Riot dropped Akali’s 2XKO trailer a little too close to April Fools’ Day for comfort — but it was real, and it was gorgeous.
Everyone covered the flashy parts. What almost nobody pointed out is that the trailer is stuffed with deliberate callbacks to Akali’s original League of Legends rework trailer from 2018 — same beats, same jokes, same visual language, eight years apart.
Once you’ve seen them side by side you can’t unsee them. So here’s every Easter egg I caught, plus what the trailer was quietly telling us about how she’d play.
Quick note on timing: this was recorded when the trailer first dropped, before Akali was playable. She’s live now, so I’ve added a section at the end on how the trailer’s hints actually turned out.
The Easter eggs, side by side
| 2018 League rework trailer | 2026 2XKO trailer |
|---|---|
| Akali beats up Darius | Akali beats up Darius, again |
| Ends with her eating ramen, unmasked | Same bowl of ramen, same unmasked face |
| Her shroud is a circle she vanishes inside and fights out of | Smoke she disappears into and attacks from |
| Front barrel rolls, flips, constant repositioning | Almost the same acrobatic vocabulary |
| Training with Shen and the Kinkou order | Yasuo namechecks the Kinkou in the opening line |
| Throws kunai, chains into an assassination | Kunai on a backflip, chains into combo pressure |
Darius just cannot catch a break
In the 2018 trailer she runs through Sion, links into Talon, and then thoroughly embarrasses Darius. In the 2XKO trailer, her first real showcase is — you guessed it — bullying Darius.
Even his line is a callback in spirit: “Stay where I can see you, assassin.” She answers, “Then I wouldn’t be much of an assassin, Darius.” Eight years and a genre change later, he’s still the guy who gets got. If you’d rather be on the other end of that, the Darius guide is right here.
The ramen bowl
This is my favourite one, and it’s the deepest cut.
The 2018 trailer ends with Akali — mask off, job done — sitting down to a bowl of ramen. It’s one of the only times you ever see her face. The 2XKO trailer recreates it: faceless Akali, no mask, bowl of ramen.
You won’t find that reference anywhere else in the game. Somebody on that team went back and watched an eight-year-old cinematic, and I genuinely love that they did.
The shroud is the whole character
In League, Akali’s W is Twilight Shroud — a circle she becomes untargetable inside, where her abilities get empowered. It’s where all her craftiest plays happen.
Watching the 2XKO trailer, the smoke does a lot. She dodges a projectile while running through it. She leaves a trail behind her. She has smoke effects clinging to her after a backflip, and later after a teleport the smoke visibly looks different — which had me convinced she was buffed while inside it.
She also appears to create it two ways: as a normal ability, and as the payoff of a super. Multiple routes into the same resource is a strong hint that it’s the mechanic the character is built around.
The Ionia thread
The trailer opens with “a member of the Kinkou joining a disgraced swordsman” — which is doing real lore work. Akali trained with Shen in the Kinkou order. Yasuo is also Ionian, and their stories overlap.
So the pairing isn’t random flavour, it’s two characters from the same region with an existing relationship. Worth knowing if you’re building a team around Yasuo.
What the trailer told us about her kit
Trailers are marketing, but they’re shot from real gameplay, so the frames leak information. Here’s what stood out.
- Teleports and a lot of dashes. Her movement vocabulary is enormous — dash, slash, slash, teleport, slash. It reads exactly like her League animations.
- Kunai on a backflip. Instantly reminded me of Strider’s Vajra from Marvel vs Capcom. The recovery looked slow, though — that move struck me as the honest one in her kit.
- A genuine DP assist. A clean shoryuken motion, which is a big deal for a team game.
- An air-to-ground projectile super. Right now only Jinx really shoots straight down like that (Teemo throws straight), so that’s a rare tool — see the Jinx guide for why that angle matters.
- A limit strike that hooks them to her. Ground bounce into a pull — structurally like Darius’s, which is strong precisely because it gives you room to run forward and bait a wake-up attack.
- A flaming card. No idea. Ninja seal, Naruto-style trap, something else entirely — it was one frame and I still don’t know.
The wall jump is the thing to actually pay attention to
Everything above is cool. This part made me rewind repeatedly.
She does a wall jump — fine, Wolverine and Strider do that. But watch the sequence. The first time she uses it, it’s clearly defensive, getting her out of a corner. Then later, after a spinning move, she cancels straight into another wall jump.
That’s not an escape. That’s a heavy cancelled into a wall jump on purpose, to reset the situation and mix from a new angle. An offensive wall jump built into a combo route.
I’ve genuinely not seen that in a fighting game before, and if it works the way it looks, it changes how you think about corner pressure and defence in this game — for both players.
And the level 3
Flashing through smoke, up and around, opponent never sees where it comes from. If you’ve watched Demon Slayer, it’s pure Zenitsu — the spider fight, where he moves faster than the shot can follow.
Plenty of level 3 animations in this game are great. That one is the best.
How it turned out
Akali is live now, so a few of these can be checked rather than guessed at.
- The shroud was the mechanic. Twilight Shroud makes her untargetable to projectiles, hides her position, and — the part I suspected from the smoke effects — attacks made from shroud gain enhanced properties. The “she’s powered up inside it” read was right.
- The “smoke as a resource gauge” guess was off. I wondered whether smoke would be a meter like Blitzcrank’s charge or Darius’s bleed. It’s an ability and a zone, not a gauge. Closer to her League W than to a resource bar.
- The assassin read held. She shipped as the purest assassin on the roster — low health, stubby mid-range, and nobody steals a round faster off one opening.
- The mixup depth was real. Her rekka chain branches into an overhead, a low, or a grab, so every blocked string is a three-way guess.
The full breakdown of where she landed is in the Akali guide. And if you want the wider story of why Riot picked her and Senna in the first place — plus the other predictions I made that season, graded honestly — that’s in this retrospective.
Honest caveats
- Trailer footage is edited. Sequences get cut together for drama, so a combo in a trailer isn’t proof the route exists in that order.
- I never confirmed the wall jump cancel. It looked deliberate across two separate moments, but I’m reading intent off edited footage. Treat it as an observation, not a fact.
- The flaming card is still unexplained. I didn’t figure it out then and I’m not going to pretend I have now.
- Easter eggs are interpretation. Darius getting bullied twice might just be Darius being a convenient punching bag. The ramen is unambiguous; the rest is me joining dots.
- Riot’s own stat card said high mobility, hard to use. That was accurate, and it’s still true — she’s not a first-character pick.
The short version
- Akali’s 2XKO trailer deliberately references her 2018 League rework trailer — the ramen bowl is the giveaway.
- She beats up Darius in both. Sorry, Darius.
- The shroud carried over from her League W — and yes, she really is stronger fighting out of it.
- Yasuo’s opening line is lore, not flavour: both are Ionian, and Akali trained with Shen in the Kinkou.
- The wall jump used offensively — cancelled into from a heavy — was the most interesting frame in the whole trailer.
- Her level 3 is Zenitsu. I will not be taking questions.
- Riot told you up front she’s hard to use. Believe them.
Want more lore breakdowns?
This kind of thing is a change of pace from frame data and I had a lot of fun with it. If you want deeper dives on the lore and design side — where characters come from, what their kits are referencing — come tell me in the 2XKO Jungle Discord and I’ll make more.
If you’d rather get straight to playing her, the Akali guide has her combos and shroud setups, the tier list shows where she sits against the roster, and if you want someone to actually watch your Akali and tell you what’s going wrong, that’s what coaching is for.
