In this piece · 9 sections+
Yes. Arcane is worth watching, especially season 1. Even if you've never touched League of Legends, this one earns the hype — with a caveat about season 2.
For years every studio in town kept trying to make a prestige adaptation out of a video game and tripping over the welcome mat. Then Riot Games and a French animation house called Fortiche quietly dropped a Netflix series based on a MOBA that most people over 30 can't pronounce, and it turned out to be one of the best-looking animated shows ever made. Season 1 is a 9-episode masterwork. Season 2 is the sound of ambition slamming into a deadline. The whole package still clears the bar for most TV being made right now, and it clears it by a lot.
The quick verdict
Yes. Watch it. Season 1 is the kind of thing that makes you text people. Season 2 fumbles a chunk of its ending but still delivers scenes that will live in your head for a while. If you care about animation as a medium, voice acting that actually sounds like humans, or sibling drama with real stakes, you're the audience. If you need a tidy, satisfying bow at the end, lower your expectations a notch going into the final three episodes.
✅ WORTH IT
What Arcane is actually about
Two cities stacked on top of each other. Piltover is the sunlit one, run by scientists and oligarchs who all look like they went to the same prep school. Zaun is underneath it — poisoned air, chem-barons, kids running numbers, the whole underclass holding together with duct tape and grudges. Magic is illegal. A new technology called hextech is about to blow the door off that rule. In the middle of all this are two sisters, Vi and Powder, who get separated as kids under circumstances that will not improve either of their mental health.
Tonally this is not a kids' show, which Netflix buried in the marketing because they wanted families watching too. People get murdered. Children see things children shouldn't see. The score is this woozy electronic thing that sounds like Imagine Dragons and a jazz quartet got stuck in an elevator. There's political intrigue, lab-rat body horror, class war that actually names class, and a love story that isn't the point but hits anyway. Think prestige drama with the budget of a Pixar movie and the mood of a late-season Breaking Bad.
The math on time
Two seasons. 18 episodes. Most run 40 to 45 minutes. Call it roughly 13 hours of your life. That's a solid long weekend, or two weeks of two-episode nights if you're trying to be a functioning adult about it.
For the quality you're getting in season 1 alone, 13 hours is a steal. Compare that to the 60 or 70 hours a Marvel series will ask of you across its spinoffs just to tell a story that could have been a lunch meeting. Arcane respects the clock. The pilot moves. The season 1 finale is nine episodes in and feels like you've watched a three-season novel. You will not be checking your phone.
What it gets right
The animation first, because you can't talk about this show without it. Fortiche uses a hybrid 2D-over-3D technique that nobody else has replicated at this scale. Every frame has brushwork visible in the shading. Faces hold expressions the way oil paintings do. Watch the scene in episode 3 where Jinx is painting on the walls and tell me when American TV last looked like that. The answer is never.
The writing holds up its end, which is the real shock. Christian Linke and Alex Yee built characters with actual contradictions — Jayce the inventor who keeps becoming the thing he hates, Caitlyn the cop who gets radicalized by grief, Silco the warlord who loves one person on earth and it's the kid he kidnapped from his best friend. The voice cast is loaded. Hailee Steinfeld as Vi, Ella Purnell as Jinx, Kevin Alejandro as Jayce, and the late Harry Lloyd doing the best villain performance in animation this decade as Viktor. Nobody is phoning this in. Nobody sounds like they're reading in a booth. The whole ensemble sounds like a theater company that happened to show up to a recording session.
Pacing wise, season 1 is a clinic. Nine episodes in three three-episode arcs, each one ending on an actual event rather than a cliffhanger stall. You know where you are at all times. You know what's at stake. It's almost old-fashioned, which is maybe the nicest thing you can say about a show made in the last five years.
What doesn't work
Season 2 is where the knives come out. The team had to compress what was reportedly plotted as two more seasons into nine episodes, and you can feel it. Characters get arcs that should take ten episodes crammed into three. One major romantic beat that fans had been building toward since season 1 gets its payoff scene and then those characters basically never share a room again. There are time jumps that leave important development happening off-screen. The final battle is beautiful and emotionally giant but also kind of structurally confused — people choose things because the plot needs them to choose things, not because the previous episode set it up.
Also, if you are coming in cold, the first two episodes of season 2 will test you. There's a dream-sequence episode that is visually stunning and narratively a traffic jam. The show is swinging big and sometimes the bat misses.
And the ending. People argue about it, and I'll just say this: it earns some of what it reaches for and overreaches on the rest. A couple of character fates feel like the writers' room ran out of index cards. You will not close the laptop feeling tidy. You will close it feeling.
Who should watch it
If you liked The Last of Us, yes. Same DNA. Grim world, specific craft, sisters at the center.
If you liked Avatar: The Last Airbender or Castlevania, absolutely. This is adult animation that respects both words equally.
If you bounced off Netflix's live-action video game stuff like The Witcher after season 1, don't let it put you off. This is a different team and a different ambition entirely.
If you want something plot-tight and resolved with a bow on top, know what you're signing up for in season 2. If you need a laugh, skip it. If you don't like animation on principle, actually, give it one episode anyway — the people who say that line usually haven't seen anything this good.
Where to watch
Both seasons stream exclusively on Netflix. There's no Blu-ray release in the US yet, no digital-to-own option on Amazon or Apple at the time of writing. If you let your Netflix subscription lapse, this is a good reason to turn it back on for a month. The soundtracks for both seasons are worth owning on their own — the Arcane soundtracks on Amazon are stacked with Imagine Dragons, Woodkid, Mick Jenkins, Stromae, and about a dozen other acts who all somehow fit the mood.
FAQ
Is Arcane overrated?
No. The season 1 reception was earned, and the critics who called it the best thing animation did that decade weren't exaggerating. Season 2 is where the overrated/underrated argument lives. Some fans softened on the whole show after the finale, which is more a reaction to disappointment than a reassessment of the actual work. Season 1 is still what it was the week it dropped.
Does it get better after season 1?
Honestly, no. Season 1 is the peak and season 2 is a step down in pacing and story construction. Individual scenes in season 2 are as good as anything in season 1, maybe better, but as a complete arc season 1 is the stronger piece of television. You're watching season 2 to find out what happens to these people, not because the storytelling levels up.
Do I need to know anything about League of Legends to watch it?
Not a single thing. I've never played a MOBA in my life and the show works. The characters are introduced like they're new, because for the TV audience they are. Fans of the game get Easter eggs and character callbacks, but the main story doesn't require any of that background. If you can watch a fantasy show, you can watch this.
Is it too dark for kids?
Yes. Rated TV-14 by Netflix but functionally closer to a hard PG-13. On-screen violence, drug use, a scene involving a child and a bomb, and some genuinely upsetting body horror in season 2. Watch it before you let a 10-year-old watch it. Teenagers will be fine, and will probably teach you something about the show.
Start with season 1, episode 1. If you're not sold by the end of episode 3, which is where the first arc lands, this show is not for you and that's a fair conclusion to reach fast.
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