Arcane Vs The Mighty Nein

Before Christmas, I watched two animated fantasy TV series. I've been meaning to write something about them both ever since but somehow the post kept getting pushed down the list. Now, when I've found a slot for it, I discover I can't remember enough about either of them to make the kind of detailed analysis I would have liked. 

Lucky break! 

I guess I'll just have to go with whatever impressions have stuck, which is probably a more reliable and useful way of appraising the long-term value of any experience. Some things are very much meant to be "in the moment" but that's often more to do with sensation than any kind of cultural or academic appreciation.

The two shows were Arcane and The Mighty Nein. Both were first seasons, although there's also a Season Two of Arcane. I just haven't watched it yet. 

Both are also spin-offs, Arcane from League of Legends and The Mighty Nein from The Legend of Vox Machina, which itself is a spin-off from Critical Role. I have never played LoL and never watched Critical Role, although I did watch Vox Machina. 

The LoL connection actively put me off watching Arcane, which is why it's taken me so long to get around to giving it a try. Conversely, since I liked Vox Machina, I was keen to start The Mighty Nein as soon as it turned up on Prime Video.

And I was very happy with it, too. At least until I started watching Arcana, half way through the run.

It's Prime's own fault for staggering the release of TM9 in such an irritating fashion. If they'd let me watch the whole season in one go, I'd never have been in a position to make unfavorable comparisons. Three episodes dropped at the start and then it was a drip-feed of one a week. It was while I was tired of waiting for the next one that I started looking for something to fill the gap. In came Arcane.

I knew Arcane had been very well received and reviewed. My friend had raved about it at the time, too, so I even had a personal recommendation. She also assured me it was entirely independent of the video game, which she'd never played either. And still I wasn't keen.

Well, that was my mistake. Arcane is one of the best animated shows I've ever seen. It's been out for far too long for it to be worth my reviewing it properly, so I'll just say if for any reason you've been avoiding watching it you should do yourself a favor and start. Today, preferably.

Even if you aren't interested in the magitech world-building and fantasy plotline, something that seems exceedingly unlikely given what I know about the readership of this blog, it's worth seeing just for the visuals. If I've ever seen a better-animated show I can't immediately bring it to mind. 

The whole thing looks extremely expensive, as if a very great deal of money has been spent on producing animation far, far more lush and rich than any television show should have. It would be impressive for a movie, let alone a TV series. You could freeze-frame it and explore the individual images for hours although that would lose the enthralling, mesmerizing camera-work that makes the whole thing so astonishingly and thrillingly kinetic.

All of which stands in stark contrast to The Mighty Nein. Even before I had Arcane for comparison I was surprised by how flat and static the newer show looked. The first episode made me wonder if they were intentionally aiming for the look and feel of an 'eighties Sarturday Morning Cartoon. 

After a couple episodes I attuned to the look of TM9 and began to appreciate the way the show was doing more with less but then I started watching Arcane and TM9 went back to looking stiff and unfinished. It didn't put me off carrying on watching it but it was hard not to notice how perfunctory a lot of the imagery appeared in comparison.

Looks aren't everything, of course. Substance over style can be a mantra that works. Except that in this case Arcane has orders of magnitude more substance as well. 

I wouldn't attempt to precis the plot of either show. They're both quite twisty. Arcane, though, is truly complex while TM9 is mostly just complicated. One's a pantomime romp, the other's a greek tragedy. 

Each show relies on a good deal of character work as part of the narrative, with multiple characters appearing to be one thing and then turning out to be something else instead. In Arcane that feels like genuine character development. In TM9 it can have a whiff of Plot Logic.

I found Arcane to be quite an emotional experience. The characters are introduced and presented in a way that makes them feel like people you know. When things happen to them, there's a resonance. In TM9 they're more like performers you watch. When things happen to them, you're entertained.

The two approaches both work. I enjoyed both shows. The difference is in how much it feels like anything I saw mattered. Arcane operates much more on the lines of classical drama, working towards a catharsis. TM9 is more like a blockbuster movie, albeit one that's been put together on a very limited budget.

