Tower of God

Anyone who's followed me for the last six or seven months knows that I've grown to be a massive Tower of God fanboy. Discovering that an anime was on its way soon after I got sucked into the world and characters of Tower of God got me extremely excited to see this masterpiece of an story get the attention it deserved. When the first trailer dropped, I somehow got even more excited than I already was. Here was a trailer that captured the artstyle of the webtoon perfectly and made some changes that I thought were certainly on the right track, like Khun's hair, for example. The music was on point too, capturing the mysterious and intriguing vibe that the Tower emanated. Then, it started airing. Now, I should point out that, objectively, pushing my webtoon bias to the side, I think Tower of God is an alright anime. Not really good or great, probably a boring, but a run-of-the-mill anime. I'll go into more detail as to why I'm not very impressed with the quality of the anime even without my biases later on, but then you add in my knowledge of the source material and here's where my feelings about this adaptation get much more complicated. I will dive into spoiler territory beyond the Favorite Character section, as usual.

Like I said earlier, Tower of God captured the aesthetic of the webtoon extraordinarily well. The watercolor aesthetic is pleasing and unique, though I have to say that I wish they had toned down the brightness a little. It makes it seem a little too lighthearted in my opinion, but that's something that I'll admit is down to personal preference more than anything. The animation quality wasn't extremely impressive, especially in the battle sequences. They all seemed so generic and underwhelmingly choreographed. It certainly would have been foolish to expect ufotable level quality from Telecom but it still feels like a bit of a letdown on that front. I loved the changes that they made with some of the character designs, namely Khun, who looks so much better from his webtoon version in season 1. The fluffy hair was definitely a good touch.

Switching to the audio design, Tower of God gets a solid pass from me. On a soundtrack level, Kevin Penkin always slaps, although I think this is definitely one of his weaker soundtracks. It doesn't have many memorable tracks outside of maybe some of the numbers in episode 1, that come to mind, but again, that's something that is relatively subjective. Stray Kids absolutely kills it with their performances of "TOP" and "SLUMP" as the opening and ending songs respectively. "SLUMP" may actually be one of the best endings I've ever heard, though the competition for that title is tough, to say the least. Outside of the music, the sound design was otherwise just meh. I thought it was really underwhelming for shinsoo and certain other moments that felt as if they should have packed a little more of a punch.

Favorite Character: Endorsi Jahad

This is where my disappointment in the anime begins in full force. Starting with Endorsi's anime portrayal. This is my favorite character in Tower of God and that's saying a lot because I love so many of these characters very strongly. Firstly and most obviously, the anime removes her relationship with Bam in its entirety. In the webtoon, Bam is instrumental in her growth from a selfish Princess who only needs herself to someone who trusts her friends and doesn't look down (as much) on those who are weaker than her. They share a lot of experiences and dialogue in season 1 of the webtoon, even to the point of her developing a crush on him and telling him that they are going on a date after the final test. Then we look at the anime version of their relationship and we wonder if they even acknowledge each other's existence. They share what, one conversation? And even in that conversation, Hatz is in the room and he steals the conversation and has a shipping moment? It's so disappointing to see the removal of such a key aspect of Endorsi's character and development. Even greater than that, a huge aspect of her motivation in season 2 makes way less sense because of these completely unforced changes to her character.

I wish it was just limited to Endorsi's character, but Khun gets much of the same treatment in the anime for seemingly no reason. His backstory gets changed, on top of a lot of his personality. It's sad to see, because he's definitely still the Khun we know and love from the webtoon, but he feels like a lite version of that character due to the 'redeeming qualities' the anime seemed to force upon him. In the webtoon, we never really are sure why he's doing what he's doing and if its for himself or his friends. There's a lot of deviousness and ambiguity in Khun's character that simply gets lost in the translation between webtoon and anime. It feels pointless because of the way that they weaken his character and make him feel far less deep and believable.

I could go on about the characters and why they feel like somewhat cheap imitations compared to the source, but I had better move on. The next big disappointment for me was in the anime's overlooking of important details and subtle foreshadowing. There are far too many instances of this happening, so I'll just point out the first one that always pops into my mind whenever I start thinking about this specifically. In the first episode of the anime, we're introduced to Yuri long before she actually kicks Bam in the face. During this whole sequence, they're laying the groundwork for a lot of the early plot of the series and dropping some really important names in the process, like Urek Mazino and Phantaminum. While this flies over the head of first time viewers, its such a good bit of foreshadowing for later and introduces the strangeness of an irregular and shows you how insanely rare they are. The anime has none of this. Yuri just jumps in unexplained and gives Bam the Black March. For an anime viewer, why was she even there? For this random loser? So many moments that are weakened or simply unexplained that cause a domino effect throughout the series and weaken moments later and later because the anime is either having to play catch up or find a new way to make a moment make sense without the groundwork being properly laid.

Obviously, I can only scratch the surface with so many of these issues that occur time and time again in Tower of God's anime adaptation. There's still so much more that I could explore, but you get the idea. I feel like a valid question to ask here would be: What makes an adaptation good? Is it in the complete and totally faithful retelling of the original work? The proper retelling of the story? Making changes to more properly tell the story and explore different characterization? I think the answer lies somewhere in a mix of all of those. If we look back through history at some of the best adaptations in anime, we can look at works like Attack on Titan or March Comes in Like a Lion who faithfully adapt the series for the most part. The key is understanding what can be trimmed from adapting the work and what needs to be added. Obviously, there were moments that the anime version of Tower of God would have had to trim from the runtime, but we didn't need to use that extra time on Rak eating candy bars (Why are they not Bananas?!?). I think a lot of it comes down to directing passion. Toward the end of production, the assistant director took over and the quality took a massive upturn in both faithfulness and overall quality. It makes me kind of sad seeing the quality get so much better in the latter three episodes or so because it makes me wish that the other ten could have been as good.

Clearly, thirteen episodes is too little to adapt such a dense work as Tower of God, but its doable. A lot of these factors soften my opinion on the adaptation somewhat. Time constraints are no joke and this is an anime that could have used fifteen episodes just to pack in those details that would have elevated this season to a much higher quality. Will I be watching a season 2? Probably. I simply love this world and these characters too much and the last few episodes definitely gave me a little hope that season 2 can capture the hype better. As it stand though, season 1 was a massive disappointment to me not only as a source material reader, but also someone who likes good anime. It just doesn't manage to make itself very interesting even to me who has the passion for the material, so I can't imagine how boring and uninteresting it may have been to some others. I'd like to take this moment to apologize if any readers feel as if I'm leveraging an elitist attitude for having read the webtoon beforehand, but I hope you understand that its simply passion for one of my favorite works of art ever. I hope that the anime (and this review, hopefully) at least pushed many new people to read the webtoon for themselves and experience the absolutely phenomenal world and gripping story that SIU has crafted so masterfully.