Arcane is an animated series that became a phenomenon even among people who have never played League of Legends. If you ended up here because a friend recommended it, the Netflix algorithm pushed it or a song got stuck in your head, this guide explains what Arcane actually is, where to watch it, what it’s about and how it connects to the game it came from. You don’t need to know the game, and that’s exactly what makes Arcane interesting.
What Arcane actually is
Arcane (full title Arcane: League of Legends) is an animated sci-fi/steampunk series commissioned by Netflix in collaboration with Riot Games, the company behind League of Legends, one of the most played PC games in the world. The animation itself is handled by the French studio Fortiche, based in Paris, Montpellier and Las Palmas, and the showrunners are Christian Linke and Alex Yee, who had already worked on the game’s story at Riot Games.
Here’s the important part: Arcane is set in the world of League of Legends, but you don’t need to know anything about the game. The characters you meet in the series are playable in the game, but the show is written as a standalone story with a beginning, middle and end, not as an ad for the game or a tutorial on how to get started with it. Feel free to watch it like any other quality animated series for adults.
League of Legends is a five-versus-five online game in which each player picks one of dozens of characters (champions) and fights alongside their team to destroy the enemy base. It came out in 2009 and has long been one of the most played games in the world, which is why it has such a large pool of characters, places and stories for Arcane to draw from. But that’s all you need to know to watch the series. Arcane doesn’t get by on references to the game. It builds its own political and family story that makes sense even to viewers who couldn’t care less about video games.
Where to watch Arcane and how many episodes it has
Arcane streams exclusively on Netflix; you won’t find it legally anywhere else. It has two seasons with 18 episodes in total:
- Season 1: 9 episodes, premiered on 6 November 2021, released three episodes at a time in three “acts” a week apart.
- Season 2: 9 episodes, premiered on 9 November 2024, again three episodes at a time (Act 2 on 16 November, Act 3 on 23 November 2024).
On Netflix it’s available in the original English version as well as with dubbing and subtitles. The second season is also the last one. Riot Games confirmed that Arcane was planned from the start as two complete seasons, not that anyone “canceled” it. You’ll find more on what comes next in the section on follow-ups below.
What Arcane is about (no spoilers)
Arcane takes place in two connected cities: rich, gleaming Piltover above ground and poor, smoky Zaun beneath it. Piltover is the “City of Progress”, a center of science and hextech technology, while Zaun is its shadowy underbelly, where everything Piltover has no room for ends up. The gap between the two cities isn’t just physical but, above all, social.
At the center of it all are two sisters, Vi and Powder, who grow up in Zaun and whose paths split in completely different directions because of one tragic night. Around them revolve inventors who want to use dangerous magical technology to make the world better (or so they believe), enforcers who are supposed to keep order, and criminals who see an opportunity in Zaun’s chaos. A detailed description of where the story takes the sisters and the other characters is saved for the spoiler section below. Until then, we’ll stick to this basic setup.
Piltover and Zaun weren’t invented just for the series, either. They’re two of the roughly dozen regions that together make up Runeterra, the fictional world where all of League of Legends takes place. In both the game and the show, Piltover presents itself as the “City of Progress”: clean streets, academies, hextech inventions and a council that governs the city. Zaun is its opposite: former mines and sewers beneath Piltover that became independent with their own culture, gangs and, as the series reveals, their own view of who the city really belongs to. The tension between wealth above and poverty below is the engine that holds the whole story together, whether you’re following the Council’s politics, the inventors in their labs or the street gangs in Zaun’s alleys.
If you want to know exactly how the world of Piltover and Zaun fits into the rest of Runeterra (the name of the whole fictional world of League of Legends), we break it down in a separate article on the world of Runeterra and its regions.
Why everyone talks about Arcane
Arcane isn’t just a “decent show based on a video game”. It’s one of the best-rated animated series of recent years, and you can see that in the awards and audience reactions.
Animation that looks like nothing else
Fortiche developed its own visual style for Arcane that combines 2D painting, 3D character animation and hand-drawn details, so the frames feel like paintings coming to life rather than typical 3D CGI animation. This approach is the main reason the series looks different from anything else on Netflix at the time, and why animators and studios around the world talk about Arcane as a point of reference.
Music that took on a life of its own
The Arcane soundtrack is more than background music. The song “Enemy” by Imagine Dragons and JID went from the first season’s theme to a hit in its own right: it took first place on the Billboard Top TV Songs chart, reached the top of the rock streaming chart and held the spot of the most-streamed rock track on Spotify for several weeks in a row. For plenty of people who hadn’t seen the show yet, “Enemy” was their very first contact with Arcane.
Reception from critics and audiences
Both seasons have scores close to 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Arcane won the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program: first in 2022 (for Season 1, as the first streaming program ever to win in this category) and again in 2025 (for Season 2, with four Emmys in total for the second season, including categories such as production design, color and sound editing).
What makes this interesting from the video game industry’s point of view: series based on video games long had a reputation as a risky genre that won over neither critics nor mainstream audiences. Arcane, together with a few other titles from recent years (such as the series based on The Last of Us), turned that impression around and showed that a game world can become a full-fledged TV story that stands on its own, regardless of whether the viewer knows the game or has never even seen it running.
Voice cast
The lead roles in the original English version are voiced by Hailee Steinfeld (Vi), Ella Purnell (Jinx), Katie Leung (Caitlyn), Kevin Alejandro (Jayce) and Harry Lloyd (Viktor). The English voice track is the one the series was made with and the one the animators synced the characters’ movements to, so even if you usually go for a dubbed version, it’s worth watching at least a few scenes in the original.
