The first Cyberpunk: Edgerunners closed the book on its street-kid hero, David Martinez, and the sequel makes no attempt to reopen it. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, the new adult anime series from CD Projekt Red and the Japanese animation studio Trigger, comes to Netflix with a new crew of mercenaries and an all-new voice cast. At its centre is Weak, an edgerunner who once went by King and was at the top of his game, now washed up and forced to live in Night City without the chrome that made him dangerous.

Weak is one of four leads on separate tracks. D, whom Netflix calls a deadly nomad, is a Snake Nation netrunner hunting the killer who wiped out his clan, and that hunt brings him close to corporate secrets never meant to be found. Talia Yang was raised in corpo towers but hardened inside Maelstrom, the gang whose culture CD Projekt Red’s character guide calls hyper-violent and chrome-obsessed. Roman Carax is a young cinephile chasing real stories in a city that has abandoned film for braindance, the recorded-experience entertainment of the Cyberpunk universe. The official synopsis says their lives become entangled to the extreme.

Roman is the addition that tells you what kind of story this is meant to be. The character guide says he shadows the lives of others because he is obsessed with documenting truth, only to learn that, unlike his favourite reels, Night City’s stories are messy, brutal and rarely tied up with a clean ending. Netflix has built its pitch around the question he carries: when the world is blinded by spectacle, what extremes do you have to go to make your story matter? The synopsis closes on the same idea, promising a story of family, obsession, legacy and how your lens reflects the stories of the people around you.

The turnover behind the camera is as large as the one in front of it. Hiroyuki Imaishi directed the first series; Kai Ikarashi makes his directorial debut on this one. Bartosz Sztybor, the writer and producer of the first Edgerunners and CD Projekt Red’s franchise creative director for Cyberpunk, steps up to showrunner, with Masahiko Otsuka adapting the screenplay and Ichigo Kanno as lead character designer. Netflix says the new crew is brought to life in a reimagined animation style, so the look viewers remember from the first series is not a given.

The voices are new as well. In the original Japanese, Kentaro Tone plays Weak, Koki Uchiyama plays D, Akari Kito plays Talia and Momoka Terasawa plays Roman. The English dub gives Weak to the veteran character actor Clancy Brown, with Nazeeh Tarsha as D, Kimoy Lee as Talia and Valeria Rodriguez as Roman.

Sztybor has been clear that this is a new story rather than a continuation. When CD Projekt Red announced the project, he said: “David’s story might be over, but there’s plenty more to discover in Night City.” He promised “a raw, real chronicle of redemption and revenge, something unlike what we’ve done before.” He has also said he pitched the series to Trigger as reminiscent of Pulp Fiction and Léon: The Professional. The premise suggests the comparison is structural: separate criminal lives that collide, and a young outsider who gets too close to a world of professional killers.

The stakes for CD Projekt Red are commercial as much as creative. The first series entered Netflix’s top ten with 14.88 million hours viewed in its first week, its success helped lift sales of the video game Cyberpunk 2077 to 20 million units, and it won Anime of the Year at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards. A sequel with no returning leads is a bet that audiences came for Night City itself, not only for David and Lucy. Netflix’s latest sneak peek, which teases an escape from an Arasaka building, puts the megacorporation at the heart of the game back in the frame.

Even the soundtrack signals a change of register. The first series opened with Franz Ferdinand’s This Fffire. The sequel opens with The Cure’s 10:15 Saturday Night and closes with Watson by Petite Meller.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, Netflix anime series — Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2. Photo: Netflix

On paper, the sequel turns the first series’ premise around. That story followed a street kid on his way up to becoming an edgerunner; Weak’s starts after the rise, with a former king defined by what he has lost. And Roman’s camera sets up the question the series seems designed to leave open: in a city that turns every life into content, does recording someone’s story protect it, or just make it one more thing to sell?

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 premieres on Netflix on October 20, 2026, with ten episodes. It is a standalone story set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, so newcomers do not need to have seen the first series, which premiered on Netflix in September 2022 and remains on the service. Kai Ikarashi directs for Trigger and CD Projekt Red, with Bartosz Sztybor as showrunner.