Characterization is strong in both but again in very different ways. TM9 relies very heavily on the well-rehearsed talents of a troupe of actors very much used to working together. There can be a sense of people "doing their turn", sometimes. The voice acting in Arcane feels much more individual, with a uniformly high level of skill but an absence of too-easy familiarity.

Of the two, there's no doubt which I preferred or which I thought was better-realized. Arcane not only aims much, much higher, it also hits the target bang in the middle. TM9 rolls along very cheerily but there were multiple occasions when things didn't quite seem to fit together or follow through and the whole affair had a very slightly ramshackle feel to it, now and again.

 

But it was very entertaining. The Mighty Nein is frequently funny, occasionally exciting and almost always fun to watch. I enjoyed it a good deal and will be very happy to watch the second season, currently in production.

Arcane, on the other hand, was a lot. I was exhausted by the end. Without giving anything away, it has a fantastic ending that I actually couldn't believe was the ending. I had to google it to make sure there wasn't another episode to come.

I found it completely satisfying and absolutely enthralling. But I finished it almost a month ago and I haven't started the second season yet. 

This is the thing: the two shows are ostensibly working the same end of the market but they're serving very different purposes. You need to be aware of the commitment levels each requires, which are radically different.

I mostly watch TV shows late in the evening. Usually, I'm looking for something relaxing that will see me asleep almost as soon as it ends. I'm not really in the market for thought-provoking art that's going to keep me awake for another hour, pondering the implications.

When I start the second season of Arcane, I'll be sure to have something lighter ready to follow it each evening. A kind of decompression show that'll clear my mind for sleep. So far, I haven't come up with one but I'm sure there's something out there. 

I very much doubt it's going to be that other show I know I ought to be watching. That other video-game spin-off that also had stellar reviews when it came out and that I've also been avoiding ever since. The one that just started a new season. The one that's currently #1 on Prime in the UK. The one you're watching. Yes, that one.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, I did finally get around to watching KPop Demon Hunters. And I loved it. Now, that would be an ideal show to wind down at the end of an evening. 

Unfortunately, it's not a show. It's a short movie. And the sequel, which will also be a short movie, won't be here until 2029.

Any suggestions what I could watch until then?  

One Thing, Then Another

What I wanted to write today was a review of the first season of Arcane, which I finished watching last night. Bit late but still...

That, however, requires some time and thought and I have, if I'm lucky, about an hour to get this post written, edited and published. So that's not going to happen.

I will spoil my own future review, should it ever come to be, by saying I found Arcane to be one of the most impressive animated series I have ever seen. And I've seen a few. The animation itself is quite possibly the most detailed, fluent and expressive I've ever seen outside of a cinema or for that matter inside and the script was pretty damn fine, too. Not to mention the voice acting.

Better stop before I really get into it. I just wanted to say it was magnificent and I'm an idiot for not watching it when it came out. Maybe I'll save the full review for when I've seen the second season, although that could be a while. I need a breather after the emotional beating the first one gave me before I get back on that particular horse.  

I don't want to skip a posting day just because I can't write the post I wanted to, though. I'm aiming for 300 posts for the calendar year, which means I have to come up with ten in the next nine days. The Advent Calendar has me covered for three so it's seven in nine but of those nine I'm working three and I generally don't work and post so it's really seven in six. 

Can't afford to skip a day, then. Hence this half-assed excuse for a post.

One card any games blogger can always play is the good old "What I've Been Playing" number. In my case, that'd be EverQuest II. Quite a bit of it, in fact.

Enough that my Sage is now halfway through Level 134. The cap is 135 so he's nearly there.

He would actually be there already if it wasn't for the shameless time-gating. I'm not just talking about the reputation grind, the details of which I laid out a week ago. I got that done in about four days by doing the three-hourly quest once in the morning and again in the evening each day, much the same as I used to do the Overseer missions. 

With that finished, I thought it would be back to regular questing until I got to the end of the Signature quest and hit the cap. I was half right.

There's no more time-gated content within the questline itself. The problem is that there isn't much more questing at all. It took me one more session to finish it all. 

It was fun. I enjoyed it. I have no complaints about the quality. It's the quantity I'm not so pleased with.

