New League of Legends Animated Series Announced

League of Legends continues to be one of the biggest video game franchises in the world, and Riot Games is celebrating its 10th Anniversary in a pretty big way. Looking to capitalize on the promise of its wide world full of an ever wider variety of characters in a new way, League of Legends will now be getting a full anime series based on the franchise. This seemed to be the case as the franchise has dabbled with animated promotional material over the years, but now it’s come full circle with a full animated production!

Announced during a special event stream celebrating League of Legends‘ 10th Anniversary, the new animated series is titled Arcane. Very little is known about the new series thus far, but the brief synopsis teases that it will focus on the origins of two of the champions, “From the creators of League of Legends comes a new animated series about the origins of two iconic League champions—and the power that will tear them apart.”

This announcement confirms previous reports that a new animated series would be announced as part of a celebration for the 10th Anniversary. No concrete information was given with the report, but this felt like a natural extension of the experiments with anime League of Legends has had in the past. This new animated series will be produced by Riot Games themselves, and is the culmination of multimedia experiments such as anime inspired merch, a special K-Pop music video inspired by a few of their characters, and special promotional trailers transformed a few of the characters into Sailor Moon inspired heroes.

One of the biggest animated efforts came with the official start of Season 2019 of the game as League of Legends produced a fully 2D animated promo directed by Shingo Yamashita, who’s become famous among anime fans for his advances in digital animation movement. His work can be seen in series like Naruto: Shippuden, Soul Eater, and Tetsuwan: Birdy Decode.

Produced by P.A. Works, the studio behind popular new favorites like Sirius the Jaeger, Uma Musume Pretty Derby, and Shirobako, the promo also recruited the voice talents of AmaLee, whose covers of anime songs have gone viral on YouTube and who has also lent her musical talents to series like Dragon Ball Super. The special cinematic promo featured many of League of Legends‘ characters in gorgeous animated action, and fans have been clamoring for an official release ever since. Now thankfully they have gotten their wish!