It took a Gigguk video and an anime announcement to get me to read Solo Leveling, and I’m glad I did. I have a sort of soft spot for overpowered protagonists, but in this anime and magna landscape, it’s tough to find one that doesn’t get reincarnated into another world via truck accident. Luckily, that’s where Chu-Gong comes in. It’s actually kind of refreshing to see a world where fantasy and modern life collide; one chapter will have hunters fight monsters using Dungeons & Dragons spells and armour, and the next chapter will have someone posting a picture on Instagram. In this world, E-rank hunter Jin-Woo Sung wakes up after narrowly surviving a deadly S-rank dungeon raid. While hunters normally have a set power limit, he quickly finds out that his powers can now level up.

Because it has a decent number of chapters, the pacing of Jin-Woo’s journey from “world’s worst hunter” to “about as powerful as you can imagine, then double it” is this manhwa’s greatest strength. Not once did I feel like his power progression was being rushed; every level up happened when it needed to happen. Plus, the fights he gets into are all really cool, and the art really helps. As with most manhwas, the full-coloured panels bring a depth to the action that I haven’t seen in any black-and-white manga I’ve read before, and at times, it almost feels cinematic. Rest in peace, Seong-Rak Jang.

Unfortunately, the art does most of the heavy lifting. If you can find me an overpowered protagonist paired with a compelling story, please let me know, because this ain’t it. After Jin-Woo gets reawakened, there really isn’t so much a story rather than a sequence of repeating events: he enters a gate, he fights some high level monsters, he levels up. Sometimes there’s a longer setup for that first step, and he occasionally deals with business that doesn’t involve beheading monsters, but it really does feel like a bunch of mini-arcs rather than a continuous story. Where Jin-Woo’s power progression feels smooth like butter, the story’s progression feels like chunky peanut butter.

And no offense to the writer, but I have no idea what to make of Jin-Woo Sung himself. We occasionally see him with people he claims to love, but we also see him basically reject his humanity in order to become stronger. I struggle with this dichotomy because I want to see Jin-Woo as a person, but on the other hand, I like how the artist draws him progressively more monstrously the stronger he gets, and he even wonders at one point just how human he really is. He seems more at home in a dungeon than he does in the real world.

It’s because of these things that it’s difficult to buy that he’s so attached to certain people. That’s my biggest problem with Solo Leveling: the SOLO part. We see him fight to level himself up, and most of those fights happen while he’s alone. He’s growing more powerful than anyone in the world, but his relationships with others have no growth. It would have been an interesting idea to delve into his loneliness, but being secluded doesn't bother him. In fact, he seems to prefer it. So when we’re told his reason for fighting is for the people he cares about, I’m not convinced. He should’ve spent more time with them if they wanted that side of him to be believable.

That being said, I still had a great time reading this. It’s like junk food; little-to-no substance, but boy, does it taste good! I hope that maybe they can beef up his character and relationships in the upcoming anime adaptation, but at the very least I have confidence that A-1 Pictures will make the action scenes look amazing, and that Hiroyuki Sawano will compose some epic music to make this very fun story come to life in a new way.