It’s been 5 years since the release of The Witcher 3 by CD Projekt Red, arguably one of the best games (definitely my favorite) of the past decade. We’ve waited patiently for their new project that was revealed at E3 2018, Cyberpunk 2077 which comes out later this year. However, what we weren’t expecting, as we all watched the Night City Wire live stream was a surprise announcement of a new anime based in the universe of the video game called Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
Studio Trigger, the anime production company behind works like Kill la Kill and Promare, has teamed up with Netflix for this standalone 10-episode story that will be set in the universe of Cyberpunk. In the words of CD Projekt Red, it’s a “story about a street kid trying to survive in a technology and body modification-obsessed city of the future. Having everything to lose, he chooses to stay alive by becoming an edgerunner – a mercenary outlaw also known as a cyberpunk”. Who isn’t getting Ghost in the Shell, Akira vibes? Just me? Ok.
The team that will be running the creation of the show includes Hiroyuki Imaishi as a director (he’s known for his previous work on the amazing shows, Gurren Lagann, Kill la Kill and Promare) The creative team will also include assistant director, Masahiko Otsuka, character designers Yoh Yoshinari and Yuto Kaneko, both of whom did work on Little Witch Academia. The screenplay will be designed by Otsuka and Yoshiki Usa who worked on Promare and have been longtime creators at Studio Trigger.
I think it’s easy to say Cyberpunk 2077 is the most anticipated gaming release of the year. Scheduled for a November release on all platforms, it’s launch should be one of the biggest events of the decade considering that the next-gen consoles will be released around the same time. For the anime fans among us, we’ll have to bide our time with the video game and it’s online play (coming out in 2021) until the anime is released on Netflix which won’t happen till 2022.
