This article avoids critical spoilers of the game and animation plots as much as possible. Readers who care about the complete viewing experience should still read as appropriate. A week after
broadcasted the animation "Cyberpunk Edge Walker", the online number of "Cyberpunk 2077" on Steam exceeded 80,000 for a long time, and it is also the only single-player game among the top ten online players on Steam. The current promotion page of
2077 is also the linkage content of "Edge Walker".
has also increased the game's praise rate. Although the overall evaluation is still "mostly favorable", the number of favorable comments received by 2077 has increased significantly recently.
Whether it's popularity or reviews, this upward trend has been going on for several days.
This kind of "recovery" of course includes the influence of special promotions and content updates of the game itself - the last time it was half price, 2077 ushered in a wave of praise, and in the past two years, CDPR has The unfavorable start of 2077 has made a lot of compensatory repairs and optimizations. The version number of the game has been iterated to 1.6, which can basically provide most PC players with an acceptable playing experience.
But as long as you take a look at the recent player reviews, it is not difficult to feel the publicity effect brought by this animation adaptation - people from different countries and languages are shouting "Adam Hammer must die!" Some players added a large section of the animation after the previous game review, and then changed the original bad review to a positive one.
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"Edgewalker" does have a kind of magic, it is easy to make people want to experience 2077 again after watching it.
This aspect is of course because of the uneasy plot of the animation - just like the proverb that the NPCs in the game hang in their mouths: "The legends of the night city are in their graves", the story is not halfway, the audience has already Through various lines and plot hints, you can know the life direction of the protagonists.
Episode 4 lines
This is why players flock to the game after watching the animation to beat Adam Hammer - this character represents the ceiling of Night City's force, and is also used as a combat level in animation and games The appearance of "Final Boss" also brought heavy losses to the protagonist group. The timeline of the
animation is one year earlier than the game, so when the audience sees in the animation that the protagonist group is about to meet the heavy hammer who will live well, they actually already understand that they will have more troubles in the future.
In the game, the player's V is almost the only one who can sanction the hammer
Finding Adam hammer to clear up these old and new hatreds is enough to make people download the game back, but the animation can inspire people to replay the game That's not all that comes to mind.
Compared with the game that can be cleared in dozens of hours at every turn, the plot content contained in the short ten-episode animation is undoubtedly much thinner. Many plots are reflected through the montage lens and blank space, and even make people feel a little bit. in a hurry. But in such a limited space, it is full of some settings that compromised for gameplay in the original work. In the worldview of
in 2077, people with too much hardware implanted in their bodies will suffer from "cyber psychosis", gradually lose their humanity, and eventually fall into madness until they are annihilated by the terrorist mobile team.
animation shows the end of cyber psychosis at the beginning
In the game, these cyber psychosis authors mainly appear in some branch bounty tasks, and the role positioning is similar to "red famous elite monsters in the wild". But in the animation, "becoming a cyber psychopath and being killed" or "being killed by a cyber psychopath" is almost the common destiny of the marginal characters who rely on prosthetics to create fights and kills, even for the protagonist David. The protagonist group is no exception. The
animation maintains a gripping plot tension throughout the whole process, which is largely derived from the setting outside the main line of the game. It reveals the direction of the whole story early, and also allows players to look at the game from another angle. The protagonist V.
No matter which opening he chooses in the game, V's life will usher in a similar situation to David's - encountering similar partners, embarking on similar paths, falling into similar fates... The two of them seem to be taking the same script , even the promotional video edited by CDPR does not shy away from such a correspondence.
It is precisely with such a mirror that players can truly feel what is special about V - David has endured the side effects of implanting a military prosthesis in the play, which has given him a far superior battle. Power, gradually became a climate among gangs, but after implanting more prosthetics in the later period, he still could not avoid the onset of cyber psychosis, wearing a "protagonist halo" in the eyes of others.
And the V controlled by the player in the game, even after replacing the whole body with a legendary prosthesis, still maintains the rationality of a normal person, and is undoubtedly the real "chosen person".
Shortly after the game was released, the line "You are the famous V" was most often used to ridicule by players - V in the game was always referred to by NPCs after he emerged, but players often still received it. It's some errands and stuff that makes this polite remark look like a sneer.
"Edgewalker" shows everyone how David struggled to fight the side effects of prosthetic implants, how to actively take up the dirty work just to find survival value in the cracks of Night City, and finally How to set off a bloodbath in Arasaka Tower and become the legend of Night City... These are enough to make people feel that V, who performed better later, is a well-deserved protagonist of the game, and must be a dazzling existence in Night City.
In the words of some players, the sense of substitution brought by this animation is even stronger than that of the game. The dozens of hours of game experience failed to convince them that V was really valued in Night City, and they could not identify with themselves. The mission accomplished is meaningful at the story level, which the ten-episode animation does.
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There have always been many propaganda projects for game adaptation animations, but there are only a handful of examples like "Edgewalker" that are comparable to "helping the dead" and "helping the wounded", so it is no wonder that many people commented after watching the animation: "CDPR really It's time to give the Trigger Club a knock."
CDPR's producers also tweeted to thank people for giving 2077 a second chance because of animation
But among animation fans familiar with Trigger Club, you will hear another saying, "Thanks to this CDPR Pulled the reins", in their opinion, "Border Walker" is also an extraordinary performance in Trigger Club's works in recent years, and CDPR has contributed to it.
Last year, when the news that "CDPR will cooperate with Trigger to make a derivative animation for "Cyberpunk 2077"" was first made public, many people were not optimistic about this cooperation. At that time, 2077 was still in the quagmire of bad reviews, and no one thought that based on such an original work, any outstanding animation could be improved. Similarly, at this time there were alsoMany people are tired of the "three axes" of the Trigger Club.
