'Arcane' Season 2 review: The best fantasy show of 2024, hands-down (2024)

Oh Arcane, how I've missed you.

Netflix's League of Legends-based series rocked my world when it first came out in 2021 — and I didn't even know the first thing about League! But despite my lack of knowledge of the source material, I found that Arcane had everything I wanted in a fantasy series: a richly developed world, distinct factions full of nuanced relationships, and breathtaking magical powers and action sequences. Plus, there's no beating that animation.

With Arcane Season 1 setting the bar so high, I was worried there was no way its second (and tragically final) season would live up to that standard. Thankfully, Season 2 measures up in every conceivable way and then some, with the first six episodes made available for review raising the stakes to stunning, often unexpected new heights. Brutal, gorgeous, and absolutely devastating, Arcane Season 2 demands to be seen right when each new batch of episodes drops.

What's Arcane Season 2 about?

Let's start with the primary reason for wanting to watch Arcane Season 2 as soon as possible: to find out who lived after the explosion at the end of Season 1.

For three years, we've wondered whether Hextech creator Jayce (voiced by Kevin Alejandro), Piltover Councilor Mel (voiced by Toks Olagundoye), and inventor Viktor (voiced by Harry Lloyd) survived Jinx's (voiced by Fallout's Ella Purnell) shark rocket attack on the Council of Piltover. Arcane wastes no time informing us that there were, in fact, survivors (I'll give you time to learn their exact identities for yourself). However, there were also several catastrophic casualties, and these losses drive Piltover's reaction to the blast.

While the Council voted to give the undercity of Zaun sovereignty mere seconds before Jinx's rocket hit, that chance at peace is now officially off the table. Now, the twin cities threaten to spill into all-out war. Mel's mother and Noxian warlord Ambessa (voiced by Ellen Thomas) is ready to crack down with martial law. But Enforcer Caitlyn (voiced by Katie Leung), herself recovering from deep loss, has other plans. She assembles a strike force that includes herself and Jinx's sister Vi (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) to take Jinx down for good, especially since she's become a symbol of resistance for the Zaunites. Now, the stage is set for a knockdown, drag-out fight between sisters.

Arcane Season 2 offers a painful look at war, and so much more.

That Vi-Jinx showdown, when it comes, is a perfect encapsulation of what makes Arcane's approach to conflict so brilliant. Yes, there's an undeniable cool factor here: We're watching two great fighters pummel each other with supercharged gauntlets and guns, complete with prolonged slow-mo shots to emphasize the badassery on display. Yet all the character work that has led us here is on display too, with Jinx and Vi's every move informed by the love they once shared and the horror at what the other has become. It's the tragedy that wins out over the coolness, and that's the same with Arcane's larger portrayal of war in the League world.

That's because war pushes every Arcane character to an extreme, sometimes taking them in the total opposite direction from Season 1. Vi joins up with the Enforcers, even though they killed her parents, because she thinks it's an unavoidable necessity. A grief-stricken Caitlyn becomes a destructive monster in her pursuit of Jinx, unleashing hell upon the Zaunites. The latter is particularly painful to watch, as chemical warfare and police brutality become the norm in Zaun, and as characters we've grown to love grow corrupted by power and the need for vengeance.

But as much as Arcane's marketing pushes that this season is all about war and how it links to the rift between Vi and Jinx, Season 2 actually makes some strides into more cosmically weird territory. Innovations in the Hextech space push the boundaries of what is possible in Piltover, igniting discussions about transhumanism in ways that are both disquieting and utopic. That these conversations are happening alongside the Piltover-Zaun war is a reminder that the world of Arcane is so much bigger than these two cities — and so much stranger.

That strangeness also manifests in the arrival of new forms of magic and new factions for Arcane's players to contend with. And as exciting as that expansion is, it also threatens to cause issues for the series in terms of sticking the landing. Can the three episodes of the season that I still haven't seen wrap up these many loose ends, especially given Arcane's breakneck pacing? (Sometimes, I do wish these episodes were an hour long instead of 40 minutes, and I don't say that often.) Arcane has yet to steer me truly wrong, but the jury's still out on whether it can fully stick the landing while juggling so many complex ideas and storylines.

Arcane continues to push the boundaries of animated TV.

Even if Arcane doesn't fully nail its ending, there's no doubt about how incredible it looks. Fortiche's animation was always masterful, but Arcane Season 2 somehow levels up.

Once again, we're treated to the show's combination of hand-painted and computer-animated visuals, which bring Piltover's soaring towers and Zaun's grimy underground to life. Now, though, Arcane plays further with animation styles that speak to specific characters' points of view. We saw a bit of this in Season 1, with scribbled line drawings and text overlaid on certain scenes bringing Jinx's perspective to life. In Season 2, it's a whole new ballgame.

Once again, we get Jinx's frenzied drawings. But we also get entire sequences made up of black-and-white charcoal drawings, neon panels straight out of a comic book, and watercolor flashbacks. Strange glitches in Hextech allow animators to go buck-wild with flesh-and-metal fusions, trippy space scapes, and bizarro architecture that calls to mind the warped biology of Annihilation. In one of Season 2's biggest swings, the series places us within the perspective of the beastly wolf-creature Warwick, to the point where all we see is a nightmarish frenzy of red blood trails and the clawed hands carrying us forward.

The versatility of Arcane's art style is just one of many reasons why it's going to hurt so much to say goodbye to this series, even if it's getting a conclusive ending. However, according to a Nov. 6 report by Variety, the series was originally budgeted for a five-season arc. Variety also reported that Arcane cost roughly $250 million to produce, making it the most expensive animated show of all time. Due to its hefty price tag, it's unlikely we'll see anything quite like it again — at least, not for a few more years. Until then, we can continue to appreciate Arcane for the marvel that it is: a true Hextech gem in the rough.

The first three episodes of Arcane Season 2 are now streaming on Netflix, with three more episodes dropping on Nov. 16 and Nov. 23, respectively.