Top 5 anime to watch while waiting for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2: Akudama Drive, Psycho-Pass and more brutal hits loaded with pure adrenaline

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is two weeks out, and Netflix has already told fans what they are getting. The series premieres on 20 October 2026 as a standalone 10-episode story set in Night City, not a continuation of David Martinez and Lucy. CD Projekt Red and Studio Trigger are back, with Kai Ikarashi directing and Bartosz Sztybor returning as showrunner.

The official line calls it a raw chronicle of redemption and revenge. Weak Kingsley, once known as King, is a washed-up edgerunner living without chrome. D is a Snake Nation netrunner hunting the killer who wiped out his clan. Talia Yang came out of the corpo towers and landed in Maelstrom. Roman Carax is a young cinephile filming stories the city would rather ignore.

The opening theme is The Cure’s “10:15 Saturday Night.” If that still feels like a wait, these five gritty sci-fi anime cover the same territory. Neon, bad systems, and people who pay for the upgrade.

Kansai looks like a brochure. Bullet trains, clean towers, a city that sells order. Under that sits the Akudama, criminals ranked by how much damage they do. On the day Cutthroat is due for a public execution, an anonymous job pulls in Courier, Brawler, Hacker, Doctor and Hoodlum. An ordinary woman gets caught in the pickup and claims she is one of them so she does not get shot. That lie is the whole show.

Kodaka writes them like job titles first and people second, which is the joke until it stops being funny. Courier barely speaks. Brawler treats every wall like a suggestion. Cutthroat smiles through things he should not survive. The mission moves from a rescue to a train job to something the government would rather bury, and the Execution Division does not do warnings.

Twelve episodes, no filler, and a last act that drops the caper and becomes a war. If Edgerunners is Night City with the volume up, this is the same volume in a different postcode.

Edgerunners is a city with too few rules. Psycho-Pass is a city that automated them. The Sibyl System reads a person’s mental state and crime coefficient on the spot. Inspectors in the Public Safety Bureau act on the number. Enforcers are the people the system has already marked, sent out to hunt because they are no longer trusted to live normally.

Akane Tsunemori walks in on her first day still believing the score means something. Kogami has already stopped asking. Makishima treats the whole machine like a public joke he intends to break. Urobuchi, who also wrote Fate/Zero, does not soften the cases.

Season 1 aired in Fuji TV’s Noitamina block and still carries the show. Later seasons keep poking at the same problem: who gets to call a person guilty before they have done anything. Watch this one if the corpo side of Night City is the part you actually want.

Most cyberpunk anime after 2002 is in conversation with this. Public Security Section 9 handles crimes that happen inside people’s cyberbrains. Major Motoko Kusanagi leads the field team. She has a full prosthetic body, still goes by Major, and does not spend the series arguing with herself about whether she counts as human.

That bluntness is the point. Batou is the heavy. Togusa is the one who kept most of his original body, which makes him the odd one out in a unit built on upgrades.

Season 1 splits between standalone cases and the Laughing Man, a hacker whose meme spreads faster than Section 9 can contain it. The state panics. The people paid to stop it are not always sure the person they are talking to is still the person. Kamiyama’s version is cooler and more procedural than the 1995 film.

It is also the cleaner bridge to Edgerunners: chrome as equipment, corporations as weather, and a job that keeps going after the speech is over.

Romdo is the clean version of a failed future. Humans live in a dome. AutoReivs handle the work. Then a virus called Cogito starts giving some of those robots something like a mind, and the Citizen Intelligence Bureau sends Inspector Re-l Mayer to look. She is 19, dressed like the city already bored her, and not built for a neat report.

Vincent Law is an immigrant clerk in the AutoReiv Control Division who would rather stay invisible. Pino is a companion robot infected with the virus, stuck in the body and habits of a child.

The show leaves the dome. That is when it slows down, and some episodes wander on purpose. Murase is more interested in what a person is after the label comes off than in the next fight.

Edgerunners 2 is selling redemption and revenge. Ergo Proxy is the one you put on when you want the same future with the neon turned down and the questions left in the room.

Joe has no ID and no past. He fights in underground rings wearing borrowed Gear, the exoskeleton that turned boxing into a product. The version of the sport belongs to fighters who can afford the hardware. Joe borrows his, takes a name that is not his, and aims at Yuri, the champion who represents the official game.

Season 1 is the underdog run. It premiered in 2018 and was simulcast on Crunchyroll.

Nomad is the season that belongs next to Edgerunners 2. Joe is older. The highlight reel is over. He is trying to live in a city that already replaced him. Weak Kingsley’s setup, a former legend stripped of his chrome, is not the same plot. The mood is. Moriyama keeps the fights physical and the downtime ugly. If you only have time for one before 20 October, Nomad is the closer match.

You do not need homework for Edgerunners 2 as it is a new Night City crew, not a sequel quiz. The list still sets the mood. Akudama Drive is the noisy one: a bad plan, a fake criminal, and a city that charges for the look. Psycho-Pass flips it, with a system that scores you before you move. Stand Alone Complex is the blueprint the others borrow from. Ergo Proxy is slower, and happier to leave the question hanging. Megalo Box: Nomad is the closest to Weak, a former name living after the highlight reel. Start with Akudama Drive if you have one evening.

The original series is already on Netflix. The new one lands there on 20 October, all 10 episodes at once.