Trigger Club's works often bring continuous sensory stimulation to the audience through exaggerated lines, soundtracks and screen performances, reaching an emotional climax. This narrative style is the main feature of Trigger Club's works, but it is often criticized as "waste burning" - the strong emotional expression usually dilutes the rationality of the plot and the behavioral logic of the characters, and finally manifests as "the slogan is shouted to the sky. sound, but the core of the story does not stand up to scrutiny.”
Trigger Club's style is to use the most burning pictures and voice to shout the most inexplicable lines
If "Edge Walker" is the Trigger Club's own work, then the final ending must be David and his companions rushing to the moon Fly to the universe, and before the players can take action, David will personally blow up Adam's hammer, and then smash the Arasaka Tower, which symbolizes the exploitation and oppression of the bottom group.
But the final "Edgewalker" is obviously not such a cheerful story. The whole film has a consistent "mourning", a sense of fate that even the most human beings can't escape, which is a rare atmosphere in Trigger Club's past works.
In other words, the tonality of the Trigger Club itself is not compatible with the rather depressing theme of " Cyberpunk ", and it can have today's performance. Many people believe that it is inseparable from the imposition of CDPR. Impact.
, who is affiliated with CDPR, is responsible for coordinating the production of "Edgewalker". In an interview, he said that the reason why CDPR chose Trigger among several animation companies was because he could not imagine what they would produce." What would cyberpunk animation look like, but ended up paying a heavy price for this "fun man" mentality.
Trigger's animators didn't act like "Party B" who produced on-demand at all. They had a strong desire to control the work, so they directly called back the first draft script provided by CDPR, and the reasons given were almost straightforward" You don't understand animation".
CDPR, who is quite confident in content production, certainly cannot let the Trigger Club let go of itself. The first draft they provided was originally a more gloomy and gloomy story, and the relationship with the game plot is also smaller, and the Trigger Club has never accepted this." Too dark" story, the two sides have been running back and forth for nearly two years just for the original story.
still retains the traces of pulling and gaming in today's films, the most well-known is the irritable loli Rebecca - CDPR once asked to delete her scene on the grounds that "it is not suitable to appear in this series", but Trigger Club She insisted on retaining this character, and now she has become the hottest anime character in Europe and the United States.
Rebecca is a unique character who is quite "trigger style"
Honma's job is sometimes to mediate between the two sides of the heated debate, and sometimes to maintain contact between the two sides who are caught in the cold war and do not communicate with each other, and finally decide This is a script that interprets the main story of the game from another angle.
As far as the results are concerned, the cooperation between Trigger Club and CDPR has indeed achieved mutual success, and the animation and game script have been sublimated to a certain extent. The
game gives players many choices, but many players finally feel that they have no choice; the animation audience can only watch David go to the end, but can feel that he chose this path by himself.
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11zRegardless of the plot, "Edgewalker" has carried out a detailed restoration of the 2077 game scene, which also allows players to observe the world from another angle. Most of the scenes drawn by
Trigger Club in the animation come from the real scenes in the game. Players can see many familiar scenes and NPC characters in the animation.In the game, conduct a "Holy Land Tour" to find the residences of the animated protagonists. Some of them correspond directly to the homes of David and V, while others can be noticed with some careful attention.
Also found in the game is the hospital where David's mother died. The specific cause of death of David's mother is not explained in the story, but in the game, this place has been occupied by the "scavenger" gang who sells prosthetic organs through kidneys, which seems to imply that David's mother also died. , is Trigger Club's clever way to express the "too dark" bridge.
The hospital in the animation and the Sequoia mental hospital in the game
After the film went live, CDPR also updated the in-game easter egg quest, from which players can obtain some related equipment and know the follow-up movements of some characters in the play. It's just that compared to the natural placement in the animation, such a simple linkage seems a bit perfunctory. Many players said that the touch brought by these accessories and props is far less than the inadvertent sound of the animation on the radio in the game.
In the animation, David hates carbonated drinks, but the Easter egg drink named after him in the game is mixed with Coke for some reason , try to bring the characters back to the game and rewrite their stories.
Many of these mods have been downloaded by tens of thousands.
In addition to the game, there are also more people who want to change the original ending. There are painters at home and abroad who have drawn the Happy Ending of "The Edge of the Rogue" in the style of the original work. It is a more in line with the previous "trigger wind" ending. Fanart like
are mostly born to cure many viewers who are depressed by the ending of the animation, but some wicked meme like "hell joke" will inevitably appear. A more powerful transformation...
, just like this animation, has also been criticized to a certain extent, and it is believed that its "little family" of romantic love still dissolves the original spiritual core of "cyberpunk" and becomes a purely emotional consumer product. These contents It is still unable to escape the fate of being further deconstructed and entertained.
Conclusion
Compared with 2077, which sold 18 million copies in the highly anticipated year and then was flooded with saliva, "Edgewalker" is also like a mirror - quietly on the shelves with limited publicity, and then relying almost only on word of mouth Spread, it has become one of the most successful game adaptation animations today.
To this day, the controversy surrounding 2077 has not stopped. Some people still think that the marketing and sales of this game are comparable to a scam, and some people regret that this work may be able to get it if it takes a more low-key and down-to-earth publicity route. Higher achievement, like Edgewalker is now.
But no one knows if changing a choice will really make everything better, or if the real world is actually the same as in the show, there are not so many options.
Since its launch in 2077, CDPR's share price is now almost one-fifth of what it was at its peak
