(L) Cyberpunk: Edgerunners [Netflix]

[Renegade334]

If we want to get technical, Night City is rife with injector- and inhaler-type health boosters, like MaxDoc, Black Lace and Bounce Back. Some of these simply spike your bloodstream with a massive quantity of endorphins and adrenalin, which essentially act as painkillers. Cyberpsychos and Corpo Wars veterans have even been noted to be particularly fond of Black Lace for that reason.

MaxDoc differs from Bounce Back in that the former acts instantaneously, whereas the latter takes effect over time, which leads me to think that MD is more of a painkiller while its counterpart is more of a regenerative agent.

David could have used any of the three products, plus steroids, to stave off any damage and lingering aches, but MaxDoc, at least in-game, only gives you back 25% of your health, while Bounce Back goes up to 80%. That means attrition is still in play - and that's not counting higher risks of cybernetic overload, which in turns leads to cyberpsychosis.


As a side note, in CP2077, there is a watchable TV news broadcast that reveals that nanite treatments are a thing in this world, although it is practically a given that only the 1% can afford them (the newly-developed cure for multiple sclerosis, for one, comes at a hefty price of 700,000 eurodollars per month! That's almost the equivalent of three trips to the Moon in one month).

[AC-Phoenix]

The way the anime clarified Cyberpsychos makes them actually worse than before... If the number of implants would really affect it, governments would put out legal limits. At least for non Corpos and Government people...

[Renegade334]

Not in 2077. Governments have corpo hands so far up their colons that, instead, deregulation constitutes the norm. It's a time where air pollution in certain [Eastern] parts Europe has risen by 2,000% but France and other members of the EU refuse to intervene in their industrial output and emission policies for fear of undermining the sacrosanct principle of the free market and its underpinnings. Which is a very sleazy way for them to say that they leave it to the corps to compete with one another and find the solution to the problem themselves.

This is also the world where forming a trade union automatically earmarks the participants as "terrorists" and lethal force is granted to corporations all for the sake of restoring production and service.

It's also a world where a French political activist was arrested and sentenced to 40 years of prison and psychological reeducation/rehabilitation using braindances. His crime? Advocating for pension annuities and social benefits, a change that could potentially destroy the GDP of many developed countries.

Circling back to the topic of cyberpsychosis --- there is, in the game, a news report by Arif Iqbal, quoting the chairman of the implant association who states "it's not the implants that are killing people, but the individuals themselves who misuse our products", in a very NRA-ish fashion.

It's clear no one is interested in taking responsibility, governments are universally unhelpful and are too busy kowtowing to their corpo overlords............and profit margins have a greater weight than any body count.

This is the supercapitalist/hypercapitalist/turbocapitalist/zombie capitalist world of 2077.

[AC-Phoenix]

Finally finished it and go tto say:
Anime logic:

V, a total newb at it can quickhack Adam Smasher to death. Lucy, the Arasaka prodigy netrunner cannot.

[Dark Wing]

Finally sat down watch Edgerunners. This anime encompasses the saying that it's better to burn out than fade away.

[Kanon]

Originally Posted by Dark Wing

Finally sat down watch Edgerunners. This anime encompasses the saying that it's better to burn out than fade away.

I don't think that's what the anime was going for at all. Especially with that final scene. Sure, David is remembered by Night City as a badass, but does it matter? I doubt it makes Lucy feel any better about losing the man she loved.

[MeoTwister5]

Originally Posted by Kanon

I don't think that's what the anime was going for at all. Especially with that final scene. Sure, David is remembered by Night City as a badass, but does it matter? I doubt it makes Lucy feel any better about losing the man she loved.

The entire premise of life in Night City and Cyberpunk in general is that it only cares how you died, not how you lived.

[Alchemist007]

I've only watched up through ep 6 though I've been spoiled (willingly) on the ending. David thinking he's special after being forced to go through minutes/hours of what it's like to be a cyberpsycho is some really idiotic behavior. If anything you'd think he'd learn to be more cautious about further upgrades or overuse.

