Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article avoids the key spoilers of the game and animation plot as much as possible, and readers who care about the complete viewing experience should still read it as appropriate.

A week after the broadcast of the animation "Cyberpunk Fringe Walker", the number of online users of "Cyberpunk 2077" on Steam has exceeded 80,000 for a long time, making it the only stand-alone game among the top 10 online players on Steam.

The current promotional page of ▲ 2077 is also the interactive content of "marginal walkers".

A rising tide lifts all boats, and there are good reviews of the game. Although the overall reviews are still "mostly favorable", the number of favorable reviews received by 2077 has increased significantly recently.

This upward trend has been going on for several days, both in terms of heat and evaluation.

This "pick-up" certainly includes the impact of the game's own special promotions and content updates-the last time it was half-priced, there was a wave of praise for 2077, and in the past two years, CDPR has done a lot of remedial fixes and optimizations for the unfavorable start of 2077, and the version number of the game has been iterated to 1.6. basically, it can provide a decent play experience for most PC players.

But as long as you take a look at the recent player comments, it is not difficult to feel the publicity effect of this adapted animation-people from different countries and languages shout "Adam hammer must die!" There are also some players in the previous game reviews to write a large part of the animation impression, and then changed the original bad reviews to good reviews.

1 "Fringe Walker" does have a kind of magic, it is easy to make people want to experience 2077 after watching it.

This is, of course, because of the irreconcilable plot of the animation-as the NPC proverb in the game says, "the legends of Night City are in the grave." before the middle of the story, audiences are already able to know the life direction of the protagonists through a variety of lines and plot hints.

▲ episode 4 lines

That's why players flock to the game after watching the animation to beat Adam's sledgehammer-the character represents the ceiling of Night City force, and the appearance of the "final Boss", which is also at the combat level in both the animation and the game, has brought heavy losses to the main character.

The timeline of the animation is a year earlier than the game, so when viewers see in the animation that the main actor is about to match the sledgehammer that will be alive later, they already know that they are going to be unlucky.

The V played by the player in the ▲ game is almost the only one who can punish the heavy hammer.

Finding Adam sledgehammer to settle these old and new hatreds is enough to make people download the game back, but that's not the only thing that can inspire people to replay the game in animation.

Compared with the game which takes dozens of hours to clear the customs, the plot content contained in the short ten-episode animation is undoubtedly much thinner, and many plots are reflected through montage shots and blanks, and even make people feel a little hasty. But it is in such a limited space that there are some compromises made for the sake of gameplay in the original work.

In the 2077 worldview, people who have too much hardware implanted will suffer from "cyber psychosis", gradually lose their humanity and eventually go crazy until they are wiped out by the riot mobile team.

The ▲ animation shows the end of cyber psychosis at the beginning.

In the game, these cyber psychopaths mainly appear in some feeder reward tasks, and their roles are similar to "Wild Red Elite Monsters". But in the animation, "to be killed as a cyber psychopath" or "to be killed by a cyber psychopath" is almost a common fate of marginal characters who fight and kill, even for the protagonist David.

The animation maintains a gripping plot tension throughout the whole process, which largely comes from the setting outside the main line of this free game. It reveals the direction of the whole story early and allows players to look at the protagonist V in the game from another perspective.

No matter which start you choose in the game, V's life will be in a similar situation with David-meeting a similar partner, walking on a similar path, and falling into a similar fate. The two seem to be taking the same set of scripts, and even the promotional films edited by CDPR are not shy about such a correspondence.

It is with such a mirror that players really feel the special nature of V-David endures the side effects of implanting a military body in the show, which gives him far more combat power and becomes a trend among gangs. However, after more artificial bodies are implanted in the later stage, he still can not avoid the outbreak of cyber psychosis, who wears a "protagonist halo" in the eyes of others.

And the V that the player controls in the game, even after replacing the whole body with legendary body, still maintains the normal person's reason, is undoubtedly the real "chosen person".

Shortly after the game was released, the line "you are the famous V" was most often ridiculed by players-NPC always called V in the game after he came to the fore, but players were often given tasks that ran out of stock, making it look like a mockery.

"Edge walker" shows you how David struggled to confront the side effects of implants, how to actively take on the dirty work just to find survival value in the cracks in the city of night, and how to finally set off a bloodshed in the barren ban tower and become the legend of the city of night. These are enough to make people feel that V, who later performed better, is a well-deserved protagonist of the game, and must be the dazzling existence of Night City.

In the words of some players, the animation brings a stronger sense of substitution than the game, and the dozens of hours of the game failed to convince them that V was really valued in Night City. I can't agree that the task I accomplished is meaningful at the story level, but the ten-episode animation did.

2 there have always been many promotional projects for game adaptation of animation, but there are only a handful of examples like "Edge Walker" that can be comparable to "providing charcoal in the snow" and "saving lives". It's no wonder that many people commented after watching the animation: "CDPR should really hit the trigger club."

The producers of ▲ CDPR also tweeted to thank people for giving 2077 a second chance because of animation.

But among those animation enthusiasts who are familiar with the trigger club, you will hear another saying, that is, "thanks to this time CDPR pulled the reins", in their view, "marginal walkers" in the trigger club's works in recent years is also an extraordinary play, CDPR played an important role in it.

When the news that CDPR was going to join forces to animate Cyberpunk 2077 was made public last year, many people were not optimistic about the cooperation. At that time, 2077 was still mired in a quagmire of poor reviews, and no one thought that any outstanding animation could be produced based on such an original work. At the same time, many people were tired of watching the trigger club's "three axes".

