The first episode of the Cyberpunk anime was kinda bad in the heavy handed, generic way that was somehow both slow and too fast paced for a 26 minute thing.
And then I saw that it was done by the guy who did Promare, a movie I fucking think sucks massive ween, and then it all clicked.
@Fabricant451, I quit watching after the first episode, as well (?).
Well since Edgerunners is the topic of discussion and i've just gotten done watching it with my roommate, i'll pitch in my two cents: Going off of these two in particular.
Edgerunners is...
fine? Like...it's okay? It's not
bad? But in that same breath I hesitate to call it "good". It's very...
standard. For a beat-by-beat, plot-point perspective, Edgerunners has
nothing new to bring to the table.
Edgerunners - much like its contemporary in Cyberpunk 2077 - is like your first girlfriend: She's nice. Kinda cute. You two get along and go out, not a whole lot, but just enough. But she's also really just
basic. And if this is baby's first forray into cyberpunk, then like your first girlfriend, you'll probably be madly in love with her for a few months, then after a while, after you grow and know one another for a while, you two just drift apart. Then you two stop talking for a bit. You meet new people, and every now and again, you think of her - and you sorta struggle to really bring it to yourself to like her again. But she's your first, and the nostalgia will forever be there.
For fans of the cyberpunk genre -
especially those who have been really long-time, 10, 20, even 30 year fans of it - Edgerunners is
very archetypical. None of the characters are bad - but they do fall a bit
too neatly into their contemporary archetypes, and these aren't really shaken up in really all too interesting of ways. They're all pretty well written with their own motivations for being around and doing everything they do (a nice change of pace from the usual shitfest of excuse motivations that most anime characters fall into), and if you know the archetypes, you know exactly what's going where and what whose deal is. My roommate really loved him, but personally David wasn't anything mind-blowing to me: He was another street kid with dreams of grandeur, looking for a way up who just can't seem to keep his head on straight.
On the note of some whiplash, there are a
lot of scenes in Edgerunners that are really colorful, bright, flashy action scenes full of blood and bullets...and all that bright and vivid neon just can't really cover up the really just
mediocre choreography. None of the gunfights are particularly exiting. I think a lot of that boils down to the sort of awkward shotwork that comes out of animation as a medium - it's less of an issue to show off really good gunfight action in live action where you can position it wherever you please, but even in an era of computer-assisted animation, even the pros get it difficult to pin down. The end result here are a lot of really just gosh darn frustrating scenes that have some of the neat
parts sprinkled around, but just can't pull it all together to make a shootout scene worth a damn.
It just leaves me in an odd spot to put Edgerunners. Nothing about this show is bad, and I can sure give some praise here and there for certain scenes...but in the whole scene of eveything cyberpunk, for all its eponym suggests, Edgerunners seems pretty content to stay far from the cutting edge.
