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Much of the tension in the Netflix animated fantasy epic Arcane: League of Legends involves two potential mergers, both of them incredibly volatile. The first is the plan by inventor Jayce (Kevin Alejandro) to use technology to harness the power of his world’s bygone age of magic, in a combination he dubs “Hextech.” The second is the uneasy relationship between the neighboring communities of Piltover, opulent and allegedly utopian, and Zaun, Piltover’s neglected, crime-ridden underbelly. Piltover’s governing body warns Jayce about the danger of using arcane magic at all, let alone in conjunction with machines, and it simultaneously ignores the entreaties of the Zaunites to be allowed a say in their own governance. Even these separate conflicts intersect, since Hextech is ultimately perfected in partnership between Piltover native Jayce and Zaun émigré Viktor (Harry Lloyd). At various points throughout the series’ recently-concluded two-season run, these combinations — plus others involving rival factions within Zaun, or between the Piltover government and representatives of a distant empire — seem to be working out perfectly. And at many others, things combust in ways even worse than the sternest warning might have suggested.
Yet for most of these 18 episodes, Arcane itself manages to bring together a wide array of ideas and stylistic influences in ways that are utterly gorgeous, on both aesthetic and emotional levels. Like Jayce and Viktor’s plans for Hextech, Arcane eventually gets too ambitious for its own good. But unlike its characters, the series never winds up in full calamity.
Adapted by Christian Linke and Alex Yee from Riot Games’ League of Legends, and produced by the French animation studio Fortiche, Arcane is both a sprawling story and a small one. It chronicles the rise and fall of Hextech, and enormous tumult in the relationship between Piltover and Zaun. But first and foremost, it’s a story of sibling rivalry gone horribly awry: The series opens with orphan sisters Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Powder (Mia Sinclair Jenness) attempting to rob Jayce’s apartment, little realizing all the explosions —some literal, some metaphorical, some both — this one little crime will unleash, including the sisters becoming separated for years and winding up on opposite sides of a gang war.
What follows is a little bit of everything: family drama, political intrigue, organized crime conflict, philosophical debate, and lots and lots of steampunk. Powder —who eventually grows up into a damaged young woman who calls herself Jinx (now voiced by Ella Purnell from Fallout) — is a gadgeteer who likes to combine the magical trinkets she stole from Jayce with improvised explosive devices that look like children’s toys. Vi, a relentless handfighter, eventually acquires a pair of Hextech gauntlets that look like the biggest and most painful boxing gloves ever built. A crack shot with a traditional rifle, Jayce’s childhood friend Caitlyn (Katie Leung) becomes even deadlier when she joins the Piltover police force and gets a Hextech gun.
Among the challenges of translating video games into narrative fiction is that it’s hard to craft action that’s as satisfying to passively watch as it is to be the one directing it yourself. But the fight scenes in Arcane are staggeringly good: inventive, kinetic, bursting with energy (and a killer soundtrack), yet always clear in terms of who’s doing what and how. Yes, many of Vi and Jinx’s maneuvers defy the laws of physics, but when they’re rendered with this much care and vitality, does that matter?
Even when the implements of violence are put away, Arcane is stunning. The look is a blend of influences, from anime to watercolors. And sequences can sometimes deviate from the house style, so that in a moment of intense danger or emotion, everything might suddenly resemble a charcoal sketch, or the kind of drawing Powder would have made if given an infinite supply of crayons and Pixy Stix. (Like the Spider-Verse films, the show’s look tends to be at its most fluid when its fictional universe is growing unstable.)
Netflix deviated here from its usual binge-release approach for scripted series, unveiling each season in three distinct three-episode acts, with a week passing between acts, and considerably longer for the characters, in a story that ultimately spans many years (and also travels back and forth through time on more than one occasion). The first season, which debuted in 2021, is relatively streamlined, focusing on the rise of Hextech and on Vi and Caitlyn teaming up to go after Zaun crime lord Silco (Jason Spisak), who has taken Jinx under his wing in the years since the sisters last met. Even with the time jumps, the conflicts are clear. And Vi and Jinx are very well-drawn as characters,both in the performances by Steinfeld and Purnell and in the literal sense: Vi a resolute block of granite, Jinx an elusive, damaged rag doll. Despite being complete novices to television, Linke and Yee spearheaded a masterpiece of a first season.
Despite various reports suggesting that Arcane had been planned as a five-season story —including a Variety article placing the combined cost of these 18 episodes at $250 million, easily the most for any animated TV series —the long-delayed second season was announced as the final one. Linke and Yee later claimed that the plan was always to end after two. But whether it was by design or necessity, these concluding episodes felt like everyone at Riot was trying to squeeze four seasons of story into a one-season-sized bag. Season Two, which finally arrived in November, was far more ambitious and sprawling, with a greater and more varied group of subplots. Ambessa (Ellen Thomas), a ruthless general from a distant empire, plotted to conquer Piltover from within and loot Hextech for herself, while her councilwoman daughter Mel (Toks Olagundoye) was held captive by Ambessa’s spell-casting rivals. Viktor pushed Hextech beyond its limits and developed godlike powers, as well as his own cult following within Zaun. Jayce, his mentor Professor Heimerdinger (Mick Wingert), and Vi’s old friend Ekko (Reed Shannon) got sucked into the Hextech magic itself and wound up in parallel realities for a while. Singed (Brett Tucker), a scientist who once trained Viktor and later made drugs for Silco, began playing various sides against one another before eventually siding with Ambessa.
It was… a lot, and more than the show could successfully juggle at times. Ekko, for instance, plays a much bigger role in the series’ endgame than would have been suggested by his relatively skimpy screentime leading up to it, when he had to jostle for attention along with what felt like dozens of other characters and subplots. (For that matter, Vi and Jinx wind up feeling more tangential to the resolution of the main plot than they should, even if there’s satisfying emotional closure between the two of them.)
Yet even when Arcane was trying to do too much, it was still doing many of those things spectacularly well. The more Viktor’s power grows, the more that pieces of unnerving beauty bloom around him. Vi and Jinx’s relationship goes through many iterations without the shifts from one to the next feeling false, and the action throughout the finale is jaw-dropping. When Viktor brags about what he calls “the sublime intersection of order and chaos,” he may as well be describing the whole of Season Two, an unquestionably messy season that nonetheless has a firm handle on so many of its individual elements.
We’re well past the point of grading video game adaptations on a curve, much less wondering if it’s even possible to make compelling narrative art out of them. This was a great one, and I hope it’s only the first thing this creative team makes for TV, rather than the last.
