Hideo Kojima is in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2. The game director confirmed on Monday that he recorded a cameo for the new Netflix anime, reprising Hideyoshi Oshima, the braindance producer he played in Cyberpunk 2077, and posted photos from the voice session on X.
The cameo is small by design. Oshima was a minor character in the 2020 game, one of the faces you meet in Night City’s braindance trade rather than a figure in the main story. Carrying him into the anime is the kind of continuity nod CD Projekt RED likes to keep alive across its adaptations.
Kojima’s post did not say which episode Oshima appears in, how long the scene runs, or whether the character shows up in more than one place.
A director who keeps showing up in other people’s work
Kojima has a long habit of putting himself in games and adjacent media. He appeared in Cyberpunk 2077 as Oshima, and his studio’s own titles are full of self-referential casting. The difference here is that the cameo crosses mediums. He is not voicing a character in a game he made; he is voicing a character from someone else’s game in someone else’s anime.
For CD Projekt RED, that is useful. Edgerunners 2 is a sequel to a series that became one of the more surprising crossover hits of the decade, and the studio has been treating the anime as canon-adjacent rather than as a spin-off. Bringing back a game character with the original voice actor, in either language, reinforces that.
Where the season stands
Edgerunners 2 premiered on Netflix on October 20. It is a new 10-episode story set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, following the 2022 first season that Studio Trigger produced.
The new season is directed by Kai Ikarashi, his first time in the director’s chair after work on the first series as a storyboard artist, animation director, animator and prop designer. Bartosz Sztybor is producer and writer, Ichigo Kanno is lead character designer and Masahiko Otsuka writes scripts. We put together everything confirmed about the season before launch, including the cast of leads and the theme songs.
That production history is why the cameo reads as more than stunt casting. Ikarashi spent the first season inside the show’s visual language before getting the top job, and the people making the sequel are the ones who made the original work.
What a cameo tells you about the production
Celebrity voice spots are usually marketing. This one is closer to a handshake between two studios that have already made something together, and it lands in a season that arrived with expectations high enough to be a problem. The show topped our Fall 2026 most anticipated ranking before it aired, which is roughly the position any sequel to a phenomenon ends up in.
Kojima, for his part, seems to have enjoyed it. The recording photos are the sort of thing he posts when he is genuinely amused by a project rather than doing a promotional favor.
Whether Oshima gets more than a scene is the question. The season is out now on Netflix, so anyone curious can find out without waiting for an answer.
Featured image: Hideo Kojima at a recording session for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, via his X account (© Hideo Kojima; Cyberpunk 2077 © CD PROJEKT RED).
Source: Anime News Network; Hideo Kojima’s X account.
