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I walked into Edgerunners with mixed expectations. On the one hand, Cyberpunk the video game was pretty poorly received upon its release, but on the other hand, Trigger has never disappointed. I am pleased to report that Trigger’s legacy remains untainted, and Edgerunners quickly became one of my favorite anime of the year. Although not necessary, it might behoove anyone interested to also look into the game, since they overlap a lot. If you liked the story of Cyberpunk 2077 and wanted more, Edgerunners will be especially enjoyable to you. Anyways, on to some specifics!

Story: Edgerunners takes place in the grimy yet futuristic Night City, ... a cyberpunk wonderland of dashed dreams and corporate nightmares. The story primarily follows a young boy named David, and his misadventures through the criminal underground of Night City as an edgerunner. The story actually covers a good bit of ground, but I would say your biggest genres here would be action, drama, and romance. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the love story of Edgerunners, even though I feel it falls off a bit in the middle. A final note, at the risk of minor spoilers; Edgerunners has its ups and downs, but it is ultimately more tragedy than triumph. If you prefer all your characters to have happy endings, you might be barking up the wrong tree here. As they say, “no happy endings in Night City.”

Characters: Characters are certainly a strong suit of Edgerunners. All of the edgerunners have really strong designs, both from a visual and personality perspective. Just about all of them are really fun, interesting, and with some depth. I think I liked the interactions in the first half of the story much more than the second half, but when it mellows out a little in the middle it’s clearly by design. David, the protagonist, starts off as a pretty scrappy impatient kid that I figure most viewers could connect with at least a little. At the risk of getting into waifu-posting a little, I especially really liked Lucy. Maybe she just awoke something in me, but I think I really like women who will actually just kill me, but also have a genuinely fun time and send me flying over the moon first.

Visuals: Come on man, it’s Studio Trigger. Say what you want about story, but I don’t think Trigger has ever released a stinker in terms of animation. Edgerunners is vibrant, energetic, and above all, animated. There really aren’t any talking head scenes, and where there are, the characters are still usually very emotive and expressive. I think I could count the seconds of total stillness on one hand. The action scenes are everything you have come to expect from Trigger, with indescribable fidelity and impact on every shot. There really is absolutely nothing to complain about whatsoever visually. Hats off to Trigger, they’ve done it again.

Sound: For the sake of full transparency, I did end up watching Edgerunners dubbed. I’m normally a “We watch subs in this house the way God intended” sort of person, but dubbed just felt right for a world that was modeled after and made by Americans. Not to mention my reptile brain just can’t read subtitles and watch Trigger’s lightning-fast visuals at once. For what it’s worth, the dub voice acting was actually really good. Sound effects really add to the previously mentioned weight and impact of action scenes. Music also goes hard, but you could have probably expected that since Cyberpunk 2077 also goes hard and a chunk of the music is recycled. For the record, I blasted IRWtSaYH way before Edgerunners made it cool. 98.7 for life.

Overall, Edgerunners was a really fun watch. I think it certainly could have stood to be a little longer, but at the same time, it said and did everything it wanted to in the time it had. It really makes the most out of the time it has, and really doesn’t waste a second of screen time. Just about every moment has you feeling some level of suspense and anticipation. I wound up watching it over three days just because I wanted to pace out the excitement. Edgerunners is absolutely worth your time. It’s so good, I actually think I want to go play Cyberpunk 2077 again!

Wonder Egg is, put simply, wonderful. I have no serious complaints at all. The first thing that comes to mind for me personally in terms of comparison is Flip Flappers. Now, if you have watched FF, you might be thinking, “wait, wasn’t FF bad?” and yes, while I disliked a lot of Flip Flappers, Wonder Egg capitalizes on what I like and fixes the things I didn’t like. The shows both use a similar environment, exploring a surreal dreamscape while battling inner demons. Spoiler alert for FF here, but the thing that drove me nuts about FF was how they handled the end. It completely ... killed the mystery of the show for me, one of my favorite parts. Wonder Egg so far at least does not do this. There are things made clear, and there are mysteries left unsolved.

Visuals: 10/10
If you’re a sucker for pretty visuals, just stop reading and start watching right now. WEP absolutely knocks it out of the park. The show greets you with graphical quality that looks like it belongs more in a feature film than a half seasonal. I was blown away by the visual quality by the end of the first OP. The colors are vibrant and saturated, the lighting is beautiful, and the animation is generally smooth. Camera angling and framing is something I particularly think feels very good, especially in action scenes. Speaking of those, they look awesome. I have watched prime-time shonen anime with worse fight scenes than WEP. The fights are choreographed excitingly, with interesting albeit strange character design, and the aforementioned really good cinematography. There may be some room for complaint regarding the see-no-evils, but I can give a pass to this. There is always a large number on the screen, and using some quick CG to get that done faster, while a bit lazy, is completely understandable.

