All four are League of Legends champions (of varying popularity), and their stories each neatly reflect the cities they inhabit. Through the first four episodes that Riot provided to critics, the show focuses on two separate duos across Piltover and Zaun: the sisters, Vi and Jinx, and the scientific partners Jayce and Viktor.

These almost function like short movies with their own narrative arcs, and give the show time to dig into each of its characters throughout their lives and journeys. Their arcs are broken down into three separate three-episode acts that take place several years apart. Rather than try to work in dozens of characters from the game, Arcane smartly narrows its focus to a few key champions and a few new characters. Outside of a few short blurbs hidden away on the game’s official website, League of Legends’ characters don’t really have any concrete backstory, which is exactly what Arcane solves.

League devotees have likely played their favorite characters for dozens or hundreds of hours at least, and whether you like them because of their in-game abilities or flashes of personality, most players form strong attachments to the champions they like playing most.īut as beloved as the characters are, their in-game versions are mostly made up of some exceptional art and a few clever lines of dialogue that communicate a bit about who they are and their personality. Outside of its gameplay, what’s kept players coming back to League in the 12 years since it was first released are its characters. That balance allows Arcane’s characters to make the show - which is the way it should be for something based on League of Legends. It’s a rare sweet spot that’s darker than a Marvel movie, but never crossing the line into grimdark or adult fantasy. But none of it rises above a PG-13 level, and the show keeps most of its well-developed themes and characters pretty straightforward and understandable. Arcane is definitely not a kids show, there’s swearing, blood, a very dark tone, disturbing scenes, and plenty of violence. If this all sounds a little like Young Adult fiction, that’s because it is. The decades of mistreatment helped push the disgruntled citizens of the Undercity toward the mysterious Silco, who promised to transform Undercity into the city of Zaun, and will do anything to gain power over Piltover. As it turns out, Piltover held down the Undercity for years, forcing its leaders into disadvantageous and unpopular protection deals, wielding immense police power like a cudgel to keep its poorer populace in line.

But while the game’s version is mostly good (Piltover) versus evil (Zaun), Arcane paints a more complicated picture. The stories of the two cities are familiar to most League fans. Pilotover is the idealistic and scientifically minded metropolis that has self-branded as “the city of progress” on top, with the crime-ridden, unregulated technological dystopia of Zaun (though it was only known as “the Undercity” in its earlier days) below. These two occupy the same area of the world and are sort of like sister cities, with one on top of the other. But in that narrative vacuum, Riot and Netflix’s new League of Legends animated series, Arcane, finds plenty of room to add to the world players already know and welcome new fans at the same time.Īrcane centers its story on two of League’s most important locations: Piltover and Zaun. Developer Riot Games’ (several) attempts at stringing the world of Runeterra and its characters together into a larger narrative have always fallen flat the game had some charismatic characters and cities, and almost nothing beyond that tying them together. The massively popular multiplayer game League of Legends has never really had much of a story.

Series arcane league of legends