tbh i feel like all of the characters in edgerunners are fucking retarded and there is a lot of suspension of disbelief that has to go on to think that anyone would do practically anything they did throughout the whole thing except maybe becca or lucy. becca is at least just kind of insane, and lucy at a certain point did everything she could to protect david (as did becca despite being crazy which shows what room trigger had to work with but did fuck all with), but the shitty thing is that it was all for absolutely nothing because david is retarded and didn't really give a shit enough about either of them. he's a horrible character.

the music and animation itself was great, as was the action holy shit, and yeah of course there has to be some mayhem that happens along the way, but i am just not a fan of the overly bleak shit that you REALLY have to buy into to believe. i'm not usually a fan of any amount of suspension of disbelief when it comes to character motive. that happened in the game too, especially toward the end.

maybe nobody knows how to write a satisfying ending to cyberpunk or something... although that's not the same for the whole genre. blade runner gets it right, tron gets it right. the cyberpunk endings have just so far been subpar to subshit.

about halfway through the series i could tell it was going to be that way, too, but kept watching in hopes that somehow SOMEONE would have a come-to-jesus moment but it never happened like it ought to have.

maine pissed me off a lot too, like the dude was super cool and seemed like he cared about people but then just is really a retard and ends up going cyberpsycho for absolutely no reason. shit like that could have been 100% avoided like so much else in the show if the characters were at least somewhat believable instead of servicing a depressing plot just for the sake of being depressing.

5/10 for me, i guess. i might get shit for thinking that, and how "cyberpunk is like supposed to be ultra bleak man" but it really doesn't have to be. blade runner, ghost in the shell, tron legacy, alita, they're all examples of this.

edgerunners really puts the "edge" in it and it's just not something i'm a fan of.

if i were to do a rewrite of it, i'd probably use pilar's death (you know, the super forgettable guy that was becca's brother that hardly gets mentioned?) as a turning point for everyone to not be so retarded and self-centered, and actually start to think about how their actions might affect not just themselves but the team too. maybe maine is already too far gone with all of his chrome and does end the same way he did originally but instead of compromising a mission and getting a teammate killed, he goes out in a blaze of glory as he's well aware what is going to happen to him and tells everyone to not follow him. after that, david realizes he probably shouldn't be chroming up anymore instead of being a little faggot and just turning his whole entire body into cyberware, because he knows exactly what will happen to him if he does. they continue to take jobs and eventually faraday does try to pull some strings and gets david captured (because he isn't as strong without all the chrome) which results in some hijinx, basically every other character but lucy dying in the "last gig" to go and save him. david knows they actually cared about him enough to try and save his ass and knows if he keeps going he's just going to get more people that care about him killed, so he throws in the towel with the absurd amount of money he has and fucks off to the moon with lucy, maybe even giving up the sandy for good (if that's even possible).

it can still be a melancholic ending because he does get to go to the moon with her, but everyone else has died and they died for him specifically, so he has to live with that now. instead, all of that baggage is placed on lucy.

fuck, the ending would have been better if lucy died instead of him and he went to the moon by himself. that would arguably be more bleak but at least david would have to live with the consequences of his pride and selfishness, plus it would come full circle to the beginning of the anime where he was all alone in the world.

and to quell a counterargument of lucy being the one who started it all or something, i don't really think that's fair. david started it when he had the sandy installed despite not knowing who it was supposed to go to or where it was even from... just a very selfish decision made out of rage that ended up ruining not just him but everyone he ended up running with too. the shitty part is that there were SO MANY times he could have turned it around, everybody told him over and over again and you would think that at a certain point, ESPECIALLY after seeing what happened to maine first hand, he'd stop being such a fag. he could have stopped when becca told him to. or lucy. if he actually cared about them, he would have. i seriously do not like his character, at all, he's a bitch.

maybe some things could have been expanded upon if the show was longer. i don't know if they had a specific deal with netflix where they could only make so many episodes or something, but if it was twice or three times as long i feel like there could have been a lot more character interaction that fleshed everyone out a lot more and really changed the direction the story went. i just can't believe that the characters in there made a lot of the decisions they did, and if it were a longer anime i think it would have naturally flowed in a direction where the characters are built upon so much that not only are the viewers supposed to believe they really care about each other, but the writers realized it enough to make sure they actually seemed like they did. especially david man, god dammit.