TL;DR: one of the most goregous anime I have ever watched, but suffers in terms of pacing and quality.
Synopsis: the story follows several characters through several different struggles: the creation of a new technology that has massive potential, a potential war between two countries, and a young girl that eventually turned to crime.
Believe it or not, this are not promotional art: these are actual stills from the series. As of date, arcane is the best looking animated series ever made — prior to its release, I would have said it is either Demon Slayer, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, or The Garden Of Sinners, but now it’s definitely Arcane. The art style is not only highly distinctive, the animation, backgrounds, and character models are on point. Usually, at the high ends of statistical distributions, the tails start to come apart, where the tallest basketball player is rarely the most skilled, or the wealthiest entrepreneur is rarely the most intelligent. But for Arcane, the tails came together.
As for the story, I do not have much to say about it. My initial impression of season 1 was that it was exciting but rushed and a little all over the place. Season 2 didn’t double down on that: it was worse in that respect and was even more fast paced and incomprehensible. From the outside looking in, it seems that the Arcane staff were insecure about whether their series would be able to continue for more than 2 seasons, and tried to clump all of the plotlines into 2 seasons, and it just did not work. This made the series rather difficult to understand, but I was attached enough to certain characters for the overall experience to be enjoyable.
If it was not for the fact that it was based on the LoL game and the visuals, this series would get maybe an eighth of the attention that it got. It’s likely that this series will be forgotten soon after the LoL community dies — it’s just not that good.