Arcane TV Show Spoiler Free Review
If you have not seen on Netflix the show called “Arcane,” I highly recommend it, especially if you want interesting storytelling and a visual masterpiece. This show is based on the video game “League of Legends.”Even though I have never played the video game, I still loved this animated TV show. The video game makers wanted to dive deeper into the lore of some of the game and its characters, so they began creating the show called “Arcane.” The production of this animated series started six years ago, but the results were stunning and well worth the time. In this TV show review, I’ll talk a bit about what I liked while watching it pertaining to the storyline and its visuals.
Because I have never played League of Legends, I cannot give my review based on a viewpoint of a fan of the video game. However, I can give my review as an outsider who saw a show pop up on my “suggested” on Netflix that looked interesting. You don’t have to know anything about the video game in order to understand the show “Arcane.” I still haven’t even so much as looked at the League of Legends gameplay. The story is easy to follow with cliffhangers at the end of each episode that have you clicking “next episode” until you get to the end and realize that there is no more “next episode.”I was watching the last episode without realizing it, and at the end of the episode’s major cliffhanger, I was devastated when I saw there was no “next episode” button. The animated TV show has multiple little storylines all intertwined with one main one, and they all interconnect perfectly. The main storyline is about two sisters, and the setting is in a world where the lower class and upper class are horribly divided. I will say, watching the Netflix trailer for the show actually made me not want to watch it at first. It seemed very cliche and almost a bit cringe, to be honest. But because I had heard so many good things about the show, I finally decided one day to watch it, and I’m glad I did. The storyline is interesting, and it has you engaged with it till the very end. I also found that the voice actors did a really great job. Most of the time, this is my personal opinion, I find that voice actors in western animated series are not that good compared to, for example, anime. Their voices don’t seem that exciting, and they seem almost like they are bored in fighting scenes. (for example, in the show Castlevania, there were times when the voice actor of the main character gets clobbered by weapons and he gives a half-hearted, “uh” when he is literally almost dead). However, in Arcane, I thought that the voice actors did a pretty good job of being into their characters and “acting” out fighting scenes very well. Not only did the story make me keep watching, but the visual style of the animation as well.
The animation of this series was beautifully crafted. The characters are 3D, but 2D effects are applied to their textures/shaders. If you have ever used Maya before, there is a shader called aiToon that can achieve 2D effects, which is somewhat similar to what the creators of Arcane did. And actually, SCAD Animation studios created a similar animation back in Fall 2021 called Hex Limit. Both of their styles have some similarities, which I found to be very cool that we are creating amazing things similar to real animated TV shows here at SCAD. The art style was also amazing; it was a colorful steampunk vibe. The animation, lighting, textures, and models were all stylized beautifully. The show’s cinematography was done incredibly great, and so was the lighting of many shots. They also combined 2D animation within the TV show, which can be shown in a stunningly powerful fight scene in episode 7. The show likes to have neon colors, which emphasizes the whole vibe of the show and some of its character’s personalities.
If you love watching animated series where the art style is unique and stunning, then I highly recommend this show. Not only is Arcane beautiful in its animation style, but the storyline itself is also beautiful. This show is currently on Netflix, so go and watch it!
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