Anime Spotlight #56: Tower Of God (2025 Update)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Irregularly Ranked Animeister.

That byline has less to do with fluctuating analytics than with terms used in today's anime up for review in Anime August (and Tower Of God certainly has no shortage of "YA novel words that mean things," let me tell you).

I seriously mean it; I'd like you to let me tell you (though as is the case in 2025, I'm saving that call to action until the end). And that starts with edited reprints of my Spotlightning Round blurbs on the series, which starts with Anime-BAWklog #7: Spotlightning Round (Part II) FROM May 29, 2023:

Tower Of God is based on an ongoing South Korean web comic by S.I.U. (real name, Lee Jong-hui) on the Naver and Line Webtoon platforms. This series (the one and only season we got at the time) is beautiful, surreal, has one of the best magic systems in shōnen, and its characters (except for one, and if you've watched this, you know who I mean) are likeable and creatively concieved. Worth a watch, and worth seeking out the web comic if you like what you see, because I don't think we'll be getting more of the anime since the "Crunchyroll Originals" brand bombed hard.

Obviously, I was dejected, toxic, and wrong because it took awhile, but we did get a second season of Tower Of God (split into two seasonal arcs, or cours, for production reasons because the anime looks great and you don't just get a double-sized second season of an anime this good by wiping the asses of a thousand monkeys with a generative AI tool over a weekend) in 2024 after a four-year gap, which I gave a first impression of in Anime Spotlight #41: Spotlightning Round (Part IV) FROM August 5, 2024: After climbing up from the wreckage of the CrunchyRoll Originals brand that brought us the coke-nosed fighting tournament masterpiece God Of High School, and Noblesse and So I'm A Spider, So What? (which both existed), Tower Of God is finally back with a second season. As it mainly focuses on a whole new cast of characters, there's some disconnect besides the opening reminder that Rachel is a bitch and the thirteen Month weapons exist. Curse this Smarch weather! The animation is as good as I remember from the first season, and the new cast are pretty endearing. Climb the tower and give this a watch, but don't touch Willie.

Now that I have inserted obligatory Simpsons meme here (I said what I said) and Homer has instigated a Nightmare On Elm Street parody by becoming an Alanis Morissette lyric and toggling the wrong Willie at school (I said what I said), let's put the dirty humor behind us (I said what I said) and talk about the first season's plot beats and opening and ending beats.

Tower Of God follows Bam (voiced by the ubiquitous Johnny Yong Bosch in the dub), whom some characters refer to as "The 25th Bam" (which could mean one of three things: it's just a number like in movie titles—the easy joke of "what about the first 1,999 Death Race movies?"—Bam is secretly from a long line of royalty, or—my personal guess based on how JRPG-like the world is—Bam is a player avatar who is unaware of what he is and that he has died twenty-four times before this instance of the game he's in), as he climbs the Tower and completes increasingly more challenging tasks (fights, puzzles, platforming, sports minigames, and obscure combinations thereof and anything else I forgot because it's like a cross between Duelist Kingdom from Yu-Gi-Oh!, the first three arcs of Hunter×Hunter, and Squid Game with ki attacks—here taking the form of a fluid substance called Shinsu, which is basically like Lantern energy from DC Comics) to catch up to his childhood friend from the first episode of Gurren Lagann who left to climb the Tower ahead of him and "see the stars." Unfortunately, said childhood friend happens to be Rachel (whom, I may have already mentioned, is at the very kindest of descriptions, a cold, traitorous, manipulative bitch). Thankfully, the world of the Tower is populated by interesting characters like his ally of convenience Khun, the goofy size-shifting lizard-man Rak who calls everyone [adjective] turtles, and future love interest Endorsi Jahad, among many, many others, all with their own motivations, secrets, and compelling backstories. Add on an abundance of nomenclature like Rankers (test administrators who successfully climbed the Tower in the past and serve as floor bosses), Regulars (I think these are just people who can pass certain floors and just hang out and grind until they feel like attempting the next test), Irregulars (Bam is one, and the only thing we really know about them is that they can "change the fate of the Tower" and the status quo doesn't abide that—feeding into my "Bam is the player avatar in a video game" theory), Ignition Weapons (of which the Thirteen Months are, but we find out next season that people can be fused with and/or turned into Ignition Weapons as well), FUG (a rebel crime syndicate who train assassins to overthrow the Jahad regime who rule the Tower, though on watch, I thought it was either censored profanity or an Asian approximation of Jason Statham calling someone a thug), FUG Slayers and Slayer Candidates (the aforementioned assassins, though again, on watch, the dub line reads made it unclear if a FUG Slayer was a Slayer of FUG or a Slayer for FUG, and after awhile, I stopped giving a FUG), the Workshop Battle (a teammate-summoning battle royale test that happens at scheduled times on a specific floor, and it feels like something that was written in to promote a new mode in one of the series' five predatory mobile game adaptations), and more terminology that probably requires the author's constantly updating stream of social media supplements to fully grasp (unlike Solo Leveling, I am anime-only on this one, so I don't follow the webcomic or anything else about Tower Of God, and I welcome any corrections the TOG community has to offer), and there is an ambitious amount of plot and world-building information to keep track of that I haven't seen outside of One Piece thus far.