Trigger Club's works often bring continuous sensory stimulation to the audience through exaggerated lines, soundtracks and picture performances to meet the emotional best. This narrative style is the main feature of trigger Society's works, but it is often criticized as "waste fire"-the strong emotional expression usually plays down the rationality of the plot and the behavior logic of the character, and finally shows that "the slogan is loud." the core of the story doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

The style of ▲ trigger club is to shout the most inexplicable lines with the most popular pictures and voices.

If "Edge Walker" is the trigger club's own work, then the end must be David and his companions rushed to the moon to fly to the universe, and before the players can do it, David will personally blow up Adam's heavy hammer. and smash the Arabana Tower, which symbolizes the exploitation and oppression of the bottom groups.

But the final "marginal walker" is obviously not such a cheerful story. The whole film has a consistent sense of "bereavement" and a sense of fatalism that poor manpower can not escape, which is a rare atmosphere in the past works of trigger Club.

In other words, the tone of the trigger club itself is not compatible with the decadent theme of "cyberpunk", and many people believe that it is inseparable from the influence exerted by CDPR to achieve what it is today.

Benji, who is in charge of coordinating the production of Fringe Walker, said in an interview that CDPR chose the trigger club among several animation companies because he could not imagine what the "cyberpunk" animation would look like, but paid a heavy price for this "happy man" mentality.

The animators of the trigger club did not act like an on-demand "Party B" and had a strong desire to control the work, so they typed back the first draft script provided by CDPR, almost bluntly "you don't understand animation".

CDPR, who is quite confident in content production, certainly can't let the trigger club release itself. the first draft they provided was originally a colder and gloomier story with less to do with the game plot, but the trigger club never accepted such a "too dark" story, and the two sides ran back and forth for nearly two years just for the original story.

Today's films still retain traces of pull and games, and the most well-known is grumpy Lori Rebecca-CDPR asked to delete her part on the grounds that she was "unfit to appear in this series," but the trigger agency insisted on keeping the character and is now the hottest anime character in Europe and the United States.

▲ Rebecca is a rather "trigger wind" unique character.

Benji's work is sometimes to draw a circle between the two sides who are engaged in heated disputes, and sometimes to maintain contact between the two sides who are not in contact with each other in the Cold War, and finally decided on this script to interpret the story of the main line of the game from another perspective.

As a result, the cooperation between trigger and CDPR did achieve mutual success, and the animation and the script of the game were sublimated to a certain extent.

Players are given a lot of choices in the game, but many end up feeling that they have no choice; animators can only watch David go to an end, but feel that he has chosen this path.

Regardless of the plot, Fringe Walker makes a detailed restoration of 2077 game scenes, which also allows players to look at the world from another perspective.

Most of the scenes drawn by trigger Club in the animation come from the real scene in the game. Players can see many familiar scenes and NPC characters in the animation, as well as "Holy Land Tour" in the game to find the homes of the main characters of the animation. some of them correspond directly to the homes of David and V, while others take some pains to pay attention to them.

Also found in the game is the hospital where David's mother died. The story does not explain the exact cause of David's mother's death, but in the game, the place has been occupied by a gang of "scavengers" who sell artificial organs across their kidneys, which seems to imply that David's mother also died. It is the trigger club that expresses "too dark" in an ingenious way.

Hospital in ▲ Animation and Sequoia Psychiatric Hospital in Game

After the release of the film, CDPR also updated the egg quests in the game, from which players can get some related equipment and know the follow-up movements of some of the characters in the show. However, compared with the natural placement in the animation, such a simple linkage appears to be somewhat superficial and perfunctory. Many players say that the touch of these accessories is far less than the inadvertently animated episode of the radio station in the game.

In the ▲ animation, David hates carbonated drinks, but the egg drink named after him in the game is somehow mixed with Coke.

Of course, deeper audiences are not satisfied with these "scratching" content, and players' self-made linkage Mod is springing up to try to get the characters back into the game and rewrite their stories.

▲, many of these Mod have been downloaded by tens of thousands.

Outside the game, there are more people who want to change the original ending. Some painters at home and abroad have drawn the Happy Ending of "Edge Rangers" in the original style, giving it a more consistent ending with the previous "trigger wind".

Most of these fan pictures are born to cure many viewers who are depressed by the end of the animation, but it is inevitable that some immoral images like "Hell jokes" appear, such as giving David P a more powerful transformation than King Kong.

Just as this animation has also been criticized to some extent, it is believed that its "pettiness" of romance has dispelled the original spiritual core of "cyberpunk" and become pure emotional consumer goods. These contents themselves still can not escape the fate of being further deconstructed and entertained.

In conclusion, compared with the 2077 that sold 18 million copies and then drowned in spit, Fringe Walker is also like a mirror-quietly on the shelves in limited publicity, and then relying almost solely on word-of-mouth. It has become one of the most successful game adaptation animations today.

Today, the controversy around 2077 has not stopped, some people still think that the marketing sale of the game is comparable to a fraud, while others regret that the work may achieve higher achievements if it takes a more low-key and down-to-earth distribution route, just like the current "marginal walkers".

But no one knows whether another choice will really make everything better, or that the real world is already the same as in the show, there are not so many options.

Since its launch in 2077, CDPR's share price is now only about 1/5 of its peak.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: Lushark

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