New Akali is Hardly Akali at All
TL;DR is at the bottom.
Akali was a champion that I was drawn to since I first picked up the game early last season and looked at the huge character list of unfamiliar names and splash arts. Her unapologetically feminine, yet cool and inconspicuous personality was an awesome aesthetic, and everything about her inside of the game reflected this personality (the sound of her voice, her voice interactions, her movement, etc). Now, personally I was fine with her status in the game as a somewhat off-meta pick that could be broken in the proper hands and in/against certain team comps, and as a character who could be specialized in and utilized to climb ranks fairly reliably. Now, I'm not utterly opposed to her kit change and will likely still play her since it seems to be a fun kit - or, if nothing else, out of the love I had for her before. My real problem with this rework, though, is the massive lack of justice that was done to her personality.
As I said previously, Akali used to have an awesomely feminine, quietly badass personality that was perfectly in-sync with her voice and in-game lines. All around, her character aesthetic left little to be desired. I do want to make clear, though, that I'm also not upset at the updates to her lore, or her tatoos, or her more overtly badass persona in general. With proper execution, in fact, this character update could have been absolutely killer, and could have made me fall in love with her more than I did even when I first discovered her. Upon seeing the updated splash art for her skins (that are overwhelmingly good, save All-Star Akali, but I'll talk about that later), I was expecting an old Akali that was still cool and calm, but was maybe a slightly less low-key super badass that doesn't quite know her place, but knows she can find her path herself. Unfortunately, upon seeing and hearing her inside of the game, I realized that this was not the case at all, and her in-game personality more closely matched that of Toph Beifong from Avatar: The Last Airbender - a cringily arrogant, immature young girl who ran away from home to be edgy. You've already made a champion like that, Riot, and her name is Jinx. We don't want Akali to be like Jinx. That's not her personality in the slightest, and it never has been.
As a bleeding-heart Akali player, seeing this absolute butchering of her personality was a bigger slap in the face than the fact that they completely changed the look of her All-Star Akali skin less than a month after it became available for purchase again, essentially meaning that Akali players who bought it got a skin we didn't pay for (after waiting, and waiting, AND WAITING for the World Cup to take place again so we could buy it). This was by far my favorite skin in the game, and the fact that I got such an unbelievably short amount of time to play with it before it gets changed completely and taken away forever is sad and incredibly disappointing.
Tl;DR, I'm okay with Akali's new kit, her new splash art is mostly super badass, and I'll likely continue playing her. I'm happy with her skins being updated, except for All-Star Akali, which makes me pretty upset considering how different the new one is from the one that I just bought less than a month ago after it was unavailable for purchase for a very long time, which feels like a slap in the face from Riot. However, her voice and personality in general have been completely butchered, don't fit her as a character at all, and feels like such a lackluster update to the champion I love so much that, before now, was mostly ignored by Riot, and whose true personality is quite obviously still ignored by Riot. 