She was expected as the messiah by fans: season 2 of the event series Arcana has been broadcast since November 9 on Netflix. It should once again break many records, whether in terms of viewing hours (tens of millions of hours for the first season) or awards (22 wins at the Emmy and Annie Awards in 2021 and 2022). Above all, this second and final season once again appears to be a revolution in the audiovisual world, for a simple fact: it is an adaptation of the most popular video game in the world, League of Legends. And she’s excellent.
Video game adaptations have long had the reputation of being cursed, disasters that are a foregone conclusion. Among the most emblematic disasters, we think in particular of the series Princess Zelda from 1989, or even to the films Mortal Kombat from 1997 and Assassin’s Creed of 2016. The fault has often been attributed to the video game format. The stories are not told in the same way as in other media – long phases of action or side quests are integrated into the narrative, making a linear adaptation complex.
But Arcanaproduced by the French studio Fortiche and whose first season was released in 2021, was an upheaval. Sprawling universe, characters of rare depth, gripping plot… The Netflix series has achieved a tour de force, all based on an online multiplayer video game that is difficult to adapt: League of LegendsOr LoL for the initiated. The games, which see two teams of five players face each other, take the form of a generalized fight between the two. A certain strategy comes into play, but “there is not a scenario like in The Last of Us“, another successful series adapted from a video game a few years later Arcanasummarize to L’Express Barthelemy Maunoury and Pascal Charrue, the two co-directors. What could have been an insurmountable constraint ultimately allowed the series to shine.
“We didn’t say to ourselves that we were going to adapt a video game”
“The story we created is unique. We were able to have a lot of freedom and free ourselves from video games,” explains Barthelemy Maunoury. The story ofArcana thus follows characters who actually exist in LoLbut whose adventures had remained largely unexplored apart from a few biographical elements.
“We didn’t say to ourselves that we were going to adapt a video game. We simply wanted to tell a beautiful story,” continues Pascal Charrue. And this is what gives Arcana all its force: far from being a generalized fistfight, the episodes tell with great subtlety a story of a struggle for power which destroys cities and families. Thus, no need to have prior knowledge of LoL to enjoy the series. Conversely, the plot ofArcana serves a purpose that further deepens the game universe. The symbiosis now goes even further: since November 6, Ambessa, a character invented solely for Arcanais now playable on LoL. Enough to enable newbies to convert to video games?
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