Spoiler warning: what happens in Arcane
From this point on, we reveal the plot of both seasons. If you haven’t seen the series yet and want to enjoy it unspoiled, skip straight to the section on the connection with the game.
The first season follows the sisters Vi and Powder from their childhood in Zaun’s underground. After a tragic mission in which their father figure Vander dies and Powder accidentally kills several people, including Vander and the group around Vi, the sisters are separated. Vi ends up in prison, while Powder is taken under the wing of Zaun’s underworld boss Silco, who renames her Jinx and raises her into an unstable but dangerously gifted explosives inventor. In parallel, we follow Jayce Talis and Viktor, two scientists from Piltover who discover hextech, a way to stabilize magical energy and make it accessible to ordinary people. Their discovery brings them recognition and political power, but it also opens the door to its misuse. The season ends in open conflict: while attacking the Piltover Council, Jinx kills several of its members, including Jayce’s fatherly mentor, which sparks open war between the two cities.
The second season takes place roughly three years later and unravels the consequences of that explosion. Vi and Caitlyn (the daughter of a Piltover noble family and Vi’s close ally, later also her partner) try to stop Jinx before she does more damage, while Zaun officially declares independence from Piltover. Meanwhile Viktor, obsessed with the idea of freeing humanity from suffering, experiments with hextech on his own body and gradually turns into a half-mechanical being, referred to in the series as the Machine Herald. A new layer of politics appears too: the mother of Jayce’s colleague Mel, General Ambessa Medarda of Noxus, enters the conflict with her own agenda, turning the local dispute between Piltover and Zaun into part of a much bigger geopolitical picture of Runeterra. The season culminates in a battle for the fate of both cities in which some key heroes die and the relationships between the characters change for good, including the reveal that the creature Zaun knows as a monster is actually a transformed Vander, brought back to life by the experiments of the chemist Singed.
We go through the exact order and details of the individual twists, especially around Jinx and her relationship with Vi, in more depth in the article on Jinx and her journey from Powder and in the article on Vi and Caitlyn. The relationship between Viktor and Jayce, and where their obsession with progress leads them, is covered in a separate article on Viktor and Jayce. For a step-by-step account of what happened in Season 2, see the Season 2 plot breakdown.
How Arcane connects to League of Legends and what to watch next
Arcane isn’t just inspired by the game. It’s a full part of its story (lore), and it works the other way around too: thanks to the show’s success, League of Legends got new playable characters straight out of Arcane. Ambessa Medarda became playable in November 2024, right after the second season launched, and Mel Medarda arrived in the game in January 2025. Most of the show’s main characters (Vi, Jinx, Caitlyn, Jayce, Viktor, Ekko, Heimerdinger) were already playable in the game before, and Arcane simply gave them depth and a story the game itself had never told like this. For a complete overview of which character matches which playable champion (and which ones stayed “only” in the series), see our article on all Arcane characters and their in-game counterparts.
It also works in reverse: characters from Arcane have made their way back into the game itself, both visually and in its story. League of Legends loading screens, animated trailers and story updates now regularly build on what happened in the series, so players who have seen Arcane see what’s going on in the game in a completely different light than those who skipped it.
If Arcane has made you wonder whether to try League of Legends at all, we explain the basics of the game and how to choose your first champion in the article on all LoL champions. There won’t be a third season of Arcane. Showrunner Christian Linke confirmed that instead of a sequel, Riot is preparing standalone series set in other parts of Runeterra, specifically in the regions of Noxus, Ionia and Demacia. At the time this article was written, Riot hadn’t officially confirmed exact dates or titles for these projects. Everything else you can watch or read from the League of Legends universe, from comics and short films to upcoming series, is summed up in the article on what to watch and read once Arcane has hooked you.
FAQ
No. Arcane is written to work as a standalone story. Knowing the game will at most add a few u0022ahau0022 moments, but the plot, the characters’ motivations and the world don’t need any prior context.
Two seasons of nine episodes each, 18 episodes in total. Both are split into three u0022actsu0022 of three episodes.
Exclusively on Netflix, in the original English version as well as with dubbing and subtitles.
No. Arcane was conceived from the start as a two-season series and ended with Season 2. Instead, Riot Games is preparing new series from other parts of Runeterra.
Arcane has a higher age rating. It contains violence, drug themes and darker topics, so it’s a series aimed more at older teenagers and adults, not young children.
Most of the main characters are: Vi, Jinx, Caitlyn, Jayce, Viktor, Ekko, Heimerdinger, Ambessa and Mel are all playable champions. A few prominent characters, such as Silco or Sevika, don’t have a playable champion yet. For details, see the u003ca href=u0022/arcane-postavy/u0022u003earticle on the characters and their in-game counterpartsu003c/au003e.
No, but it helps a lot with understanding the relationship between Piltover and Zaun and the motivations of specific champions who keep showing up in the game’s story.
Riot Games releases companion material for Arcane and the Runeterra universe on an ongoing basis. We sum up specific titles and where to get them in the article on what to watch next.
Information verified as of 8 August 2026. Arcane isn’t directly tied to current events in the game, but we verified the information on the show’s release, creators and reception as of this date. Continue with the article on Jinx and her journey from Powder, the overview of all characters and their champions, or head back to the hub page of the full League of Legends guide.