I’ve been watching Netflix’s Arcane: League of Legends, and it’s amazing! Even better than I was hoping. The writing, visual quality, and voice acting are even better than I expected. The fight scenes are both badass and brutally realistic.
It’s a convincing, immersive world overall, although of course there are some oddities (possibly mistakes). So let’s delve into it and take a look at some of the things that stood out to me. Over-thinking mode engaged. 🙂
*** Time Stamps ***
00:00 – 00:58 Intro
00:58 – 03:02 Vi’s boxing skills
03:02 – 03:41 Dodging a knife
03:41 – 03:59 Vander’s knuckle duster brawling
03:59 – 05:34 Vi vs. Sevika with bionic arm
05:34 – 07:29 Accurate gun handling & aim
07:29 – 08:46 Ingame LoL vs. Arcane Caitlyn
08:46 – 09:21 Animation / immersion / Steampunk
09:21 – 10:59 Logical flaw: Hextech gauntlets (& partial cyberlimbs)
10:59 – 14:11 Confused by Caitlyn’s rifle – What is it?
14:11 – 14:52 How many cartridges can it hold?
14:52 – 15:22 Final comments / outro
*** Music ***
Intro song:
“Illuminate” by Vindsvept
https://vindsvept.bandcamp.com/track/illuminate
Used with artist’s permission
Outtakes:
“Little People At Work” by Horrorpen
https://opengameart.org/content/little-people-at-work-loop
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC BY 3.0)
Outro:
“Highland Storm” by The Slanted Room Records
https://theslantedroom.github.io/steve.yee/
Used with artist’s permission
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For Caitlyn's break action….
During a Dark Heresy campaign, I came up with a similar design for my inquisitor. The rifle had an internal magazine, loaded one by one while broken open. To cycle rounds, the inquisitor had to use the lever.
Why this design? Basically concealment. My inquisitor was a sharp shooter who wanted to avoid drawing too much attention to her role. So, she carried a laspistol openly, and ballistic sniper under her coat. Being able to break it open, and thus fold it in half, allowed her to hide it under her fancy inquisitor longcoat.
Maybe its hextech bullets, would make some kind of sense whit a bullet that can fire more than one shots pr reload.
having never played even a second of LoL, I've been enjoying Arcane! (i'm watching it an episode a day) the animation style is hands down my favorite part!!! I would love to see Mistborn or The First Law trilogy adapted in this style!!
There is a cartridge type called the caseless cartridge where the casing make up is the propellent for the round. This is used in 120mm tank rounds.
4:50 You know a lot about medieval weapons, but not that much about boxing apparently. Jabs do lots of damage. Its not that uncommon that jabs causes knockdowns. Jabs absolutely can KO someone as well. A solid jab does…yeah you guessed it, solid damage.
6:50 this is also wrong. Yeah, you have to typically adjust the rifle, if you dont practice enough. You SHOULD not need to do it. If someone is a trained marksman, they absolutely should get the alignment right away. Even decent weekend hunters can do this.
One of the things I also liked was when during the first fight Milo is able to make one of the other kids fall and then kicks him while he's on the ground. That's some great stuff, because taking advantage of situations like these is something that would occur in a real fight, especially when someone like Milo is at a disadvantage, phisically speaking. Also someone smashes someone else's face on a wall, again, very brutal.
The gauntlets have hextech powered gravity stuff. When the first hextech experiment succeeded victor and jayce were flying, so my thinking is that the hextech in the gauntlet does something similar
Man Caitlyn's rifle is pretty strange now that you mention it.
She probably uses different rifles across the entire Arcane. If I remember correctly that scene with Caitlyn doing target shooting was her in her younger years participating in an Enforcer shooting competition against Grayson(the older lady enforce from Act 1).
Lorewise I do remember that Caitlyn's rifle has been custom-made by her parents as a gift for becoming an enforcer so the fact that it is now a foldable lever-action rifle with a feeding tube, different from the rifles of the regular enforcers could make sense.
Highly unlikely theory and I have no clue of it could actually work, but what if the cartridges (the whole thing whatever it’s called, like, the thing you inset into the gun) had multiple bullets in them? Like, every cartridge carried more than one bullet, and could shoot more than one bullet
what do you thinka about this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0zCF8hMPTQ&ab_channel=Elhynion its about a asian warior vs a roman legioner
I'm honestly a little sad and butthurt that the fact that League of Legends (of all things) got a show, but not TF2. AND IT'S ACTUALLY GOOD.
Vi is definitely way beyond the category of ordinary humans, but she lives in a world with magic lol.
That Cait at 7:35 ain't in game lol, just cutscene
12:47 maybe is based in the Burgess Folding Shotgun
Damn, love the outfit. Good video too.
at 4:17, he says Vi must have bones of steel, and I mean, in episode 4 she was punching a concrete wall pretty hard.
Ah!Salakarim:your head movements are great…but.all the right hand punches would land,funny looking left eye…
Hextech isn't just the gemstone, as seen on the creation of Jayce's Hammer-Head there are runes in the body itself, meaning the actual tool-object itself if powered by magic would create magical effects.
Arcane is the greatest show I think I have ever seen. I can't think of another. Maybe Firefly………but only due to humor. As for being a great show though, I still have to place Arcane over that for almost every other reason. Edit: Interesting sidenote. I had a buddy that only played paintball firing from the hip and he was insane with it. He was one of those weird types that is all lower body and had no upper body strength at all. (not sure what affect that could have at all) He was a fucking nightmare. He also was overweight and didn't run anywhere.