[Kanon]

Originally Posted by Alchemist007

I've only watched up through ep 6 though I've been spoiled (willingly) on the ending. David thinking he's special after being forced to go through minutes/hours of what it's like to be a cyberpsycho is some really idiotic behavior. If anything you'd think he'd learn to be more cautious about further upgrades or overuse.

He's had a death wish since his mom died. Losing the man he saw as a father figure dealt another heavy blow and made him rush toward death even faster. Sadly, Lucy's love just wasn't enough to save him. That's what makes Lucy by far the most tragic character. All she wanted was to protect him, and she has to live on carrying the weight of her failure.

[ryllharu]

Originally Posted by Kanon

He's had a death wish since his mom died. Losing the man he saw as a father figure dealt another heavy blow and made him rush toward death even faster. Sadly, Lucy's love just wasn't enough to save him. That's what makes Lucy by far the most tragic character. All she wanted was to protect him, and she has to live on carrying the weight of her failure.

All they had to do was speak to one another, trust one another. Like Lucy had at the very beginning when she revealed to David and ONLY David, her personal dream to escape to the moon.

Lucy was keeping secret what she was doing to protect him. David was keeping secret he was pushing himself to the limit so he could satisfy her dream for her.

Had they been working together; they both could have left the city safely.

[magnuskn]

Oooof, finally saw it. Bleak. Really makes you think about what we did to V (or what he did to him/herself) by putting all that cyberware into him/herself. Also, the pure slaughter in this series really makes you think a lot more about how you went about playing your game.

Okay, I actually played a netrunner who just knocked out people, i.e. I never used the suicide hack and all that. So, I really went softly on the opponents. But for my next run I was planning on going with a gun / katana dexterity build. Unless I find the mods for nonlethal damage real quick, I might re-think that now.

Anyway, poor Lucy. And poor Becca.

[Renegade334]

There is...technically, a way for David to survive and make into a Season 2, but it's very unlikely.

Spoiler for big game spoilers:

Just before killing him, Adam Smasher mentions that David would have made an interesting "construct", which is a reference to Arasaka's Relic system, which essentially allows people to preserve the digitalized soul (or at least the personality, since Alt Cunningham eventually became a self-evolving AI gestalt after venturing past the Black Wall to evade Arasaka's Netrunners) of a living person. Arasaka has the means to do that thanks to Alt Cunningham's Soulkiller program, which has been known to "swipe" people off their bodies when they were least expecting it (there is an in-game reference to Soulkiller being used on a Militech corpo so that Arasaka could interrogate him without physically abducting him).

Why it c/sh/would be possible: in the game, once Jackie dies in the Delamain cab after the disastrous gig at Konpeki Plaza, you are offered the option of either sending his body to a ripperdoc or back to his family (Mama Welles, at her bar). Choosing the former comes with an interesting twist: in the ending, you meet Jackie's engram in Mikoshi (Arasaka's digital prison for Soulkiller victims, where Johnny Silverhand was once also kept), meaning that Arasaka swiped his body once it got to Viktor Vektor...and that there IS a way to salvage the body's personality even after death (though it must be done before the brain cells begin to decay).

And...yeah, if Arasaka bothered to Soulkill an already deceased Jackie, then what about David? Soulkiller has been around since 2023, which is when Alt was kidnapped by Arasaka, forced to (re)create SK for her captors and accidentally died during her rescue...all of which drove Johnny to detonate a Militech-supplied nuke Arasaka's Night City headquarters. So it's not some new tech. It's been out and about and the AS corpos use it for high-importance targets. A young man with an astounding affinity for Sandevistan would definitely tick a lot of checkboxes for digital abduction here.

So...Lucy could still meet a digitalized David in a hypothetical season 2 of Edgerunners, provided she gets access to Mikoshi...which is a pretty damn tall order given that in the game, this is only possible in the ending stage when you are forced to mount an all-out assault on Arasaka Tower.

