Hideo Kojima has crawled back into the Cyberpunk universe as Hideyoshi Oshima for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, and I have never been happier about a glorified NPC getting a sequel. The official Edgerunners account announced the cameo on X on Oct. 19, one day before the show’s Netflix premiere, which is a shockingly normal way to reveal something this weird. Why does this man treat cameo roles like collectible trading cards he absolutely must complete the set of?
The Braindance Guy Nobody Remembers
Let’s get the facts straight: Some outlets call Oshima a braindance producer and others call him a braindance director, which tells you everything about how seriously the gaming press treats job titles. (The official Edgerunners account went with director, so we will too.) He first showed up during The Heist mission, holding court at a table in the Konpeki Plaza hotel bar, and you have to actively wander over to trigger the conversation.
Most players blew right past him on their way to traumatize themselves with the main story. Oshima tells anyone in earshot that he wants his braindances to carry real, raw human emotion, and if you hang around, he asks whether you brought him a pitch. This is a man playing a fictional version of himself who wants story pitches from a player character who probably mashed the skip button. The layers are exhausting, and I love them.
The Melancholy Man Is Back
Kojima confirmed the news himself on X, writing, “I make a cameo appearance in the anime series ‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2‘ as Hideyoshi Oshima, the character who appeared in the previous game.” He also shared photos from his recording session, which is charming for a character whose entire game career amounts to a few lines of hotel bar small talk.
The emotional target Oshima laid out in the game is the whole point of the guy: happiness mixed with melancholy, calm with a little anxiety underneath. Sure, it sounds pretentious. It is pretentious. But it’s the fun kind of pretentious, the kind that gives us a game director playing a braindance guy who lectures about feelings while Night City burns around him.
Release Day Chaos
All 10 episodes of Edgerunners 2 dropped on Netflix on Oct. 20 in one massive block. Right after the cameo announcement, CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michał Nowakowski posted that it’s always a pleasure to work with Kojima, which is the politest way anyone has ever described collaborating with the man behind Joakim Mogren. That was the bandaged “CEO” of a fake Swedish developer called Moby Dick Studio, played by a hired actor in a 2013 interview, all to tease Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Fans cracked it fast, since “Joakim” is an anagram of “Kojima.” The man invented a whole fake person whose name is a puzzle, and we all just went along with it. If that is not the energy you want in a Cyberpunk cameo, I do not know what to tell you.
Kojima Sneaks Himself Into Everything
In Remedy’s 2019 game Control, Kojima voiced Dr. Yoshimi Tokui, a scientist who talks Jesse Faden through a guided imagery side mission. That cameo was part of a swap that put Remedy’s Sam Lake into Death Stranding as one of its preppers, a delightfully nerdy trade that CD Projekt Red and Kojima Productions one-upped in December 2020 by shoving each other’s content into their respective games. Oshima arrived with Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, and a week later, a PC update dropped Cyberpunk-themed missions, Johnny Silverhand’s robotic arm and his sunglasses into Death Stranding. The man leaves references to his own games inside other people’s games. It is a sickness, and I respect it.
Why This Matters, Sort Of
Here is my bias, stated plainly and without apology: Kojima cameos are the best thing about modern franchise crossovers, and the Oshima return proves it. He is not playing a hero or a villain or a mysterious figure with a hidden agenda. He is playing a guy at a bar who wants to talk about art. That is the most Kojima thing imaginable.
Meanwhile, he is also juggling Physint and OD alongside his cameo work. He popped up by video at the end of Xbox’s Tokyo Game Show 2026 broadcast Sept. 17 to say OD is on schedule and Physint, which Xbox is now publishing, is making steady progress, with Bill Skarsgård cast as its lead. The man is developing two major projects and still found time to voice a hotel bar philosopher.
The Oshima role extends his habit of showing up in other studios’ projects into the anime side of Cyberpunk, which means somewhere a Studio Trigger animator had to figure out how to draw Kojima’s face for a cartoon. I hope they gave him sunglasses. He deserves the sunglasses.
The Final Nonsense
Edgerunners 2 brings an all-new crew to Night City. Weak Kingsley is a former legend cut off from his chrome and looking for something to live for, while D, a nomad netrunner, is chasing whoever wiped out the Snake Nation clan, and that trail runs straight into corpo secrets. The show is a standalone 10-episode story, which is a fancy way of saying people will probably die horribly and I will probably cry about it. Somewhere in there, a fictional braindance guy voiced by a real game director is doing his thing. Journal du Geek spotted him in a brief Episode 5 restaurant scene, which feels about right: a man probably saying something profound about storytelling while chaos breaks out three feet away.
The best cameos are the ones you have to hunt for, and Kojima knows it. He is the Stan Lee of video games, except instead of a quick wave from a crowd, he wants to sit you down and explain his philosophy of art. I would let him. I would absolutely let him. The man is a magnificent weirdo, and I’m glad he keeps showing up in places he does not technically belong.
What’s Next
All 10 episodes of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 are streaming now on Netflix. Go find the braindance guy.
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