Director: Pascal Charrue Arnaud Delord

Genre: Action/Adventure/Fantasy/Sci-Fi

Show Length: One Season, Nine Episodes (Average of 41 Minutes per Episode, Net Runtime of 370 Minutes)

Streaming on Netflix

Arcane: League of Legends is rated TV-14 for language, violence, and smoking.

 

League of Legends is one of the most popular games in 2021 boasting 8 million active players. Riot Games, the company that made League of the Legends, made one of the biggest moves in the gaming industry in November of 2019: they announced that they were making a TV show with Netflix, the king of streaming services. They dared to go where few games have succeeded.

What resulted is arguably one of the best animated shows Netflix has made. The first season of the show was released in three-episode arcs, with an arc released per week, starting on November 6th. The first arc covered the backstory of Vi, Powder, Silco, Victor, and Jayce, all who are important characters in the storyline. Between the first and second arc, there is an estimated 5+ year gap. The second arc bridges the past and the present and explains what happened in the time that elapsed. The third arc explains how the political tensions between the undercity and Piltover grew at an exponential rate. 

I have never played League of Legends before, but I understood the entire plot because they explained everything in an amazing way. Like many other video games, the game has its own world, containing lore, history, and maps. Piltover and Zaun are some of the core cities in League of Legends, but that knowledge is not pivotal for the show. All of the characters in Arcane are “Champions” (characters with special abilities in the game), but once again, that knowledge is not important to the storyline of the show. 

In this story, there are quite a few recurring characters and places. Firstly, there are Vi and Powder. Vi and Powder are two sisters from the undercity. Their parents were killed during a skirmish between the undercity and Piltover. Vander, the head of the undercity, saw them on the bridge and raised them as his own children. Next there are Victor and Jayce, two scientists in Piltover looking to improve the lives of all the civilians. Lastly, there are the sister-cities of Piltover and Zaun (the undercity). They are two bordering cities that are ruled by the same government. Piltover and Zaun are completely different. In Piltover, everyone is rich and lives a luxurious life. In Zaun, life is poverty stricken and there are only a handful of people that could be considered “rich”. These are not the only people and places that matter, but they are the ones that have been given the biggest spotlight.

Arcane has a compelling story to tell. There were no “filler episodes” and the pacing of each episode is smooth and the animation styles represent other things Riot Games has animated. For example, the show included many unorthodox styles of animation. One brilliant time that this was shown was in Ekko and Jinx’s fight scene in the third arc, as they use two distinct animation styles. In the scene I mentioned, they used a sketchbook animation style. This is what allowed the show to stay very upbeat. In addition to that, the animation used a lot of unique colors. Whenever a scene involved Hextech (a futuristic technology that combines science and magic, a key part to the show) the animation used a shade of blue that is seen nowhere else in the series, other than in Jinx’s hair. In a similar manner, the setting of the undercity is always an unsettling green.

With Vi and Caitlyn as heroes and Jinx as an anti-hero, a sizable portion of the main characters were females—an uncommon cast to see in today’s animation world. In addition to that, every character had a role to play. For example, the character whom the house that Vi and Powder are breaking into turns out to be one of the main characters. 

Another great thing about the characters in the show is that many had some sort of character development. For example, Jinx having to cope with the death of her friends and Caitlyn, who comes from the upper side of Piltover, and learning what the undercity is truly like both changed them as characters. Jinx was lively before the incident that killed her friends, but after the incident, the show develops how it impacted her in the form of what could be interpreted as schizophrenia or PTSD. On the other hand, Caitlyn, who is from a wealthy elite family, gets a wake up call about what people have to go through everyday in the undercity. This allows her to gain a different perspective on her ideals. Her impact on the series is many, but most of it is derived from her experiences in the undercity.

One more thing that amazed me was the show’s music track. Riot Games did not license any music, but they worked with bands and rappers to create the sound track, many of which they’ve worked with before. This is seen with their outstanding intro music. They worked with Imagine Dragons (a band) and JID (a rapper) to create Enemy. It was one of the better show intros I had seen in a long time, and I credit it to the music they made. One thing that Christian Linke, a creative director in Riot Games, said in a video about music in Arcane was, “What if we have a mini-music episode in every episode?” I’d argue that this mindset really shows how much they cared about music in the show. As Toa Dunn, the head of Riot Games Music, said, “Music’s a powerful medium. It can take you through a narrative, it can build context, build atmosphere, which is [why] understanding the power of music is so important.” If that was their goal, Riot Games hit the nail on the head. All the music in the show helped build a strong ambience in each setting. 

Unfortunately, like many other TV shows in this era, the ending of the season begged to have another season. With the show ending on a cliffhanger and millions of viewers asking when the next season was coming, the League of Legends’ YouTube channel dropped a trailer for the second season a few hours after the final arc aired. At the time of writing this article, the trailer has almost 4.5 million views which pales in comparison to the 18 million views of the trailer of season 1.

It seems that I am not the only one who has praise for this show. It has a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an audience rating of 9.4 on IMDB. This means that in IMDB, it has a higher rating than Avatar: the Last Airbender, the obsession of young Millennials and much of Gen Z last year.

All in all, I say this is one of the best series made this year by Netflix, and maybe one of the best animated series anyone has ever seen. Arcane has a powerful story with impressive character development and tone-setting music from their studio. If you don’t have any plans, I’d highly recommend adding this show to your watch list. 

 

written by Edward Christopher

edited by Saanvi Gutta and Tryphena Pilli

 

/Dev Diary: The music of arcane – youtube. Youtube. (2021, November 24). Retrieved December 3, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMzi3-2Nct0.