Sound: 9/10
The sound is another exceptionally good aspect of WEP, at least most of the time. Most of the soundtrack is a very orchestral arrangement, and this sounds really nice. The OP especially almost puts a tear in my eye. Character voices are good, especially considering the age range of the characters. All too often my ears are assaulted by overly cutesy and squeaky sounding middle school characters, but these characters actually sound like humans. They have real emotion in their voices. Sound effects are also perfectly acceptable. Often slept on, sound design is usually only noticeable when it is egregiously bad, which it isn’t here. The only reason I don’t have a perfect score here is because of the occasional electronic-sounding music. Yeah, it still slaps, but it feels a little tonally off, so I took a little off for it.

Story: 10/10
This is the part where for many, things get tricky. Note, this show features some heavier themes, including self-harm, suicide, and child abuse. Now, darker elements can often be incorrectly used to try and create some edge, but here I think they are used effectively. I’ve read criticism that the plot is laid out on the table very clearly, and over usage of transparent symbolism mocks the viewer’s intelligence. This is a valid criticism, but I feel that these reviewers sort of missed the point. The small scenes are easy to parse, but the big picture is far more complex. As I mentioned, there are still a lot of mysteries. What are the eggs and where do they come from? What is the dream world that they share? Who/what are Acca and Ura-Acca? These stranger elements of the story are the most intriguing to me, and I applaud WEP for not laying all its cards on the table too hastily.

TLDR; WEP is a part high-energy action, part slice of life drama twelve-episode seasonal. Sporting gorgeous visuals and sound design, it is a feast for the eyes and ears. The story has easier to interpret pieces on the small scale but still has a more complex overarching plot. It features some darker themes, but these aspects are used sparingly and compellingly for emphasis. I highly recommend this to anyone, especially if you wanted something like Flip Flappers but not bad.

Before I actually write out a review to this, I just want to briefly mention a bit about why this anime was particularly important to me. Putting it briefly, it was my first introduction to anime, although I wouldn't know it for a long time. When I was just a little kid, my dad did a lot of weird science stuff for fun. Among many of these things, where ionocrafts, or lifters, back when those were popular. He uploaded a few videos about it on youtube, one of which was used as the example video in the show! https://youtu.be/uF8otSSPgdA Interestingly, the video thumbnail was swapped ... to another popular ionocraft video creator's thumbnail, but the video title and description survived. Comments pestered him and eventually he dug around and figured out it was connected to this show. I had no interest in anime at the time, but this was my first introduction to it. Just a fun aside! On to the actual review.

Story: 10
Good time travel is really hard to pull off. Hell, even good sci-fi is hard to pull off recently. But for what it's worth, Steins;Gate knocks it out of the park. If we are talking actual science, sure, we're way off course. But the enjoyability of the fake science is still great, it's kind of like listening to Star Trek technobable but in japanese. Other than the sci fi, the actual story is phenomenal, one of my favorites, maybe ever. It covers a lot of ground, sci-fi, horror, drama, romance, mystery, and everything in between with a little extra on top. Almost every episode kept me on the edge of my seat wanting more, something i’ve almost never felt while binging a show before. Even after finishing, it still leaves some lingering questions, which I hope will be answered in season 2. I don't want to say too much, as every minute of the story is worth experiencing first hand.

Art: 9
Despite closing in on being a decade old, the art actually still holds up shockingly well. General animation and art quality is comparable to a lot of currently airing shows today. It was a small detail, but the really bright and washed out colors in outdoor scenes really gave me the impression of summer. Even if the cicada sounds wheren’t playing, you would have been able to tell immediately just by the color usage and exaggerated size of the sun. My only complaint is that there are a lot of scenes with characters just standing around and talking without much movement, but this ultimately didn't matter too much because it served the characters and plot well.

Sound: 10
Music was something else I found the show did very well. The music never felt like it was encroaching on dialogue or other important sound effects, and set up scenes and tones extremely well. In some of the earlier episodes, the music really cranked up the horror aspects at some of their discoveries, and expertly built tension in other more suspenseful scenes. There really isn’t a lot to say here, they call it background music for a reason. It did its job, and it did it great.

Character: 9
Characters are certainly another strong suit of the anime. Almost all of the characters have very clearly defined arcs that are entertaining to watch. Seeing what people would do if they could change their past is interesting, but trying to get them to go back to how it was before things changed is even more interesting. This created really great arcs, especially Ruka’s in my opinion. The main characters also have some great development for the most part as well, but with one unfortunate exception in Daru. I just found his arc a little disappointing. While its conclusion was interesting because of what Daru *will* do, it left Daru without much development *right at that moment* in the story. But apart from that, S tier work for everyone else.

Enjoyment: 10
The pacing is great, always wanting me to keep going to the next episode without me ever feeling like there was too much or too little happening on the last one. It masterfully strings together the episodes into one cohesive story in a way that feels like you never miss a beat. It creates questions and gives you just enough to go on to have an idea, and then answers it, and sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong. There really was no aspect of the anime that felt lacking in any particular regard.

Overall: 10