Arcane Season 2 Act III Review - IGN
Arcane Season 2 Act III Review - IGN
Act III of Arcane’s second (and final) season 2 contains some spectacular action and one of the best episodes in the entire series. But it’s also an underwhelming ending that rushes its story.
Act III of Arcane’s second (and final) season 2 contains some spectacular action and one of the best episodes in the entire series. But it’s also an underwhelming ending that rushes its story.
The finale felt like we got Game Of Throned, rushed for no apparent reason, ignoring character arcs and storylines, and I was shocked at how they shoehorned a "faceless army" into the Big Bad fight like an MCU movie. Why did Arcane only have to be only two seasons? I mean, was it not successful enough? It's one of the most celebrated animated productions of all time, everyone loved it, why wasn't THIS given more seasons, when so many other lesser shows drag on forever? Why did this happen. Did the studio not make enough money selling this to Netflix, did they get bored, did Netflix want to "move on" from the most successful video game adaption of all time? I don't get it. Son I am disappoint.
From what I understood from interviews it was rushed because they really wanted to move on from Piltover/Zaun and start creating more series (and movies potentially) for the LoL universe. But yes... It's so, so disappointing.
A lot of people are laser-focused on the ending but honestly season 2 in its entirety was super disappointing. Straight from act 1 I told people it was disappointing and anticlimactic but I guess people were hopeful things would improve.
More than anything I am so blown away that they decided to make the conflict between Zaun and Piltover in the background to focus on world-ending disasters and magic and random inserts like the black thorn. Sure, it's rushed but that's hardly the biggest problem. The story completely forgot what it was about in the first place and made it about something else.
I think episodes 4-7 were great, easily on the level of season 1. The rest were... lacking. The fist three felt like filler that could be combined into one episode. What exactly was the point of the big fight in episode three? The story doesn't really change without it. I think you really hit the nail on the head with them forgetting what the story is about, but I'd say this applies mostly to to the last two episodes. I liked the conclusion that Jayce and Victor got, but that's just not enough. You can't forget about the main duo of Vi and Jinx, the ones we care about most. It's sad that this is the ending we got, but I don't think it's so bad that it overshadows all of the amazing episodes that came before. All in all, still an amazing show.
There were a lot of "twists" the show seemed to have thought were smart but largely ignored any and all character development for the sake doing whatever it thought was cool while missing the beat of what was actually cool.
And the endless wave of introduction of mostly nameless characters for them to kill off to avoid ever having to kill off main characters was annoying.
Season 2 lacked good story telling.