I haven’t played Cyberpunk 2077 yet because my current computer probably isn’t powerful enough to run it. But I actually own the pencil and paper Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game so it’s kind of crazy to think that I’m watching an anime adaptation of it thirty years after I had this book in high school. This adaptation has a rather straightforward storyline and I can’t say I like the protagonist’s motivation being about getting a girl. Still it nails the dystopian, life is cheap and meaningless theme of the cyberpunk genre perfectly and the hectic visuals capture this vibe well.

David Martinez is an ordinary teenager being raised by his single mother who works as a medical technician. He attends the prestigious Arasaka Academy though his mother Gloria can barely afford the fees and he is made fun of by his fellow students. One day they are caught in the middle of a crossfire and Gloria is killed. David struggles to pay the bills and finds a military-grade Sandevistan spine implant that Gloria had stolen from a dead cyberpsycho. He goes to a black market ripperdoc to have it installed in himself to get revenge on a student at school and meets a netrunner Lucy who teaches him to pickpocket using the enhanced speed granted by the implant. David gets close to her and she shares her dream of going to the moon to escape Night City. But Lucy betrays him to a team of edgerunners she works for and their leader Maine tells David he knew Gloria and had already paid her for the Sandevistan implant. David talks Maine into allowing him to join the team and their first mission is to steal data from the driver of a high level Arasaka executive.

This isn’t the easiest show to parse with its kinetic, high energy visuals and how it likes to show text messages between characters in small boxes. The plot moves very quickly and characters die by the boatload so there’s no fear of the story dragging out and it sure doesn’t shy away from bloodshed and sex. The grimdark hopelessness of life in Night City is much in evidence right from the start as we see David and his mother struggle with mundane daily needs, how everything including emergency medical attention costs money and the casual, senseless violence in the streets. It plays up the thrills but also extreme risks of life as an edgerunner, as the characters become addicted to the endless cycle of cybernetic upgrades to make themselves faster, stronger, and deadlier while using drugs to control the side effects. The action escalates to absurd levels later in the show, as their enemies bring in tanks and artillery platforms to deal with what should be only a small mercenary team. I’m irked by how increasingly unrealistic it eventually gets but before that the combat and gunplay is reasonably plausible.

As a longtime fan of the genre, there are several things I found to be missing. For one thing, netrunning and hacking in general are central to many parts of the plot but the show isn’t really interested in depicting how it works. It mostly just uses it as an excuse to draw Lucy being mostly naked while doing it. Then there’s how the cybernetic implants are all about being faster, stronger, tougher, which is a very anime way of handling clashes of raw power. It’s not very interested in exploring smartguns or implants that make someone smarter or even anything about the wider world outside of edgerunning. Lucy’s monomolecular whip similarly is a gimmick instead of being treated as a serious weapon. Most of all though, none of the characters in here are psychologically very complex or even well developed. It may be in keeping with the spirit of cyberpunk that everyone is so beaten down and have no dreams beyond living just one more day, so it feels stupid to have experienced people like Maine see the fate of cyberpsychosis in their future and still barrel straight towards it.

The producers of the show seem to understand its inherent limits as CD Projekt has stated it will only ever have this one single season despite its popularity. It’s a solid cyberpunk show and it’s pretty great that it goes all out with the sex and violence. It isn’t a great show like Arcane with great worldbuilding and complex characters but it’s entertaining and it doesn’t feel dumb. That’s good enough for me.