Why it c/sh/wouldn't be possible: well, the first issue is that Adam Smasher blew up David's head, presumably as a grudging show of respect to the one guy who gave him a challenge, to spare him a very dark fate of endless imprisonment. Smasher, while being a loyal attack dog to Arasaka (as a show of gratitude for salvaging his damaged body time and time again), is actually known to internally hate the company (and most people he meets and sees, let's be honest) due to his extreme sociopathy and, yes, stabilized cyberpsychosis. At the end of the day, this cyborg grim reaper will only do as he wishes and this is (subtly) shown in the game when Hanako is taken back by AS shock troopers --- Adam Smasher used more lethal force than Yorinobu (who actually did NOT hate his sister and wanted to keep her alive) was comfortable with. Smasher's whim probably didn't leave much time for the top corpos in Arasaka to prepare Soulkiller to light up David and transfer him to Mikoshi. With David's brains destroyed, there is nothing to save, either.

----Side note: I have seen some people on YouTube speculating about a digitalized David being reprogrammed into an Arasaka lapdog, but the Lizzy Wizzy mission chain in the game reveals that once your soul is digitalized, it cannot be edited anymore. All personality changes must be implemented while the person is still alive and not afterwards----

The other reason is that it would destroy the Noir tincture of the series. As has been said time and again in this thread, nobody gets a happy ending in Night City, and even those who succeed in leaving the metropolis typically bear some big scars for the rest of their life...as in Lucy's case.

And, even if Lucy did somehow manage to meet David in Mikoshi, there would still be a bittersweet parting in store for the two of them, as nobody else aside from Arasaka knows how to digitalize and store a human soul inside a material medium (the Relic). Mikoshi is satellite-based and its few access points on Earth are heavily defended by Arasaka. In the game, it took the most powerful AI in existence, Alt Cunningham (or, more exactly, Alt's AI-ified personality, evolved beyond imagination and hungry for more contributions to its source code), and V's help in creating a physical backdoor in the Mikoshi network, to actually crack open the prison, then break out all Soulkilled AIs and herd them into the uncharted, digital wildlands that lie beyond the Black Wall firewall. Even a Netrunning genius like Lucy would have trouble achieving this all on her own.

Not to mention that by the end of the game, even Soulkilled characters (Alt, Johnny, Jackie) bitterly acknowledge that they're but pools of swirling data, not people, and that they're therefore not the real thing. Just computer programs aping their past selves.

As for using a Relic like the one Silverhand's personality was downloaded into...? Yeah, it could work, although...inserting the shard into one's head will kill you, overwriting your personality with your digital guest's...and rearranging your DNA and immune system to treat your faltering consciousness as a biological intruder, thus hastening the takeover process (which is basically the same thing that happens to Alcatraz in Crysis 2/3). A very cruel and painful end, no need to say.

And, and the CP2077 YouTube channel dropped this yesterday:

YouTube

https://youtu.be/h4VJGNNSQnw

Sorry; dynamic content not loaded. Reload?

[MeoTwister5]

David died in a blaze of glory (sort of), which is pretty much how those who want to make some sort of mark on the City want to go. I'm more interested to see more stories of others in Night City since it's been shown that they can do successfully with Edgerunners.

[AC-Phoenix]

Originally Posted by Renegade334

There is...technically, a way for David to survive and make into a Season 2, but it's very unlikely.

Spoiler for big game spoilers:

Just before killing him, Adam Smasher mentions that David would have made an interesting "construct", which is a reference to Arasaka's Relic system, which essentially allows people to preserve the digitalized soul (or at least the personality, since Alt Cunningham eventually became a self-evolving AI gestalt after venturing past the Black Wall to evade Arasaka's Netrunners) of a living person. Arasaka has the means to do that thanks to Alt Cunningham's Soulkiller program, which has been known to "swipe" people off their bodies when they were least expecting it (there is an in-game reference to Soulkiller being used on a Militech corpo so that Arasaka could interrogate him without physically abducting him).

