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Arcane overview - finally a great video game adaptation!

Look out for yourself!

By John H. KnightPublished about a year ago 4 min read
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For years and years, video game adaptations were a bit of a laughingstock. For one thing, people didn't really take the games seriously, thinking that they were only for children. The image of an adult gamer only stepped out of the territory of mockery very recently. Back in the '90s gaming was considered childish. Just think of everyone's favourite sitcom from the era, Friends: on more than one occasion the characters pretended not to play video games in fear of looking immature. While Friends by no means can be considered as truthful documentation of the era (how did they afford those apartments? why weren’t any people of colour in New York City?), it still reflected it. The way Chandler and Ross, on different occasions, pretended not to like video games, and even the forgiving laugh they got when they actually played, show that being a gamer was considered a quirky way to keep your inner child going, at best.

Even years later, when The Big Theory, another hit sitcom, first aired, the base of the show was that being a geek, reading comic books and playing video games was not a behaviour and lifestyle society can accept or understand.

No wonder the movies came from a world neglected and laughed at as much as this one mirrored precisely this attitude. Just think of Mortal Kombat, The Super Mario Bros or Street Fighter (not to mention early comic book movies such as Howard the Duck, Daredevil, Elektra, Fantastic Four, etc). Why take yourself seriously, if nobody else does?

Arguably, these video games might not have been the best choices to adapt to movies, given that their actual plot could be written on a napkin with room to spare, but the fact remains: they were nothing but poorly made cash grabs trying to make money by using characters and places from video games, without any intention of being anything more.

There is one more factor that cannot be overlooked while talking about the low quality and poor judgement of early video game movies: Uwe Boll. This absolute potato of a filmmaker single-handedly held back the entire genre by making abominations of movies based on popular games such as Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark, Postal or Far Cry (this last one being the rare example of a Boll movie that reached more than 10% on Rotten Tomatoes). Bolls’ movies were so aggressively bad, that at some point he took to Kickstarter to raise money for the next one because no studio executive in their right mind would have given another chance to him. After he couldn’t pile up enough to make his next masterpiece, he sent literally everyone to hell in a video and beat up a film critic for not liking his movies. Charming fella.

In the last five years or so we finally got adaptations that could be more or less considered movies (none of them, of course, came from good old Uwe), but the bar is still low. With Detective Pikachu, Uncharted or Warcraft being decent movies, the film industry seems to realise that video game movies don’t have to be bad. The real breakthrough, however, the video game movie that will end the stigma once and for all are yet to be made.

That is if we are talking about movies. TV shows, however…

A year ago an animated TV show called Arcane hit Netflix. It’s based on Riot Games’ wildly popular online multiplayer team-based strategy game, League of Legends. Which I never played, nor do I know much about it. I had no anticipations or background knowledge when I first sat down to check out this new thing, based on nothing else but a few good critics and the fact that I didn’t have to know the game to understand the show.

A year later, after my second (and definitely not last) watch of season 1, I think Arcane isn’t only the best video game-based media out there, but one of the best series, animated or live-action, from the last few years. It is nearly perfect, and that isn’t only my opinion: on RT the show is currently fresh with 100%. It uses its length to tell a long and complex story from the points of view of several characters, ranging from street kids in the filthy and dangerous undercity to scientists and council members of the city of Piltover. The main focus is on Vi and Powder, sisters from the undercity. They are struggling to make a living on the mean streets, even though breaking the law isn’t something they worry all that much about. And as it happens in these stories, on a faithful day a job goes very, very wrong… Which eventually kicks off a chain of events that could change or even destroy the city forever.

Hard to say much about the story without any spoilers. It’s a steampunk fantasy adventure crime drama, animated beautifully, with an amazing soundtrack (not once did I skip the intro of this one, to say the least), first-class voice actors and real, well-written characters all around. In fact, the show is so good that Netflix did something it very rarely does: gave green light to a second season, which is anticipated to be out sometime in 2023. If it will be just half as good as the first one, the entire Arcane TV show will still be the best thing that ever happened to video game adaptations.

entertainmentgamingmoviepop culturereviewsteampunktv
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About the Creator

John H. Knight

Yet another aspiring writer trying his luck on the endless prairie of the Internet.

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