TV: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

I'm not breaking any new ground when I say that the December 2020 launch of CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 was an unmitigated disaster.  The game was buggy, unfinished, and in some cases unplayable, all in spite of the brutal year-plus crunch period the studio higher-ups demanded. But as surprisingly bad as Cyberpunk 2077 was, it did spawn a surprisingly good anime, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, now streaming on Netflix:

Edgerunners follows David, a "street kid" struggling to survive in a megacorporation-dominated metropolis called Night City.  After an accident causes him to drop out of school, he throws in with a crew of "edgerunners" - mercenaries who take on outrageously dangerous jobs for the corporations for equally outrageous pay. But as David rises through the ranks of this dystopia, will he lose his friends? Will he lose himself?

Edgerunners was produced by Studio Trigger (Little Witch Academia), and it features beautiful, sometimes-chaotic animation and a dazzling score. The series has a melancholy tone reminiscent of anime like Cowboy Bebop - a tragic revenge tale with a bad end that you (and the characters) can see coming a mile away. The excellent ending credits theme, "Let You Down" by Dawid Podsiadło, pretty well captures the tone of the series: