Tower of God is an awful clusterfuck of anime cliches haphazardly stitched together. Somehow its pseudo-deep story has tricked thousands of people into thinking it’s good. I’m in awe that this miserable fanfiction got an anime adaptation.

Becoming popular is the reason why ToG was adapted. Crunchyroll milked it because it was their prized cash cow, more interested in money than creativity. It recycles familiar anime tropes, plot points, and character archetypes to create the anime equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster.

Tournament arcs are successful, so the entire show will be a tournament arc. Superheroes are trendy, let’s add superpowers. People like comedy right? Let's add nine or ten comic relief characters, they'll love it! We'll even shoehorn a school into the Tower. Fantasy stories make tons of money too, so we'll say outside of the tower is a sprawling fantasy world. That way we won't have to write it, instead, we'll just call it a mystery. Genius. Perhaps I may be mistaken. I've heard it gets better later on, but I don’t care how long it takes to become worth watching. I’m not reviewing chapter 400 of the manhwa. I’m reviewing this season.

The premise is simple, but the execution is threadbare. Those attempting to climb the Tower strive for riches, influence, and the power to become a God. They've been living inside it forever. How has it shaped their lives? I have no clue what the world is like outside of the tower. Maybe it will be explained in the next season. Constantly it is implied there is a huge fantasy world out there, but it’s never actually shown. Rather than organically introducing the setting, characters, and politics, the show haphazardly drops names and exposition onto the audience. Thankfully, the author knows how poorly explained everything is, so he writes blog posts to fill in the blanks because he doesn’t know how to integrate information into the story. The paper-thin plot is played up to be mysterious, but the biggest mystery about ToG is how the hell it got so popular.

This UNIQUE and ORIGINAL story follows a boy named Generic Male Protagonist, his Cool Guy friend, and a Comic Relief character. Our hero embarks on a quest to find the Generic Girl. Where did she go? She entered the tower, the Tower of God! Despite being told not to pursue her, Generic Male chases after her anyway! For as long as Generic Male, AKA Bam can remember, he has lived in a cave beneath the tower. One day, Rachel the Generic Girl found Bam. For better or worse, she taught him about the world. She became a mother figure to him and his love interest. Uh-huh. I have no clue what her perspective on their relationship is. Does she love him too? Or did she just pity him? I have no idea what Rachel's life was like before she found Bam. How did Bam live before being “saved” by her? How long was he trapped? The show wants us to sympathize with him, but it's impossible. He is a potato with arms, legs, and a face. Despite trying to leave him, Rachel groomed him to be loyal. She told him, “Betraying a girl’s trust is the same as betraying the whole world,” but Bam is a brainless mouth-breather so he believed her. This is how he became the world's biggest SIMP.

At the beginning of his journey, Bam is granted superpowers. Out of nowhere, one of the Tower’s Princesses of Jahad meets Bam at the first level. She presents him with a mighty sword. Why? Because she’s bored. When it's convenient for the plot, she reappears to remind us she exists. Ingenious character writing. Luckily for Bam, a ghost babe is living in his sword and she grants him even more power. Why? Because she thinks he's “cute.” Do you see the trend? Bam gets everything he needs without putting in any effort (almost like the author). He is a Deus Ex Machina magnet because using cheap plot devices is easier than writing character development. The longer Bam is on screen the more he looks like a human-shaped punching bag. Bam is the audience’s avatar. He doesn’t need a deep personality, but it would've been nice if he had one. The story follows an ensemble cast and we learn about the world through him. Throughout the season Bam and his ‘friends’ take various tests administered by Rankers, people who’ve climbed the tower before. The tests vary from a fight to the death to making friends with competitors. There's never a sense of urgency in any of the challenges.

At the end of the season, Bam announces, "I have changed so much." Except, he never does. The only thing he changes is his outfit. For the entire show, he is an amnesiac with no personality or memories. His only reason for living is to chase after a girl even after she said not to. I’m honestly more interested in why Rachel’s trying to avoid him. She wanders through the anime with an expression that seems stuck somewhere between disapproval and boredom. You never get a sense of what she’s thinking because she’s so… dull. Her motives are so wishy-washy and her relationship with Bam makes no sense. She ditches him, then avoids him, then helps him. Rinse and repeat. It’s no wonder why ToG fans hate her guts. When she tries to avoid Bam, she does nothing to change her appearance. She wears the same hideous outfit that she wore when she first met Bam. If she didn't want him to find her she would’ve at least cut her hair. They’re always close together yet he’s too dimwitted to figure it out. While in Tower school, they’re in the same class, but Bam can’t even see through her lazy disguise. Their whole relationship is so unbelievably stupid. How did someone above the age of fourteen write this?

Wrapped layers thick with plot armor⁠—Bam embodies the “Chosen One” archetype. As though the author realized how bland Bam is, he introduces tons of side characters to distract us. The less bland deuteragonist, Khun, carries Bam through this season’s challenges. There’s not much to him (yet) aside from being the quintessential Cool Guy™. When he is first introduced, he suddenly gets a convenient flashback to his family. It’s vague, of course, but at least it’s something. From what I could discern, he was expelled from his family because his sister disappointed his parents. I’m assuming his personality and motivations were deemed unimportant because he has neither in this season. Maybe the author was kind enough to blog about Khun so we can fill in the blanks. One thing I find remarkable about Khun is his magical briefcase. Not only can it hold a couple of people, but it can also duplicate anything. While it’s an awesome idea, it doesn’t make much sense. If we’re supposed to believe this fantasy world has modern technology like electricity, televisions, phones, and the internet, then it would probably also have guns. Why can’t Khun just clone a bunch of AR15’s and plow his way through the tower? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe we can look forward to that in the fifth or sixth season.

Rather than integrating exposition into the story organically, the author uses Bam’s amnesia to lampshade exposition dumps. Random characters spoon-feed him plot points as if he’s a toddler. Sometimes people will just start monologuing their backstory out of nowhere. Throughout this season, we get random flashbacks to develop side characters. Two of them stood out far more than any others: Anaak and Endorsi. As princesses of Jahad, their rivalry to one-up each other is the most enjoyment I got from the show. Anaak, a green lizard-tailed girl, at least has a reason for climbing the tower. Revenge. As for Endorsi, her entire personality revolves around her vanity. She explicitly says she wears makeup and high heels to use her beauty for her benefit. Though this is just the ‘woman manipulates men with beauty’ cliche we can at least sympathize with her. The King views his princesses as beautiful tools only he may use, which explains Endorsi’s obsession with her appearance. The King’s prejudice towards women isn’t challenged by the author, which is likely because the author shares those ideals. As if unintentionally, certain lines of dialogue reveal the author’s regressive view of women. I wish the show was about Anaak and Endorsi rather than Bam and Rachel. There’s so much more to them. In future seasons, I hope to see more focus on them.

All the other side characters are cardboard cutouts. Their personalities can be summarized with one word each. Annoying, confrontational, tired, loud, hungry, etcetera. Way too many of the fight scenes are from the perspective of these forgettable characters. There is no reason to care about any of them if you haven’t read the manhwa. Some of the character designs fit the enigmatic fantasy setting they’re going for, but others just make no sense. Some people wear typical 2000s fashion like tracksuits, sneakers, and cargo shorts but others are in ninja outfits. And that’s not even to mention the dozens of different fantastical races. Just the character designs imply so much about the world, I wish he fleshed out the world or its inhabitants. But he didn’t. It’s a mess of disjointed tropes stuck together with Gorilla Glue.

If all you want is action and eye candy, you’ll probably be disappointed. Most of the combat revolves around strategic games, but rules are never clear, or where the contestants are in relation to each other. Despite the skilled animators they hired for certain fights, it all feels completely weightless. The director can compose a shot fine enough, but he otherwise seems bored to be here. Each scene lazily collides into the next; transitions are rushed and ugly. To make this trainwreck worse, the art quality is inconsistent as hell. The animation is stiff and the background art is unimaginative.

It's as if the director didn't know how to even script a TV series because every episode ends abruptly. In the middle of dialogue, it cuts to the credits. The next episode picks up right where it left off. They rarely ever tried to surprise us with a cliffhanger. It feels like they wrote the screenplay for a four-hour movie rather than a thirteen-episode TV show. Traditionally episodes conclude a chapter and setup to the next one, not just suddenly cut to black. The only buffer we get is the OP and ED, which are both average pop songs. For a high budget series, they put so little effort into designing the visuals for the credits. Within the series, the music is much better. The piano and the orchestral soundtrack is beautiful, as expected of Kevin Penkin, but it's not suited to this series. Admittedly, it's difficult to tell what tone Tower of God is going for. I doubt even the director always knew what emotion he was trying to evoke. In the rare action scenes when the music and artwork sync up well, it's pretty entertaining. All of a sudden, someone will interject with an unfunny joke and the pace comes to a screeching halt. The art style will suddenly swap to chibi and comedic reaction faces are thrown in at random too. Even out of combat, the comedy is just cringy as hell. I was expecting it to go away as the plot progressed, but it only got worse.

Everything in Tower of God is a mystery. It is predicated on mythology, the setting is very vague, the protagonist is an amnesiac, and the rules of the Tower are unclear. For a show that’s at least 80% exposition, impressively it didn’t explain much this season. While watching ToG, questions like these will fill your mind: Who or what created the Tower? How does it grant people power? What is the outside world like? When the final episode ends, you still won't have answers. The Tower is a mystery to everyone, even the author. Like an unplanned fanfiction, the direction is unclear. There is some vague foreshadowing. New characters are endlessly added in favor of developing current ones.

Tower of God suffers from inherent problems that are deeply structural, not just superficial, and they run right down to its core. If you build a tower on a weak foundation, it is bound to collapse. You cannot write a fantasy epic with no bones, and that's why this season was a trainwreck. It has been a long and tedious climb, and apparently this is only the prologue. There’s nowhere to go from here but up, so as the fans say,

“It will get better next season!”
“It will get better next season!”
“It will get better next season!”
“It will get better next season!”