Solo Leveling might be one of the most embarrassing, confused amalgam of power fantasy tropes and self-insert garbage to ever come out of South Korea. It’s a completely worthless experience that even the most uncultured viewer will get absolutely nothing out of. The question of the day is why A-1 Pictures expended so much of their time and resources into essentially polishing a turd; every second of top-notch storyboarding and animation would’ve been better spent enhancing a more competently written and directed series. Perhaps the blame lies on its slavish cult following - despite its severe failings as a story, as some people (and presumably AI-generated social media posts) will tell you this completely outclasses every piece of modern fiction despite it being the inverse of observable reality. The more likely explanation is that South Korea’s media conglomerates want to take another swing at breaking into the ever-lucrative world of anime, despite just about every prior attempt to adapt the worst manhwa slop Webtoon has to offer being one unmitigated disaster after the other. Regrettably, no amount of fervent online shilling can make this show a bearable experience.

Solo Leveling is the story of Sung Jin-Woo, a mopey, incompetent loser who finds himself gifted with the power of RPG mechanics after a near-death experience; he is the only one of a group of supernaturally gifted humans called hunters who can “level up” or get stronger than the rank that was arbitrarily bestowed onto him. Jinwoo goes from being the “weakest hunter of all mankind” to one of the strongest within the span of a few episodes, and the glaring issue with the story almost immediately becomes obvious; there’s going to be zero tension after a certain point. After the first 2 episodes of the show, almost nothing is shown as a challenge for Jinwoo. His toughest battle’s over in five minutes. Around halfway through the season Jibunwo stops being a self-pitying cretin and transitions into a borderline sociopath. His original motivation of raising enough money to save his comatose mother is almost non-existent, rendering him a cold and unrelatable Gary Stu with no motivation aside from gaining power. You’d think with this rapid metamorphosis into an entirely different person being thrust upon our hero, he’d have some sort of introspection about how he’s changed. But the most self-awareness we ever get from the series is a halfassed Nietzsche quote.

Perhaps Jinwoo’s most unlikeable quality is how he seems to hold a grudge over the most asinine things; most notably against a 60/70-year old man for not carrying Jinwoo to safety during the first encounter in the dungeon that granted him his powers; when said man is fatally wounded later in the season Jinwoo’s only response is, rather than “I need to help you get medical attention!” like a normal person, but rather “You need to survive no matter what, how else can I keep blaming you?” What the fuck is this mindset? As if that wasn’t enough, the story even presents the idea that Jinwoo’s been bullied his entire life for being the weakest hunter in history, but only one instance is ever shown onscreen through a flashback - his teammate tells him to stop being a liability and get behind the others after he gets injured during a fight - less bullying and more showing concern for someone who is clearly not qualified to be there at all. All this seems to do is, rather than reinforce Jinwoo’s bizarre complexes, is raise the question of why he can’t just find another fucking job.

On that note, Solo Leveling tries to enforce a message of self-improvement and “believing in yourself” which falls flat because Jibunwo has everything handed to him by sheer coincidence and he’s the only one in the world who can get stronger. He wouldn’t have started working out and trying to become a more competent hunter had he not lucked out and pleased the statue deity. His physical transformation is the funniest thing to me because the writer has clearly never worked out in their life; if they did, they’d know that doing some pushups and light jogging does NOT make you taller or change the structure of your face unless you’re taking fucking tren.

I genuinely have next to nothing to say about any of the other characters, because nearly every single one that appears only exists to service Jibunwo. His love interest is an insufferably timid copy-paste of Orihime without any of the charm, relatability or humor Kubo would’ve endowed her with; every time she’s on screen, she’s either trembling in the corner and crying like a scorned child because fighting low-level WoW enemies is apparently PTSD-inducing, insufferably shrieking like a fisher cat, or smiling vacuously. She’s inept when it comes to healing people, her sole purpose in the story. She’s not even good at being a demure tradwife for the self-inserting audience, because she’s a whiny bitch who passive-aggressively insults Jibunwo after his transformation (“you used to get hurt so much it was annoying!”) yells at her parents for caring about her well-being, and has to rely on everyone around her just to accomplish the most basic tasks that anyone else would have no problem with. Her tremendously grating voice acting does her portrayal no favors, either. The writer seems to at least realize how awful a character she is because by episode ten she gets written out of the story.

Jinwoo’s simp Yoo Jinhoo or whatever only exists to follow Jibunwo around and larp as a hunter, as he is a literal trust-fund kid who gets to sit back and watch professionals handle everything for him. then act like he contributed after the fact. I do not see why anyone finds him likeable, as much like everyone else who isn’t Jinwoo he does absolutely nothing of value. Jinwoo’s sister and the other hunters are so one-note and static that the anime has to cut back to them having mundane conversations just to remind the audience they exist and will, hopefully, do something later down the line. Every other background character exists either to suck off Jibunwo and remark on either how much of a weakling he is before his transformation, or how cool and awesome and attractive he is afterwards. The antagonists are either your standard fantasy monsters, or villainous hunters who turn comically evil at the drop of a hat. All you’re left with is a cast of increasingly difficult to distinguish names and faces that serve no purpose other than to explain the rules of the world to the audience. There’s also a guy named Hwang Dongsuk, which is really funny.

