We Liked: That It’s Stylish as Hell
Unsurprisingly for a Trigger series—especially one directed by Imaishi himself—a lot of the joy in Edgerunners is its bold aesthetic. The anime takes the grimy world of Night City as seen in 2077 and saturates it with distinctive color, from splashes of violent red to the neon haze of city streetlights, but especially in its use of the bright yellow that defined a lot of the marketing for the game—cleverly baked into David’s design in the form of his mother’s medic jacket, which he takes as his own after she perishes in a traffic accident.
There is never not a moment its characters don’t just look cool. The visual effect to create the activation of their enhanced cybernetic abilities, even as the narrative descends into a warning of how they slowly drive each user to a state of degenerative “cyberpsychosis,” is done so well that you cannot help feel excited that something extremely cool is about to happen whenever it occurs—no matter how gut-wrenching it becomes as you realize you’re watching the decline of these characters along the way.