Moving onto the music, Stray Kids does the opening and ending music for the first season

Season 1 OP: "TØP"

Season 1 ED: "SLUMP"

and the second cour of Season Two (the Workshop Battle arc).

Season 2 Workshop Battle OP: "NIGHT"

Season 2 Workshop Battle ED: "Falling Up"

The first cour OP ("Rise Up") and ED ("Believe") by NiziU are catchy, too, but they didn't have the "I'm hyped to listen to this every episode until I mumble the hook in my sleep" factor that the Stray Kids tracks do.

In the first half of Season 2, subtitled Return Of the Prince, we pick up after a timeskip (which wasn't confusing at all after not having watched the series for four FUGking years) where our new main character seems to be Ja Wangnan (the neck-horned blonde guy pictured above), a weak but charismatic youth with Jahad connections who fights with legally distinct pumpkin bombs. There's also a FUG Slayer Candidate in Wangnan's testing group named Jue Viole Grace (voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch in the dub; hmm...) who is a living Ignition Weapon to boot, a quiet, hulking guy who may be a notorious serial killer known as "The Devil's Right Arm" and is also a living Ignition Weapon, a pyrokinetic aristocrat named Yihwa (basically Noelle Silva from Black Clover, but fire), and a bunch of fodder characters that are there to make the writing look good and break down Viole's walls so he can learn to embrace the most powerful trope of all, but they don't serve much of a purpose otherwise.

Elsewhere, Rachel is no longer just a cold, traitorous, manipulative bitch, but also evil now, because pretending she was paralyzed as a means to kill Bam with a long fall into the jaws of a Lovecraftian sea monster wasn't an irredeemable enough act to make her "special," and Khun and Rak are still kicking about with plans to kill her in revenge for Bam's death. And because this series hasn't totally gotten stupid yet, the second season introduces Emily, an AI virtual assistant app with seemingly omniscient and predictive abilities that turns out to be a living Ignition Weapon who was liquefied into Shinsu by the same research program that enhanced Viole and the Devil's Arms, and downloaded into a supercomputer that looks like an Akira ball but she's got a bad case of Ghost In the Shell syndrome and thinks she's still a corporeal human. That research program? The Workshop!

Yeah; in the Workshop Battle arc, it turns out there's a conspiracy between the Workshop and FUG to trap Viole and give him the Emily treatment so he can be the organization's god or something, and the rules of the test go out the window, except that by now he's learned the Power Of Friendship and characters new and old join forces to stop FUG's machinations (and in a nod to the final battle of the OG Dragon Ball anime, they still find a way to win the Workshop Battle so they can Rank up—as far as I can tell, no real explanation is given as to the means of this process or its relation to what floor one can reach—and keep climbing in Season Three if that ever gets officially greenlit). There's also the post-credits scene where Rachel and the group she is using as her "legs" get their hands on Emily's Shinsu. The cute little farewell animation at the end of the season finale sends a mixed message as to the anime's future, so it's likely we'll get a third season because the Jahads at Webtoon, Sony, and Crunchyroll like money, but again, quality content takes time, so nothing is definitive yet besides the ongoing nature of the source material.

My source material is also ongoing and it's currently "I'm not getting any sleep tonight" AM the day of publication, so please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can keep climbing, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the best-Ranked news on my Irregular content.

Animeister,

Falling Up,

And Out.