The world of Solo Leveling is, safe to say, so piss-poor at justifying its own existence that even after twelve episodes I couldn’t find myself buying it for a minute. So there’s portals to a fantasy world that spit out monsters, and there’s people with latent magical abilities that form teams to fight them as a professional career. Sound simple enough, even a series as narratively dysfunctional as RWBY could pull off a premise this simple. However, it overcomplicates itself. Every hunter only has one set rank and can never grow more powerful through training. This deterministic angle infects the series with this ugly brand of cynicism and kills any pretense of the “work hard and you’ll get stronger!” attitude the show wants you to believe in. There’s also hunters who kill other hunters, which begs the question of why they’d waste their time and risk their lives killing the only other people capable of keeping the world safe for a little more cash. Even worse is the fact that the hunter organization recruits convicted felons with latent powers to fight the monsters in their home turf. Not exactly a great plan but throwing hardened criminals into the meatgrinder is a better alternative than making the Average Joe do it. You’d think, right? But the hunter association makes criminals fight alongside the civilian hunters who only do it to pay the bills, most notably the lower ranked hunters and ONE singular B-rank supervisor; this would instantly stand out as a logistical nightmare to anyone with a functioning brain.

Additionally, the party system is extremely poorly thought out even on a conceptual level – having poorly trained civilians doing your work for you is already questionable, but afterwards they report everything to a supervisor afterwards who believes the recounting of events of the mission at face value and doesn’t engage in any further questioning or research. No sane organization would approve of something like this, especially with how unqualified the average hunter is shown to be at the start of the series; Jinwoo’s team goes into an obvious trap in the first episode, and predictably they all start dropping like flies. Rather than stay composed and try to find a way to overcome their predicament like you’d expect professional monster hunters to do, they all start screaming like little girls and dying in increasingly comical ways due to their lack of cooperation, leading to the encounter where Jinwoo gain his looksmaxxing powers. The dramatic hook of the first two episodes is portrayed as a tragic massacre, but it’s impossible not to laugh at how they all get steamrolled so easily. To add insult to injury, there are also S-ranks, who are the strongest but they’re seemingly never around when the weaker hunters are in danger. An inspector for the organization also states that S-ranks could pose a threat because they are essentially so strong they are above the law, but he makes it sound like there wouldn’t be any enforcing the law at all. None of this makes any sense, it’s all peripherally defined and therefore it fails at even being a self-insert story because you intrinsically could not self-insert into a world so poorly thought out.

The show’s only saving grace is the technical competence of the fight scenes; everything else is abysmal. The direction is all over the place. Most conversation scenes are just shot reverse shot, and there’s no cinematic diversity. Anytime something interesting is going on the scene will suddenly cut back to some inane conversation about something the audience has already heard between side characters the audience has no reason to care about – episode 5 cuts from the middle of a fight to Jibunwo’s sister and some random hunters talking about stuff that was ALREADY EXPLAINED IN THE SAME EPISODE – this scene has zero reason to exist, it doesn’t even introduce new characters, I genuinely do not understand what the thought process is with these moments. Furthermore, characters will state things they should already know to each other, such as their teammate’s backstory, just to make sure the audience knows. The writers behind Solo Leveling seem to be under the assumption that “show, don’t tell” is merely a suggestion.

The opening animation seems to be a perfect indication of everything wrong with the series – it’s a visually cluttered, incomprehensible mishmash of characters, location shots, and disorienting fight scenes that tell you nothing about the show itself while some guy raps in Engrish over the blandest Hiroyuki Sawano music you can imagine. Speaking of Sawano, he couldn’t be phoning it in any harder with the soundtrack, and it brings me no pleasure knowing how he could do so much better. His distinctive arrangements don’t fit the show at all, and nearly every track sounds indistinguishable. Outside of the manufactured sakuga scenes made to go viral on Tiktok, Solo Leveling is incompetent even in an aesthetic sense. Saying that the anime captures even an iota of the original webcomic’s artistic prowess would be an incredibly generous assessment. Every episode is plagued by characters constantly looking off-model in background or group shots and sometimes even in closeups.

Solo Leveling is Crunchyroll’s desperate new attempt at launching a flagship title, and perhaps there’s something to be said about how a company that’s spent its lifespan trying to commercialize and depreciate an entire medium is funding and promoting such a sterile and blatantly mass-produced series. What webtoon companies call “entertainment”, I call the violation of an art form. At the very least, the show’s aesthetic failures reflect its own failures as a story; it’s ugly, intrinsically cynical, and dishonestly presenting itself as something profound and grandiose when there’s nothing about it that justifies the portrayal.