Overwatch's new Origin Video 'Rise and Shine' for Mei is more interesting than anything League has

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE "RISE AND SHINE" VIDEO

In a lot of ways, Overwatch's story approach mirrors League's. Both involve universes where a players choose a character and play games that don't have much bearing on the story.

However, Overwatch's approach to building it's narrative universe is much stronger than League's. I think the latest video from Blizzard really highlights the difference in approach that Riot and Blizzard takes in their universe development.

Here are some takeaways I think Riot's Narrative can learn from the Overwatch Animation 'Rise and Shine'.

1. First of all, it's a very well done video. Holy hell is it pretty.

2. **There's a clear and definitive Overwatch aesthetic. ** A lot of major video game franchises has strongly established aesthetics. This is an art style that unifies a series. A person can look at, say, Minecraft and instantly know it's Minecraft. For Overwatch, it's that Pixar-ish/Incredibles feel to it's cinematics and ingame design. It's hard to describe but it's there. If you compare it to League, the League art style can vary dramatically from Ekko's Seconds video to Amumu's Music video to the puppet Bilgewater material to the anime-like Bard video... when you compare a lot of the past video attempts, it's hard to tell they're part of the same franchise w/o recognizing the characters.

3. **They show the character in question. **One thing that's really interesting is that Mei is a person. There's moments she's shown happy, sad, frustrated, etc, etc. We see different sides of her. A lot of League champs are rarely shown different emotions.

4. **The story they presented is more than just kick-ass-and-take-names. ** This kind of builds off point 3 a lot. A lot of League color stories usually end up with the champion doing something really cool. They rarely struggle. In Mei's origin video, we're shown she's struggling. We're shown her life (albeit briefly) prior to the character-defining disaster that shapes her. We see her initial hesitation to leave the base to look for help, we see her competence in building an ice ray (but also see how unforseen problems and how she responds to them), we see the respect she has for her fallen colleagues. And most of all, we get she wants to save the world even if it's kind of dorky and is just getting climate data to someone who could use it.

5. The characters die, but aren't forgotten I know I bash on Riot a lot of killing off secondary characters but usually when these secondary characters die, it's usually because of an enemy champion or so the champion in question can kill some random mook. However, in Mei's case the people who died are friends. We don't see them much but their influence (through the group photo/their drink mugs) we see how much Mei respected/loved them as her friends. In some ways, less is more, and even though we get literally a single scene with one of them alive, we know how much they mean to Mei. I can't think of a single secondary character in the League universe that has that same effect except Quiletta from Darius' and even then I'd argue the execution there was botched.

Overall, I think there's a lot of lessons to take away. Mei is an interesting character in a massive part because shes, well, a female. But League has literally dozens of sexy female characters and I don't think any of them has been given the same treatment Mei has in this video where their backstory is developed so we understand and see them.

Thoughts?