The video game adaptation as the age-old punchline is seemingly on its way out. Live-action TV shows like Prime Video’s Fallout and HBO’s The Last of Us have dominated streaming. At the same time, Netflix has made moves to own the conversation on animated adaptations with properties like Castlevania, Dota: Dragon’s Blood, Tomb Raider, and the steampunk fantasy series sensation Arcane: League of Legends. The first season of Arcane took the world by storm when it debuted in 2021. Based on Riot Games‘ popular League of Legends video game franchise (which is also the world’s largest esport), Netflix’s Arcane gave fans what they always dreamed of while acting as an easy in to the world of Runeterra for new viewers.
Fans and casual viewers alike have waited eagerly for Arcane Season 2, especially in the wake of a crazy cliffhanger. But now that it’s finally here, it appears that Netflix’s animated series, unfortunately, doesn’t have enough steam to carry its momentum to the finish line. As with the first season, Arcane Season 2 is split into three acts. The first picks up seconds after season one’s cliffhanger finale, seeing the heroes licking their wounds after the attack on the Piltover council chamber by Jinx (Ella Purnell), formerly known as Powder. The response to this attack is displayed largely through the lens of Piltover’s politics, with Ambessa Medarda (Ellen Thomas) seizing more power in the chaos.
The groundwork is further laid out by a strike team led by Caitlyn (Katie Leung), who is joined by series lead Vi (Hailee Steinfeld), as they venture into her childhood home of Zaun. Vi being sworn in as an Enforcer, the same foot-soldiers of Piltover that haunted her and Jinx in their youth, is a massive shift for the character. Much of Arcane Season 2’s premiere episode is spent on Vi struggling with accepting this offer. Yet, not nearly enough dramatic weight is put into her putting on the uniform, with it instead revealed through a triumphant team shot.
This speaks to one of the worst tendencies of Arcane Season 2 — a pivot away from its drama and character dynamics towards flashy montages and slow-motion action beats. Nearly every episode opens with dialogue-free sequences that play like music videos, soundtracked by deeply overindulgent and toothless pop, rap, and metal. These scenes are used to display what would otherwise be interesting opportunities to flesh out the new, unfamiliar situations in which our characters have found themselves. Instead, they feel like trailers for a show that we’re already watching.
The urge for the writing to be hands-off, thus allowing the animation to speak for itself, is understandable on the part of co-creators Christian Linke and Alex Yee. After all, Arcane is still as gorgeous as ever in this latest season. The game’s steampunk aesthetic makes for a beautiful canvas that French animation studio Fortiche then runs freely on with its lovely painted art style. Ultimately, though, even that strength is somewhat diminished as this season moves too far away from the strong world-building its predecessor boasted. Piltover’s politicking is largely just noise, with the ultimate concern of Zaun’s threat to the city not being nearly specific enough to warrant all the time talking about it.
In fact, the poverty-stricken city of Zaun as an entity feels like a headless chicken for the first act of Arcane Season 2. Following the loss of Silco (Jason Spisak), Zaun has no one to speak for it, a role that Jinx is obviously meant to embody but spends her time running away from. While this makes for some interesting characterization for Jinx later in the season, it does little favor to Zaun. It’s now gone from a multi-angled character in its own right to a battleground for sisters Jinx and Vi to wage their war against each other on (a war which is, again, largely developed through musical montages).
With Zaun, the sense of grit that coated the entire first season is gone, replaced by the sanitized marble-white and gold of Piltover. Even if this utopia is less than, well, utopian, Zaun doesn’t do much for the counterculture posturing that many of the characters are built around. Speaking of the cast, Arcane‘s strength as an ensemble story is also largely lost. For a show that spends most of its time in Piltover, characters in that cast like Mel (Toks Olagundoye), Jayce (Kevin Alejandro), Viktor (Harry Lloyd), and Heimerdinger (Mick Wingert) are quickly swept off the board, with priority being shifted entirely to a choice four characters.
The new players introduced to replace the aforementioned losses, which are council members and warring families, aren’t nearly as captivating and fail to carry over the personal character arcs of the first season. Viktor is an especially egregious loss as a compelling representation of the worst the Pilotver-Zaun hierarchy has produced, as well as tying back to the show’s mystical subplot with the story of Hextech. Most of his development is done off-screen during the time skip between the first and second acts of Arcane Season 2, a huge waste considering how much wheel-spinning the first act does. Ekko (Reed Shannon) is a similar voice of Zaun and, much like Viktor, is a sacrifice this season is willing to make.
The first act of Arcane Season 2 feels lost in its plot and in too deep on something that isn’t nearly interesting enough to dedicate this amount of screen time to. The second act reshuffles its priorities, placing its characters in more challenging and, generally, more interesting roles. The new perspective for Act II is personal dynamics, be it between Caitlyn and Ambessa, Jayce and Viktor, or any combination of Caitlyn, Vi, and Jinx. These were the tensions that built the strongest parts of the show’s first season, and it’s only in refocusing on this aspect of itself that Arcane regains its stride.
Suddenly, the elements that were becoming grating in the first act of Arcane Season 2 begin to make more sense and, in some cases, even land. The fifth episode of the second season features a montage that achieves exactly what it’s aiming for. Then, the sixth episode has a slow-motion-laden fight that is nonetheless emotionally gripping and tense. So, the question begs: Why did it take so long for Arcane to rediscover its already-established strengths in what is supposed to be its big finish?
Despite the incredibly strong first season, Arcane’s second season sadly gets tangled in its plot (or lack thereof) for too much of its runtime. Though it manages to pick up the pace and recapture some of what made its prior season so special, it spends too long spinning its wheels to offer anything quite as compelling. It remains to be seen how the final act will close the book on Netflix’s beloved animated show as a whole, but it’s hard to envy quite how many threads are left for Arcane Season 2 to pull together for a satisfying conclusion.
Arcane Season 2: Act I hits Netflix on November 9!
Release Date: November 9 (Act I), November 16 (Act II), & November 23, 2024 (Act III).
Created by Christian Linke & Alex Yee.
Based on League of Legends by Riot Games.
Executive Producers: Christian Linke, Marc Merrill, Brandon Beck, Jane Chung, & Thomas Vu.
Main Voice Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, Ella Purnell, Katie Leung, Kevin Alejandro, Brett Tucker, Mick Wingert, JB Blanc, Amirah Vann, Ellen Thomas, Toks Olagundoye, Harry Lloyd, Reed Shannon, Lenny Citrano, & Jason Spisak.
Composers: Alex Seaver & Alexander Temple.
Production Companies: Fortiche & Riot Games.
Episode Count: Split into a 3-act structure, 3 episodes each (Season 2).
