Eurek

This show's been great for an introductory season, with Viktor likely being the most three dimensional character of the story. The artstyle's gorgeous - as you'd expect from a multi-billionaire company - although conversations between characters can feel somewhat overly-animated at times and lip motions have a watery feel to them. Caithlin is probably the most obvious example, where her hair and the mouth flaps have the same silky physics and her model feels a little weightless. The 'worst' part about Arcane is obviously the music. I'm not saying it's bad, hold your pitchforks, however, there's a bit too much teen angst when the vocals kick in and it makes me feel like I'm watching an amv. I guess the show's aiming for teens and young adults, so it's only natural to add that extra funk to the action scenes, but I found myself having to mute the audio to stop cringing. I would've liked the music not to have any lyrics to it, but I'm assuming Riot chose this course of action to add it later on to vinyl and Spotify and I'm sure it will sell well. There is also.. touching, a lot of it. I'm not trying to say that hugs and kisses are awkward, but when they happen for the 20th time it takes away from the emotional factor and their intended message gets muddied along with all the other times affection is being displayed. The main reason why I only gave this show an 8/10 is because it's the foundation of something with lots of potential. I like the story, some of the characters deserved more development, there were too many love interests and you can pretty much cross an entire BINGO board with all the secondary characters that die along the way. I hope the writers will learn from their mistakes and continue to improve on this series, because the amount of lore they have to work with is insanely rich. It's a great watch along with friends, I saw some episodes alone for comparison, but since it's based on an online game we've been playing for over half a decade at this point, it made much more sense to me to binge watch it in a group.

After remembering this was a thing, I gave it a shot and I can say I'm not disappointed inthe end result. I've played a little bit of DotA when moba's we're still my thing and although at the time I found the characters' backstories laughable at best and Shakespeare-esque at worse, I think they did a great job with what they had to work with. But the show feels like it's moving a little too fast and I don't exactly get a lot of time to attach to these characters, unless I'm actually a fan of the game. I had the same feeling about Castlevania up to season 4, but I really do think that two more episodes would have tied everything together nicely. The CGI also has to go, it's so incredibly ugly, the villagers in episode 8 and the lip flops of the dragons strike me in particular as goofy and weightless. I don't know what the budget of this series is, but I've almost never seen 2D and 3D combined and done well, unless the models are semi-hidden by energy fields and whatnot to better blend them in. You have traditional hand-drawn animation in twos or threes vs those buttery smooth models for the drakes and Terrorblade and it's a shame, because it makes the experience feel a little bit cheap, I'm talking Master Raindrop levels of cheap. Still a good watch, not gonna lie, but for outsiders it's just action with some predictable character developement thrown in to justify the murder rampages. Season 1 feels more like an experiment to see how many would tune in, so let us hope that season 2 - should it ever come out - gets better from here.