Hollywood has oftentimes tried to capture the magic of video games on film, and the most fun audiences have ever gotten out of it was seeing it fail stupendously pretty much every time. Still, you cannot say the same about game-to-tv-show adaptations, as those have already provided us with actual top-tier entertainment. Let’s take a look at the best of the bunch.
06. The Witcher
Okay, It’s very important to establish that Netflix’s The Witcher is an adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s books, and not of the games — Just kidding. It’s pretty obvious that Henry Cavill is emulating video game Geralt because this series only exists due to the success of the games. Yes, I know damn well that the only people watching this are the millions of Witcher 3 fans out there.
It’s also important to mention that the entire show (so far) is very uneven, hence landing at number six in this ranking. Still, the show does many things right — the fight choreography is awesome, and so is the costume and set design. Production-wise, this feels closer to the original Lord Of The Rings trilogy than to The Hobbit trilogy. Sadly that’s not a given these days when they usually just use CGI for everything. It’s great to see a video game adaptation putting so much work in.
Also, it’s clear that the heart is there. Cavill is awesome, the same goes for Ciri, Yennefer, and Jaskier, obviously. The only real problem here is the story’s awkward progression, but you can always come back to the first season to enjoy some fun and uncompromising episodic monster-of-the-week action.
Oh, and that song about throwing money at Witchers is an instant classic.
05. The Last Of Us
Please don’t get angry for seeing The Last Of Us merely at number five in a ranking about the best things of a specific kind ever made.
It’s definitely good, competent, and very ugly or beautiful whenever it wants to be. Just like the game, it picked the perfect couple of actors to give life to the characters that could carry the massive weight of both the game’s drama and the hopes that more video games could get prestige TV treatment in the future.
But is it really that big of an achievement? It feels like a very safe adaptation of a game that already played like a movie in the first place. HBO’s The Last Of Us is good, but you know what else is good? Watching a video compilation of the cutscenes from the first game on YouTube. I wish we could see a future season starring a new group of main characters on a completely different adventure. Perhaps you can get Henry Cavill to star in it. I heard he likes games.
04. Sonic Boom
Sonic Boom, the game, is one of the worst games ever made. Its TV show, also called Sonic Boom, would deserve praise even if it were just a smidge above an unwatchable mess filled with inexplicable animation errors, but nope, it’s a genuinely good kid’s show.
Many Sonic fans are aware that good Sonic games are a rarity these days, but good Sonic TV shows have always been rare. Remember that show where Sonic had a rock band? The kids of today don’t have to suffer through that just to get their Sonic fix anymore.
The Sonic Boom animated series gives the world of Sonic and its characters a makeover, and ties it all up with some pretty funny dialogue — if you’re in the age range of people they made this for, at least.
03. Castlevania
Netflix’s Castlevania is probably the first truly-great video game-based TV show, and legitimately one of the best animes of recent times.
It does a great job of fleshing out the entire Belmont clan, as well as making Dracula go from just that meme who asks “What is a man?!” into a real flesh and cold-blood character with real motivation. Also, the action is unsurprisingly great.
It succeeds in all the parts where The Witcher TV show fumbled, as whereas most of the people who care about the Witcher TV show were already fans of the games, Castlevania actually brought in a lot of new fans who likely weren’t even born by the time the first game in the series came out.
The only possible problem stemming out of this show is how the demise of the game series might lead future generations to think of Castlevania as something that began as an anime, and not as one of the best 2D games of all time.
02. Cyberpunk Edgerunners
Even though the Cyberpunk 2077 game we have today is miles better than what we got upon release, I think it’s safe to say that Edgerunners, its neat Netflix anime tie-in, still beats it by a wide margin.
Instead of trying to retell the events of the game via some beautiful but ultra-expensive CGI, Edgerunners gives us what I wanted out of The Last Of Us TV show.
It uses the world of the game to tell a completely new story featuring a bunch of instantly lovable new characters, a decision that ultimately enriches both the anime and the game by helping populate such a huge but otherwise empty city. No, I’m not taking a dig at how the PS4 version of Cyberpunk featured a comically low number of NPCs on the streets of Night City — I’m talking about how seeing more characters living out their stories brings life and soul to the world of Cyberpunk — and this world will never have too much of that.
01. Arcane
There was no way this would ever end anywhere other than in the top spot. The animation alone is so unique and marvelous it makes me believe that even if its story made as little sense as the game’s lore, and even if the characters were as toxic as the overall League Of Legends community, I’d still feel tempted to rank it near the top. Luckily, I don’t have to deal with that as Arcane avoids all of the known video game adaptation pitfalls and then some.
Instead of fitting the popular game in its plot in an inevitably contrived way, Arcane had the guts to create a completely new story that ignores the Summoner’s Rift competition altogether, opting instead to give long-deserved depth and pathos to many of the game’s popular characters. The result is an astounding success on all levels. I hope more adaptations could learn from it and risk going for something new instead of trying to repeat its video game beats — those which famously work for video games, but not necessarily in the audiovisual format.
Not bad for a show whose intro features a song by Imagine Dragons, huh?
