On November 7, just after the end of the 2021 League of Legends World Championship, League of Legends brought another blockbuster surprise to players around the world - the animated series "League of Legends: Battle of Two Cities" (hereinafter referred to as "Battle of Two Cities").
Ratings at home and abroad dominate the list, and the audience praises it as "the best anime in history"
Since the beginning of the painting, "The Battle of Two Cities" has achieved remarkable results overseas: IMDb scored 9.4 points, topping the list of animated dramas; Rotten Tomatoes freshness 100%, audience popcorn index 98%, winning the reputation of professional film critics and viewers; IGN platform full score "graduation", becoming one of the most successful "game adaptations" in history; in addition, according to Netflix statistics, "Battle of Two Cities" has been ranked in the top 10 ratings in more than 80 countries around the world.
Looking back at China, "The Battle of Two Cities" has also received considerable responses: Douban score 9.3, nearly 40 related topics on Weibo hot search, Tencent Video played more than 400 million ... At the same time, the popularity of "Battle of Two Cities" not only caused shocks in the player circle, but also attracted the attention of major mainstream media and self-media in various fields.
People's Daily published an article affirming the artistic presentation form of "The Battle of Two Cities", indicating that the series integrates a variety of art genres and visual styles to design, highlighting the unique artistic aesthetics of the Twin Cities world; Guangming Daily affirms the achievements of "The Battle of Two Cities" in storytelling, artistry and innovation from the perspective of film and television production. In addition, media such as China Youth Daily and Jiefang Daily, as well as self-media in the film and television industry such as "Poison Eyes" and "Sir Film", have also published their affirmations of "The Battle of Two Cities" from different angles.
At the time of various honors, "The Battle of Two Cities" has become the "best anime of all time" in the mouths of many viewers. However, as a work that is essentially adapted from the game, how did "Battle of Two Cities" break through the circle of players and form such a wide and profound influence in all walks of life? Excellent production quality, clever story presentation and cultural ecology that drives the audience to spontaneously create are indispensable.
Visual and story boutique presentation, to create a twin-city world fabric
The producer of "Battle of Two Cities", Fist Company, has been jokingly called "the world's most animation and music game manufacturer" by the majority of players. As early as the launch of "Battle of Two Cities", Fist released a number of well-made game promotional videos, including the MV of the theme song of the League of Legends World Championships in previous years, the promo of the season opening of the world, the game background promo and the hero background story.
Among them, French animation studio Fortiche Studios, which has cooperated with Fist and is responsible for producing the MV of the S8 and S9 Global Finals, and the MV of the K/DA song of the virtual idol girl group, is the producer of this "Battle of Two Cities".
It is understood that "The Battle of Two Cities" took nearly 6 years to complete. In order to make the visual effects of the work as realistic and impactful as possible, the production team designed more than 7,000 storyboards and tens of thousands of hand-drawn original paintings, delicately depicting many details such as different scenes of the series, character micro-expressions and inner emotions, presenting a vivid and vivid twin-city world for the audience.
It is worth mentioning that the style of "Battle of Two Cities" is different from that of general animation, but it adopts a hardcore American comic style in character design, which strengthens the character expression and action tension to a certain extent, and also makes it easier for the audience to capture the inner emotions of the characters.
Steampunk elements are featured in scene creation. The production invited professional architects to participate in the construction, forming a design style that blends this art nouveau genre with steampunk, which greatly highlights the unique artistic aesthetic of the twin cities world.
On top of the excellent production, the story of "Battle of Two Cities" is even more exciting. The series adopts the perspective of God, multiple story lines are synchronized and parallel, and each character extends 2-3 emotional clues, interweaving a series of lamentable storylines in complex and diverse dramatic contradictions. In particular, the various elements hidden in the play have triggered countless plot speculations on the Internet, which shows that the perception of "The Battle of Two Cities" for the audience is very immersive.
It can be said that in "The Battle of Two Cities", each character has its own unique two-sidedness, this complex character setting can not only allow the audience to fully understand the charm of the character, form a "full of no villains" perception, but also allow the character's inner contradictions to evolve into the core internal drive to promote the development of the plot, so that the story of "The Battle of Two Cities" has a more layered and grand sense.
The popular theme song boosted the heating up, and the multi-party linkage triggered a wave of network co-creation
In addition to creating high-quality dramas, "The Battle of Two Cities" also continues high-quality cultural publicity externally, not only joining hands with the popular band Imagine Dragons to create a popular global theme song "Enemy", but also specially launching the Chinese theme song "Lonely Warrior" for Chinese audiences and inviting well-known singer Eason Chan to sing, singing with strength to shape the story into a sensual side, exquisite lyrics and arrangements to give it a high degree of singing, and the two songs have won good results in major music charts.
Offline, "The Battle of Two Cities" has joined hands with a number of platform media, theaters, theaters, universities, Internet cafes and hotels to create more touching scenes and cover more people. Through the linkage of drama and tourism, create a more interesting League of Legends ecology. The official also actively links with China's traditional cultural heritage skills and national publications to combine young people's favorite games with traditional cultural innovations to collide with new vitality. In order to meet the needs of fans watching the drama, the official also opened a plot interpretation variety show "A Different Battle of the Two Cities" to output the latest views, and triggered a second creative carnival among fans across the network: digging story eggs, hand-drawn creations, etc., and thousands of excellent works have been produced.
The first-class production standards and unique artistic aesthetics make "The Battle of Two Cities" bring new vitality to the cultural ecology of "League of Legends", open up a way forward for the progress of the game industry, and bring innovative inspiration to the combination of games and film and television. Today, the League of Legends universe is still under construction, and I believe that in the near future, "League of Legends" will bring more surprising works and innovative cultural presentations.