Even if you don’t play video games regularly, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve heard of Riot Games’ League of Legends. Since its launch in 2009, the game has enjoyed a large and dedicated community of players, hungry for its strategic team gameplay and impressive roster of playable “champions.” Each year, it continues to generate billions of dollars in microtransactions, and its presence as an e-sport has remained unmatched by its contemporaries in the competitive gaming space. Though opinions on the game itself have varied over time, there is no doubt that LOL will forever be regarded as one of the most influential titles to hit the industry.
But with all that said, its journeys beyond the gaming space have been few and far between. Aside from a pair of spin-off games (League of Legends: Wild Rift and League of Legends: Ruined King) and a handful of music videos, the Netflix animated series Arcane is the very first attempt at anything League of Legends outside of the wildly successful main game. So, what exactly does this tell us? If Arcane is anything to go by, LOL should try this sort of thing MUCH more often.
Arcane opens on a city split in two, with the futuristic metropolis of Piltover contrasted by its seedier, messier undercity. Our main duo, the rugged Vi and her timid sister Powder, are a pair of young thieves struggling to survive in the harsh, divided world they’ve grown up in, guided only by their guardian Vander and the handful of friends they grew up with. When one of their topside heists goes terribly wrong, they set off a long series of interlocking events, growing in impact until the city itself begins to come apart.
Admittedly, this summary leaves out much of the real hook of this story, but I believe that discovering each new character and plot element for yourself is one of its key pleasures. This is especially true if you’ve played the original League of Legends (though it isn’t necessary to have played beforehand). If you enjoy the type of narrative that starts simple and grows impossibly complex, watching as the folds of Arcane’s world begin to unfurl is like slowly unwrapping a present: tantalizingly fun.
Even the smallest character here feels full of lore and backstory just waiting to be unlocked, and the amount of development Netflix squeezed into only nine episodes is impressively high. Take genius inventor Jayce, for example: Just within his portion of the story, you get to see his development alongside that of his assistant, his love interest, his mentor, and multiple members of the council he sits on, all with multiple dedicated scenes for each character. It adds to the feeling that this is a living, breathing world with real stakes and consequences, which then further enhances my enjoyment of the plot going on within it.
As you may have noticed in the pictures above, the art and animation on display is unquestioningly good, especially considering that it was entirely digitally produced. Usually, I find that CG productions feel stilted and lack polish, but Arcane couldn’t be farther from that. The use of style and color here is both vibrant and refined, with clear attention paid to making every scene fit whatever mood needs setting. If the characters are in a fight, their movements become more fluid and visceral, and if there’s drama to be had, the color palette may shift to reflect that.
It’s rare for me to say that a show’s animation is what first caught my eye (especially for an American production), but Arcane shows again and again that it knows exactly what it’s doing: punchy, exciting, and downright beautiful animation.
To be frank, the issues that I have with Arcane have less to do with what it does do and more with what it doesn’t do. The story and characters are consistently enjoyable, but the amount of times they go truly above and beyond are few and far between. There were always one or two scenes per episode that I really loved, but when each episode is forty minutes long, it’s hard to call Arcane truly outstanding with such a limited ‘wow factor.’
Then there’s the issue of pacing. As mentioned, there are a lot of characters here and a lot of screen time dedicated to them, and in most cases, this is good, but it does come with a problem: If you don’t like a given protagonist, the scenes where they play a central role won’t appeal to you. This only happened twice for me out of the dozen or so focal characters, but I couldn’t help but sigh whenever the shot would cut to someone like Silco or Kaitlyn. This was only worsened by occasional unwanted dips in the pacing. With a world this dense and complex, a certain amount of pace breaking for lore reasons was inevitable, but when the breakneck pace of the first episode is cut off by a long, boring fifteen minute block of exposition in the second, it begins to drag down the experience.
Verdict
On the whole, Arcane is a perfect example of what a video game adaptation should be. It’s world feels lived in with a real sense of intrigue, its characters are full of life and personality, and its animation is stunning to the eye. Between this and its sister shows Castlevania and The Cuphead Show (see our review), it’s clear that Netflix really does have video game adaptations down to a science. Even if you’ve never heard a peep about League of Legends, Arcane is something that I can thoroughly recommend.
