Arcane Season 2 review – luxurious animation returns with lavish angst and melodrama

It’s no great surprise that an animation costing a whopping $250m for two short seasons is ending before it gets to a third, but that doesn’t make it any less of a shame. Arcane is a wonderful series, obviously beautiful but also deeply earnest. This show is unafraid to feel things, and feel them hard.

I’ve watched the first six of the final nine episodes coming to Netflix over the next few weeks. They pick up in the immediate moments of the season one finale, where series antihero Jinx, née Powder, has blown a whacking great hole right at the heart of Piltover’s ruling council chambers. The first few episodes follow the lead characters – those who survived – literally and metaphorically picking up the pieces of that climactic incident, as both Piltover and the neighbouring undercity of Zaun suffer parallel power vacuums in the fallout.

There are strikingly obvious (albeit given the lengthy development, probably coincidental) real-world parallels here. A prosperous, technologically and economically advanced society and its oppressed neighbour; a terror attack; the response. Arcane pokes and prods at this subject, a little line here or there – “why is peace always the reason given for violence?” – before receding to something broader.

Among those big themes, however, Arcane threads the same frantically emotional personal dramas it set in motion with season one. Vi and Caitlyn’s forbidden, Romeo and Juliet romance goes beyond its initial happy-ish ending to the place of inevitable tension for one involving two people from entirely opposite worlds. Jinx struggles (and mostly fails) to cope with the loss of her family and mentor by adopting an adorable street urchin of her own. Heartthrob science bro and all-round human jawline Jayce fights to keep his bromancé Viktor alive, counting the weight of his principles against his own desperation.

Most of these are handled a tiny bit bluntly – some dialogue is strikingly on the nose to the point of simply stating characters’ intentions out loud, making the subtext text – but again, with absolute earnestness. Expect punched mirrors, punched faces, screams and tears and multiple needle-drop, techno-punk montages. Much the same as a good bit of young adult fiction, that bare-hearted angst and melodrama is an asset, part of what makes Arcane so compelling, and is in many ways a necessary framework for it to hang its utterly striking visual work on. You need the emotional stakes to be dialled up to the maximum when your art director’s decided to go full-on, transcendental awe.

Again, just like season one, Arcane’s second season is an utterly remarkable achievement in animation, continuing its almost indescribable blending of concept art scenery, flickering, anime-style special effects, and a painterly, brushstroke approach to faces that creates characters which speak and move as if portraits under a spell. The level of detail – the sense of luxury – is astonishing at times, with single shots that might appear on screen for less than a second still jumping out as not only detailed, but thoughtfully detailed. I’ll rewatch this season very soon, if only just to keep an eye out during rapid-fire quick cuts for more little decisions and moments of craft – the clever binding of a book in an artful flashback; the switch of camera perspective in a brief cutaway – that must have been laboured over by artists for weeks, only to risk being entirely missed. And all that among dramatic, Spiderverse-style shifts in entire art styles to charcoal sketches, watercolour paints and more.

Frankly, it’s magnificent. There are a few small hiccups in these first six episodes, although yet again just like the first season, they fade as things gather momentum and all that pent up potential energy starts to bubble over. Along with moments of slightly stiff dialogue for instance, there’s also a lingering sense that we are absolutely whistling along through the story in order to cram this into just two seasons, jumping between parallel timelines to scenes that are months in the future, flashing backwards to memories, and beyond. Some arcs feel slightly abridged, such as the broader societal situations in Zaun that I’m forbidden to spoil. And one or two main character stories, at least in the first six episodes so far, feel underdeveloped and as a result, a little out-of-pocket. I’m thinking particularly of the circumstances around Mel and an encounter with the Black Rose, a secret cabal that I suspect even the majority of League of Legends players won’t have heard of.

There’s also some obligatory fan service, which is really quite inoffensive, a mix of subtle and, in the case of one Nordic nursery rhyme, not-at-all-subtle nods to League characters and backstories. I’m still totally fascinated by what it must be like to watch Arcane without any prior knowledge of Riot’s various Runeterra-based games. I hear it’s perfectly great. As a shameless LoL player myself, I can’t help but watch Arcane’s many exceptional, intricately choreographed action scenes and wonder if that new, named character with a tagline (“I like to get up close”) and clearly distinguished array of skills (Blocking bullets! Special stab! Scampering arms!) might one day become an in-game Champion, just as the Noxian villain Ambessa has finally arrived in-game alongside this new season. I suspect that’s a ‘me problem’ though. Like everything in Arcane, these action moments are rendered in absolute richness and luxury, across ultra slow-motion moments that beg to be screenshotted to flashes of frantic, bullet-speed intensity.

I could go on. Particularly on Arcane’s visuals which, as you might expect, only continue to flourish as the season progresses, matching and arguably outdoing the best moments of season one – such as Viktor’s initial, astral encounter with the arcane world back then – which, once again, are mirrored in season two by taking place beyond the mentionable embargo. I do wish I could see those final three episodes now, as well. Mostly because there are so many loose threads still twirling in the air as of the end of the second act; if Arcane can successfully tie them all together it will have managed something genuinely special. But also because I just really would like to see what happens next.

Riot Games and Fortiche have made something pretty rare here, something it’s tempting to call a vanity project, a thing that arose out of the studio’s peak of profitability, a relic of a bygone age of limitless players and limitless cash reserves. But it’s really a bit more noble. This is a creative work that is absolutely doomed to lose money, but which has still managed to exist to its conclusion – on Netflix, no less – regardless. We should be delighted it exists at all.

Season two of Arcane launches on Netflix from 9th November.