It's already been said a fair few times, but we're living in the early stages of a potentially lengthy golden age of videogame adaptations on TV. The runaway success of shows like The Last of Us and Fallout has proven that well-made stories set in the worlds of familiar games can be massive hits with audiences.
Now another show has joined that pantheon – one that was arguably one of the first to clue people in on the power of gaming media. Arcane is back on Netflix with a second season, the first part of which is now available, and it's rocketed right to the top of the huge streamer's global charts.
The show's second season is being released in three parts throughout November, with the first two doses of episodes available now, and the third coming on Saturday 23 November, at the end of this week. That means you can't quite find out how Vi and Jinx's stories end yet.
What you can do, though, is enjoy the show's absolutely sumptuous production values and animation, which have gone from strength to strength in this long-awaited second run. Where the first season was already impressively detailed and hand-made, this one feels like it's scaled up in a way I wasn't sure would actually be possible.
Things could change based on that final portion of episodes, but as it stands Arcane isn't just a chart success for Netflix – it's also a critical triumph. At the time of writing it has a 100% score for both Season 1 and Season 2 on Rotten Tomatoes, which is literally as perfect as you can basically get.
That makes it all the more heartbreaking that we know for sure there won't be a third season – that had been confirmed quite a while ago, with the show's creators repeatedly explaining that it's unbelievably time-consuming and labour-intensive to make. Still, at least we might eventually get a fresh project from the same creative minds, which is another exciting thought. Whether that next project is with Netflix will be anyone's guess, but whichever streamer secures it will get a boost in the battle to be declared the best streaming service overall.
