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When Arcane’s co-creators Christian Linke and Alex Yee were still conceiving their League of Legends adaptation over a decade ago, the relationship between the multiplayer online battle arena’s publisher Riot Games and Fortiche Production was still relatively new.

So despite the wild success of a few franchise-shifting collaborations between both companies — that includes Riot’s first music video to support a new character launch (2013’s “Get Jinxed”) and another visual in 2014 involving Imagine Dragons, the band behind Arcane’s title theme “Enemy” — the French studio wasn’t a shoo-in for the game developer when it was looking to usher its popular title to the screen.

“There were other studios that had higher fidelity, that in the cinematic space were more polished, but Fortiche had this style, and a lot of it was the human imperfections,” Linke, who is also Riot’s Head of Animation, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “The first view, the camera [wasn’t] perfect. There would be scratches on the lens, and dust particles that made things a bit blurry, but it felt real because it’s imperfect.”

From its earliest days to its final episode, Arcane has embraced not just the refined skills and distinct stylings of its team of artists, but the potential crudeness within their work. The result is a series with a visual palette that might easily inspire copycat attempts by way of generative AI. But Arcane’s team says their envy-inducing success is an effort only possible thanks to the Netflix series’ very human crew, which reached almost 500 people at the peak of season two, according to Bart Maunoury, Fortiche’s creative director and Arcane’s co-director.