As with everything Riot Games produces these days, the money is very much on the screen in Arcane, its striking new animated series that’s first act arrived on Netflix this past weekend, the second arriving on the 13th. As a fan of League of Legends (to my eternal shame), it is an unsurprising treat, full of winks and nods and shiny blue nuggets of lore, just as I’d hoped, and indeed suspected, a studio of Riot’s now formidable stature could manage. As a fan of just plain, good television though, it very much is a surprise. Arcane is actual, good TV.
Arcane – Act 1 reviewProduced by: Riot Games, ForticheReleased via: NetflixAvailability: Act 1 out now on Netflix, Act 2 on 13th November, Act 3 on 20th November.
To get the obvious question out of the way: no, you very much do not need to be a LoL fan to enjoy Arcane. It’s a prequel, and the goal here is pretty obvious – to hook in a new wave of fans through an entirely new medium, who may even stick just to that medium. Arcane is set a few years before the “now” of League of Legends, whenever that really is. Basically, it follows a handful of characters from LoL, but they’re all a few years younger. Those that regular players might know as being in their 20s are instead in their teens and tweens, those in their late 30s are in their early 20s, those in their mid-300s, like the Yoda-esque Yordle scientist, Heimerdinger, are in their early to mid-ish 300s.
It’s a clever way to balance the two – an avalanche of freshly backfilled lore for the LoL nerds, and an equal entry point for new viewers who know nothing – and Riot has been clever here across the board, really. Arcane is set in the twin cities of Piltover, a shiny steampunk land of scientific (and economic) progress, and Zaun, an “undercity” that exists beneath it, just as steampunky and ingenuitive but minus the freedom and security, and money. It’s a smart setting because, as far as LoL’s world of Runeterra (and connected “realms”) goes, it’s the one that splits the difference between the safety of something recognisable – fairly modern technology, humanoids, guns – with something a new – the mix of magic, the relatively less-popularised steampunk genre, Heimerdinger’s weird yellow hair that looks kind of like a giant brain.