Arcane

Arkin's collection proved that if you spend enough accuracy, elegance and effort, nothing will be impossible, not even making a good video adaptation. Arkin is so well-built that instead of ensuring his success due to the popularity of his league game legends, he credits himself with this game and its source of adaptation. This series was one of the few TV shows I've been excited to see in the last few years, so much so that I started seeing it again immediately after the series ended and watching the final scene, and I'm still writing this article, and I'm not thinking about it, and I'm looking forward to the next season (which I hope is as good as this season!). Arkin is a work that is not enough to see not once, not even twice.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I wavered between a 6 or 7 but ultimately the dull writing pushed me to a 6. First, what I liked -- the animation style is pretty interesting, computer animated but given a 2D hand-drawn shader treatment. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it looks kind of bad, but I like seeing the medium being pushed into new directions. Still, I have to wonder, if you want it to look hand-drawn, why not hire actual artists to draw it? I would probably prefer the result even more. Just look at Japanese anime to see how well a predominantly hand-drawn medium can still incorporate cell-shaded 3D artwork in a seamless fashion. I also liked the character design, liked the background design, too. The music mostly worked for me, too, although I agree with others that it could be cringey at times. I will also say that to some extent the plot and the characterization worked for me, too. However, despite the excellently choreographed fight scenes that occasionally took place, the story was a bore. Character complications developed, and then just didn't really go anywhere, except to more character complications. There was never any character arc leading to resolutions. It was a series where the "bad guys" pretty much won all the time, and it got old. I've never played LoL, but having read some of the other comments and gathered that these are characters from the game whose backgrounds are being explained, I think I see the fundamental problem with this series: it's not meant to go anywhere. These are supposed to just be character creations fleshed out for players of the game, who then play these characters in the LoL world. The stories of these characters are ongoing in the game -- there has been no resolution in-game, either, I guess. So basically, if you want to watch a story that has some feeling of progression and dramatic resolution, you just aren't going to get it here. It instead feels like a drawn out bore of a soap opera, where the goal is to string you along and keep you watching inifinitely long, not to actually trace any story arcs. So it was a real struggle for me to make it through this first season, but like a **** I kept going, thinking somehow the story would start to pick up. And it just never did. I'd also add another complaint: the magic is pretty boring. It never really gets developed much but pretty much stays mostly as a method for creating super powerful batteries for machines, with a few minor exceptions. That was something else I kept waiting to develop in an interesting direction and it never had any payoff. So, yeah, mostly a bunch of characters running around, whining about their problems, making bad decisions that cause their problems to grow even bigger, and not really doing anything interesting, with a bunch of good artwork and voice acting that can't really overcome a fundamentally futile goal of making these in-game characters' origins into satisfying stand-alone stories.

Visually stunning and technically excellent in many ways. This series is let down by bad writing, boring and unbelievable characters, poor story structure, questionable pacing and baffling music choices. A better story with more interesting characters could have compensated for tropes and cliches.

Мне было скучно. Первый мульсериал, который я частично проматывала, потому что и так превосходно знала, что сейчас произойдёт. А если и не знала, то мне было всё равно, ведь я так ничего и не почувствовала к пустым персонажам.