If you didn’t know already, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is out now on Netflix and is wowing viewers with not only its visual style, but its story and how well it portrays its world. Remember, this is based off of Cyberpunk 2077, and yet the show feels like its own entity. There are plenty of reasons for that. Not the least of which is that the team behind the show is Studio TRIGGER. They know how to make things work, which makes you wonder why the differences between the two media are so big at times.
The answer to that is the team didn’t get to play the game, they worked off of documents:
“Well, the game wasn’t fully developed yet at the time we started production, so obviously, no one had ever played the game. Still, we received the documents on the worldbuilding and were told that CD Projekt Red would handle the basic storyline so we assumed that we could start the production with a script in hand. However, as we were making it, we started to encounter differences between games and anime and felt that some parts should be changed for the anime.
We were following the basic storyline provided by CD Projekt Red but we gradually started to give our opinions on how to interpret it into an anime.”
The head of the team further noted that they were much more willing to make the anime different from the show because the notes they got just didn’t feel right:
“While working on the anime, I felt that it’s important to create a flow to let the audience empathize more with the protagonist. The original plot was rather focused on the overall mood. I understood their intention which would work out for a game, but felt the audience may not be able to empathize when adapted into anime.”
The result is that Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is great, and the team behind the game should learn from from Studio TRIGGER did. You can watch the full interview below.