When my Sage reached the end of the Tradeskill Signature, he was still some distance from the cap. It took him to the very beginning of Level 133. It also gave him a Familiar, an Advanced Spell Book with some of the new recipes and granted him license to fly in the two opening zones of the new expansion. 

All of which is very nice but it's not the end. He still needs two more books and the power of flight in the third zone and for all of those he has to be Level 135. So how is he supposed to get there?

By doing time-gated, repeatable quests, of course! There's a single quest available and it has an eighteen-hour refresh. That's a lot more manageable than the three hour refreshes of the last one but also less amenable to shrinkage by super-human effort (Aka Obsessive and Unhealthy Gameplay.)

Putting a positive spin on it

On the plus side, the quests are very easy and the xp is substantial. If he'd bothered to pop a potion before handing them in, he'd be 135 already. I wasn't in that much of a hurry so I left it until today to do that. He's now one more boosted hand-in away from the Big Ding, which should come... let me see... I did the hand-in around two o'clock this afternoon so... eighteen hours... hmmm... breakfast time tomorrow.

At that point he'll be able to buy the other two recipe books from the vendor in The Unknown and fly anywhere he fancies. Then he's going to need an unconscinable amount of rares for all the Expert spells he'll have to craft for himself, Mordita the Necromancer and possibly the Inquisitor and the Wizard, too. If I have any sense, which is a debatable point, I'll take him through the Adventure Signature line first, so he's robust enough to do his own foraging in the new lands. Otherwise he'll have to use the silly magic hand and that's soooo sloooow....

The issue with the Adventuring Signature is the speed of leveling. Mordita is on the final stage now and once again I have to say it's been an entertaining story with enjoyable gameplay. I'll maybe do a proper write-up on it when I've finished. She just has one instance left, according to the wiki. It should only take her another hour or so.

And then she'll be right around where the Sage was at the same stage, I think. About two levels shy of the cap. Only I don't think Adventurers get a nice little 18-hour repeatable that gives half a level every time you hand it in. I think what they get is a whole load of side-quests, repeatables and collections that each net maybe 4% of a level. 

I could be wrong. I hope I am. I guess I'll find out when I get there. I fear it could be a while before Mordita caps out, though, and if Barnabus is going to do it too, he has at least a dozen or so hours ahead of him to get to where she is.

I said it was entertaining. I didn't say it made sense.

Which, I suppose, is the standard, intended, expected gameplay of an MMORPG. After all these years of going on about how much I like leveling and how the journey is the best part, blah blah blah, I can hardly complain if I don't get given my five new levels in the first five minutes, can I?

Except there were several expansions where that was pretty much what happened. Okay, not five minutes, but fast. The questline gave you so much xp you were capped long before you got to the end of it. 

And I liked that.  It was a great example of giving someone what they want not what they ask for. If they'd done a poll in advance, asking if I wanted to level faster, I bet I'd have said no. But they didn't ask. They just did it. And it turned out that was what I wanted, even if I didn't know it.

And then, a couple of expansions ago, the whole thing went into reverse and then some. We didn't even go back to how it was before, when the main questline in an expansion would take a good, long while but you'd come out the end of it there or thereabouts at the cap.

Instead, the current model has you still in the middle of leveling up when the story reaches its conclusion. After which you have to cobble together whatever sources of extra xp you can find to make up the difference. There's always enough, somewhere, but you have to go look for it. Or in my case read a guide.

These things change all the time, of course. If they don't, all the complaints are about how stale and repetitive the expansions are getting. If they do, it's all "Why try to fix something that wasn't broken?" There's no winning with MMO veterans. 

For all that, I think this is a pretty good expansion so far. I can quite easily imagine taking multiple characters through it over the course of the year. And we get a pass on leveling for the next one with the bi-annual rise in Level Cap, so really I have two years to bring everyone up to speed.

Always assuming, that is, that there is another EQII expansion in 2026. And 2027. If I had to bet on it, I'd bet there will be but I wouldn't bet my shirt, let alone my house. 

I should probably just be grateful we're getting expansions at all and stop nitpicking.