Why it c/sh/would be possible: in the game, once Jackie dies in the Delamain cab after the disastrous gig at Konpeki Plaza, you are offered the option of either sending his body to a ripperdoc or back to his family (Mama Welles, at her bar). Choosing the former comes with an interesting twist: in the ending, you meet Jackie's engram in Mikoshi (Arasaka's digital prison for Soulkiller victims, where Johnny Silverhand was once also kept), meaning that Arasaka swiped his body once it got to Viktor Vektor...and that there IS a way to salvage the body's personality even after death (though it must be done before the brain cells begin to decay).

And...yeah, if Arasaka bothered to Soulkill an already deceased Jackie, then what about David? Soulkiller has been around since 2023, which is when Alt was kidnapped by Arasaka, forced to (re)create SK for her captors and accidentally died during her rescue...all of which drove Johnny to detonate a Militech-supplied nuke Arasaka's Night City headquarters. So it's not some new tech. It's been out and about and the AS corpos use it for high-importance targets. A young man with an astounding affinity for Sandevistan would definitely tick a lot of checkboxes for digital abduction here.

So...Lucy could still meet a digitalized David in a hypothetical season 2 of Edgerunners, provided she gets access to Mikoshi...which is a pretty damn tall order given that in the game, this is only possible in the ending stage when you are forced to mount an all-out assault on Arasaka Tower.

Why it c/sh/wouldn't be possible: well, the first issue is that Adam Smasher blew up David's head, presumably as a grudging show of respect to the one guy who gave him a challenge, to spare him a very dark fate of endless imprisonment. Smasher, while being a loyal attack dog to Arasaka (as a show of gratitude for salvaging his damaged body time and time again), is actually known to internally hate the company (and most people he meets and sees, let's be honest) due to his extreme sociopathy and, yes, stabilized cyberpsychosis. At the end of the day, this cyborg grim reaper will only do as he wishes and this is (subtly) shown in the game when Hanako is taken back by AS shock troopers --- Adam Smasher used more lethal force than Yorinobu (who actually did NOT hate his sister and wanted to keep her alive) was comfortable with. Smasher's whim probably didn't leave much time for the top corpos in Arasaka to prepare Soulkiller to light up David and transfer him to Mikoshi. With David's brains destroyed, there is nothing to save, either.

----Side note: I have seen some people on YouTube speculating about a digitalized David being reprogrammed into an Arasaka lapdog, but the Lizzy Wizzy mission chain in the game reveals that once your soul is digitalized, it cannot be edited anymore. All personality changes must be implemented while the person is still alive and not afterwards----

The other reason is that it would destroy the Noir tincture of the series. As has been said time and again in this thread, nobody gets a happy ending in Night City, and even those who succeed in leaving the metropolis typically bear some big scars for the rest of their life...as in Lucy's case.

And, even if Lucy did somehow manage to meet David in Mikoshi, there would still be a bittersweet parting in store for the two of them, as nobody else aside from Arasaka knows how to digitalize and store a human soul inside a material medium (the Relic). Mikoshi is satellite-based and its few access points on Earth are heavily defended by Arasaka. In the game, it took the most powerful AI in existence, Alt Cunningham (or, more exactly, Alt's AI-ified personality, evolved beyond imagination and hungry for more contributions to its source code), and V's help in creating a physical backdoor in the Mikoshi network, to actually crack open the prison, then break out all Soulkilled AIs and herd them into the uncharted, digital wildlands that lie beyond the Black Wall firewall. Even a Netrunning genius like Lucy would have trouble achieving this all on her own.

Not to mention that by the end of the game, even Soulkilled characters (Alt, Johnny, Jackie) bitterly acknowledge that they're but pools of swirling data, not people, and that they're therefore not the real thing. Just computer programs aping their past selves.

As for using a Relic like the one Silverhand's personality was downloaded into...? Yeah, it could work, although...inserting the shard into one's head will kill you, overwriting your personality with your digital guest's...and rearranging your DNA and immune system to treat your faltering consciousness as a biological intruder, thus hastening the takeover process (which is basically the same thing that happens to Alcatraz in Crysis 2/3). A very cruel and painful end, no need to say.

