Anime Spotlight #34: Solo Leveling (600th Post Special)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Animeister

Today marks the six hundredth post I've published on Blogger, Ticketholders!

The headlines! The headlines! The banger opening!

But I'll talk about that a bit later. Let's get all of the Hunter registration out of the way, so please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your dungeon raid report at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can keep my S-Rank status, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest dungeon breaks of news on my content.

Solo Leveling began its English-language life as a web novel on Webnovel (duh) titled Only I Level Up, which proved popular enough to receive a web comic adaptation of the same title on the same platform, and I managed to read all of it (with the exception of the side stories that were published after the main story concluded) before Webnovel's subscription and gacha-based customization mechanics started to get extra-predatory and I lost out on valuable content-creation time trying to hit daily reading thresholds while my alotment of free-ish coins and chapter passes quickly dwindled under inflation pressures. Sure, it helped me read more for awhile, but when a joy starts feeling like a job that costs money and half of the stuff you want to read was translated to English by a pseudo-bilingual grade-schooler and grammar-checked by a blind cabbage, it's time to dip out.

In a world where even the Americans have Korean names and everyone had to switch to a static-Rank, RPG-based economy because a weird energy thing happened that rendered some people perpetually comatose and "Awakened" others as "Hunters" with varying levels of magical or strength enhancement, Sung Jin-Woo (flipped around and pronounced "Jinoo Song" and voiced by Aleks Le--Gamma 1 from Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero and Zenitsu from Demon Slayer--in the dub) is the infamous "World's Weakest Hunter" at a Rank of E (on a typical letter-based ranking scale where S is the highest, and I guess people without powers are Rank F, but only Rank E is ever officially stated as the lowest registration Rank). After joining a mid-tier raiding party in a C-Rank Dungeon, he and the team stumble into a rare Double Dungeon, where you can start cuing up the Dark Souls "you accidentally entered a boss room" meme music because almost everyone gets brutally murdered by giant living statues with weapons, deafening musical instruments, and flesh-disintegrating eye lasers within the first few episodes, including Jin-Woo!

But this is a double-reverse isekai, so he wakes up in the hospital three days later with no injuries and a UI display that only he can see. He may be the only person with the ability to level up now (Ranks are fixed evaluations based on allotted power, making them different from Levels, which only he has because it's in the title and he's the main character), but that doesn't mean he can take things easy. Jin-Woo soon learns that he will get transported to a desert to get chased and eaten by giant centipedes if he doesn't complete Saitama's training regime every day (I'm serious; Sung Jin-Woo and One Punch Man have the same workout). As he grows in strength, Jin-Woo makes enemies and allies alike as he gains confidence, strength, new skills and weapons, and knowledge and experience of the darker side of the Hunter lifestyle, taking on greater and greater challenges. The anime is pretty much what I pictured in my head between panels while reading the web comic, following its first half beat-for-beat (ending with Jin-Woo surviving a special Dungeon with a built-in horde survival challenge to become a Necromancer while the world's top-Ranked Hunters and Guilds band together to face an uncleared insect Dungeon that almost killed them years ago) and featuring some top-tier fight animation and perfectly mood-appropriate dramatic shading. Also, check out the opening: a hype, techno-rap-pop fusion that sounds amazing in English and Japanese:

"LEvel" by Hiroyuki Sawano and TOMORROW x TOGETHER

This is usually where I would stop the review because this it the Anime Spotlight, and I don't go into manga territory because I don't read manga, I watch anime!

But because this is my six hundredth published post on Blogger, and I've read the web comic that this anime is based on, I'm going to break my own rule!

Only I Level Up is a South Korean web novel-turned-comic written by Chugong and illustrated by Dubu. So far, the anime (produced by A-1 Pictures) has adapted the growth and adventures of Sung Jin-Woo up to the completion of his Job Change Quest and the arrival of the S-Rank and A-Rank Hunters on the island where the insect monster Dungeon Break has been under surveillance for the past several years. Unfortunately, this is where the series gets into "power levels are bullshit" territory and the threat escalation and Jin Woo's plot armor strip the enjoyment out of the story. After a certain point, he has enough "in-game" currency to buy whatever gear he wants, an ever-growing and ever-evolving army of immortal shadow monsters at his command, and skills and physical abilities that make him casually multi-city-to-planet-level until we find out that angels and demons were screwing with everyone for fun (that whole, "some people are in comas and other people are superheroes" thing? Two sides of the same coin because the immortals got bored and started giving people other people's life force, including that of Jin-Woo's mother), and he has to start killing gods to get things back to normal. Oh, and his missing father is an overpowered, feral monster-man and there are hints that the Hell dimension Jin-Woo had to travel to (and kill Satan for ingredients to a magic potion that would bring his mother out of her coma) might be the post-apocalyptic future of the world, or the burning, monster-infested remains of a previous incarnation of the world, but that's never really addressed because "gods made my father a monster and my mother a vegetable, and every top-Rank Hunter is trying to kill me because I'm strong, so I have to murder everyone else first and never mind that I might get a future Job Change into the devil or be betrayed by my shadow-monster army as a consequence." I still want to see how insane the animation is going to get in Season Two of the anime (which still has a "January 7, 2024 - Present" status on its Wikipedia page, so a second season is coming, subtitled Arise From the Shadow), but the scope creep of the story ruined it for me by the end.

Thanks for joining me in this special, rule-breaking, plot-spoiling landmark post, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder in my Hunters' Guild if you haven't already, comment your dungeon raid report at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can keep my S-Rank status, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest dungeon breaks of news on my high-level content.

Ticketmaster,

Leveling Up,

And Out.