Edit: Unlike most channels I've posted on the topic of Arcane……….I've been subscribed to this one for, I don't don't even know how long lol…..a long long time ago.
yes, Great Show!
Glad you appreciated the show my boy. I threw up that recommendation during a live stream and the chat started parroting it, lo and behold you made the video!
Really smart notes on the rifle and odd mechanics. It may stand as the most valid "mistake" in the series (Other than that Imagine Dragons video in an actual episode, that was just weird haha). I really didn't notice or perhaps care as we are so used to this sort of thing in film and animation, but its interesting when compared to the detail given to most everything in the show. It doesn't lessen my opinion of the show and you were pretty clear, its just "overthinking for fun". 🙂
10:00 more ahead in the series you can see that these gloves actualy mitigates it own weight, so it may have antigravity device
An in-universe explanation for the lever action/break action hybrid gun might be that in a fantasy world where you have different kinds of enchanted bullets it might be useful to open the gun up and insert some kind of specialty munition into the barrel manually, while still having a ready supply of regular ammunition in an internal magazine.
My favorite offender to bullet count from a single magazine is Underworld. They fire hundreds of shots from a pistol without reloading.
I think recognizing those limitations in fiction is against the law or something.
Buckshot at close range doesn’t have much spread at all, especially quality buck.
I liked the super strength evaluation. Interestingly this is true for many people who weight lift – they fail to strengthen their anchor muscles (spinal and other support muscles) and only exercise their glamor muscles, which is how they blow out a shoulder or disc.
I'm pretty confident that Netflix has little to do with this show. To me it seems they basically only bought the distribution rights but aside from that the show is produced by Riot themselves and animated by Fortiche Productions which is a French animation studio that worked extensively with Riot in the past.
I would go so far to say that this show is that good because Netflix has no input on it.
Honestly I can't give Riot enough credit for this. They could have produced some cheap, middle of the road, pedestrian, action cartoon like so many other. But they didn't, they choose to treat their most important franchise and asset with care and respect. In a time where seemingly more and more beloved franchises get destroyed (e.g. Star Wars, Star Trek, Masters of the Universe etc.) this is very much a welcome change.
It also nice to see that two companies that had success in the past work together to become even more successful. Riot and Fortiche Productions seems like a match made in heaven judging by the quality of their product (at least from the outside).
When I trained in the Country, hip firing was required.
You have to be quick because not all snakes have alarm bells. ( Copperhead, Cottonmouth and others.) Some hang from trees and others stick to the ground.
Pretty sure its a break action, because its a cool looking reload and its a lever action, because its a cool looking way to cock a gun.
Its nothing to do with practicality, pure "style" for the animators to play with.
You gotta finish arcane some of the nit picks don't follow all the way through.
Well, you've convinced me. Gonna watch it
my guess with caitlyn's rifle is that it's based on the burgess folding shotgun, but a rifle. htere's a good video on it by forgotten weapons here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXvmGtLYwKA
People can condition their bones to be strong enough to hit metal, there was that video of that girl who was legit making dents into metal fence posts, the ones for chain link fences, with her shin kicks, so I think it's possible to hit metal if you work on strengthening your bones
Judging by how the hextech items work, they don't seem to just be powered by the magic crystals. They seem to have their own sort of momentum and effects on the weight of things. For instance how we seem them hit people with the hextech weapons and enemies just break apart despite them not even hitting them that hard. So maybe jayce not having something to support his shoulder wouldn't be necessary. Also we see in the vi vs sevika fight that when sevika cuts though vis gauntly we see her acting as it is NOTICIBLY heavier. So yeah I'm willing to bet the magic does something to the weight of objects.
you have a thing for animated series on netflix: first the dragon prince then the castlevania now the arcane.
After looking at the model animation on twt, i think there is room to THEORIZE about its functionality if it were real; Maybe the first cartridge (the one loaded into the barrel via the break action) has multiple shots within it, and the lever action is meant to fire a cartridge that is purely ballistic, and without a projectile. Sort of like a rifle grenade, but a bullet instead of an explosive. This is obviously not what they designed it as, and it still is a little non-sensical in function and purpose. BUT if we were to theorize its reality this is what i thought up
I don't know if this is the case for the show, but in League of Legends, Caitlyn has a custom-built Hextech rifle gifted by her family, while the Piltover Enforcers have basic semi-automatic rifles that do eject brass earlier in the show, albeit from the left side. So we're probably just not seeing the shells get ejected, since we are looking at the gun from it's right side.
I've read and watch a couple of reviews of Arcane, mostly to validate my feeling about the show because I've been a huge LoL fan for over decade and am extremely biased, and it surprised me how no one commented on the attention to detail and realism of the technique (relative to the fantasy world it exists in) in the brawling scenes. I'm not used to seeing that in most live-action stuff, much less animation, and it actually shocked me seeing it in Arcane.
If you think it is crisp and tight in the show, check out the "Enemy" music video. There is a couple scenes in that where it is just masterful. This series is honestly one of the best works of art I have seen in animation overall in over a decade. Not to mention the rematch with Savica.
This show really is the big talk……there is so little to hate…..
As a philosopher once said, "Everything Riot Games does makes you want to play League of Legends, except playing League of Legends".