And, and the CP2077 YouTube channel dropped this yesterday:

YouTube

https://youtu.be/h4VJGNNSQnw

Sorry; dynamic content not loaded. Reload?

We've actually not seen Smasher really shoot, it was just heavily inclined, therefore Arasaka could have stopped him in time, leaving options for david to both become an engram (which Smasher even suggested) and him not being dead at all.

And David isn't even the only one whose death is rather ambiguous.
rebecca still looked rather good, considering that she got SMASHED (pun intended), and KIWI got killed behind a dumpster.

Spoiler for Prototype Chip stuff - Game:

Also, V's case with the chip was kinda special. It wasn't supposed to be slotted into a living person, but an already dead one, if V hasn't died it would have never activated. The whole ordeal V had to go through, was because he died with the Chip already slotted, otherwise he could have probably even take it out, but that last bit is speculation on my part.

[sa547]

As I said in another site, I'm interested in a second season but re-rolling a new character in a different setting, faction, and situation. So many other stories that could come out of the game, like all those D&D playthroughs which resulted in, say, the Record of Lodoss War.

[Alchemist007]

Game sequel announced.

https://mobile.twitter.com/CDPROJEKT...17455524929538

[Ghostfriendly]

Originally Posted by AC-Phoenix

Finally finished it and go tto say:
Anime logic:

V, a total newb at it can quickhack Adam Smasher to death. Lucy, the Arasaka prodigy netrunner cannot.

Lucy had been badly beaten up at that point. If V really was a 'newb' by the time they met Smasher, although being controlled by a player instead of a game can be taken to represent prodigious talent, this sounds like a flaw of the game rather than the anime.

Originally Posted by Kanon

He's had a death wish since his mom died. Losing the man he saw as a father figure dealt another heavy blow and made him rush toward death even faster. Sadly, Lucy's love just wasn't enough to save him. That's what makes Lucy by far the most tragic character. All she wanted was to protect him, and she has to live on carrying the weight of her failure.

Self-destruction isn't exactly the same as desire for death. I'd say he wanted the power to impose his will on the world and give meaning to his life, badly enough to use the quickest and easiest means of obtaining that power for himself, although it would rapidly kill him.

[AC-Phoenix]

Originally Posted by Ghostfriendly

Lucy had been badly beaten up at that point. If V really was a 'newb' by the time they met Smasher, although being controlled by a player instead of a game can be taken to represent prodigious talent, this sounds like a flaw of the game rather than the anime.

given that the anime came first, and Smasher hasn't gotten an ICE since, it's an oversight on the anime's part.
Also If you account for Lucy being heavily beaten up, V was literally on the verge of death, so there is still a huge hole in the anime's logic of Smasher being able to easily repel Lucy's hack there.

[Ghostfriendly]

Originally Posted by AC-Phoenix

given that the anime came first, and Smasher hasn't gotten an ICE since, it's an oversight on the anime's part.
Also If you account for Lucy being heavily beaten up, V was literally on the verge of death, so there is still a huge hole in the anime's logic of Smasher being able to easily repel Lucy's hack there.

My point was that Adam Smasher is presented as a difficult cyborg to kill. There is absolutely nothing unreasonable in itself about a severely beaten Lucy failing to hack such an experienced and augmented cyborg with Arasaka's hacking-defence resources behind him, who has presumably been killing anyone who tried to hack him to death since I think the 2010s. It's a 'newb on the verge of death' managing to hack and kill this final boss which, in itself, requires much more justification than you're giving me if the game isn't weakening its internal credibility with a less-than-probable feat. V needs to have some advantage Lucy didn't have, to hack Adam Smasher without making for an unconvincing resolution. Which Edgerunners would have strongly improved on in terms of drama and likelihood by their ending where Smasher isn't so easily hacked.

[Alchemist007]

Finally finished it, the last 2 eps sure felt fast. I liked the first half more since it felt more like the discovery phase, and the second half was more paying the price, but it is what it is.

8/10