less than 5 minutes with Talia and Weak. He interacts with two other characters far more to the point where THEY feel like the crew more than Weak and Talia do. Where this is most wasted is Talia and Roman, who have the potential to have chemistry equal to David and Lucy from season 1, but the issue was that they were kept apart for so long that even when they had their moment to truly connect, it feels but there out of obligation rather than something of substance. Capri was a cool concept and her interaction with D was actually really well done at the beginning, but again that doesn’t last long enough for anyone to really latch onto because they literally strip Capri of her personality for most of the show when it comes to D. I also wasn’t really a fan of her abilities. I get that she was supposed to be extremely powerful, but after a certain point it stopped feeling like Cyberpunk powerful and just plain magic. Where this show starts to fall apart is when all four of the poster characters meet at the diner. Up until then, the pieces are being laid out and you can feel the potential, see the dynamic that COULD be there, and then it proceeds to throw a wrench in that to split them up for nearly the entire show afterwards. If it was deliberate to subvert expectations, then it gave a loose and relatively meandering plot as a replacement, which is a poor execution of the concept. The pacing and plotting also feels very “so I guess this just happens, I guess” at points. The biggest offender of this is when they just decide to dump D into the junkyard without verifying if they were supposed to kill him or not. Like wtf, I get they wanted a “oh well they were just stupid” moment but it just felt weak. Not to mention one character just serves as a mcguffin dispenser so the plot just happens. And the relic mechanics for Capri are never really convincingly good explained, they, again, just kinda happen that way. The animation was really stunning at moments and I loved the framing of many scenes through the camera and other means as well, but I think it was also lacking in some regards where a lot felt very “slide-y” at moments. Overall, just feels like a lot of wasted potential. Subjective critique in reply.