Solo Leveling

The hype around Solo Leveling has been growing like crazy these past few months and it quickly jumped to the top of my must-read list after my fav anitubers/streamers began to do live-readings of this series. I went in with high expectations due to seeing videos and threads about SL being a "masterpiece", but after the third arc I found it quite repetitive. The most revolutionary thing about it is the high quality, full colored and always consistent art style, the plot on the other hand is like the next RPG style story. It started off with the typical worst-case scenario happening in the first few chapters and afterswards our MC, Sung Jinwoo, was made a player of a system that allows him to endlessly grow. Where this system stems from exactly isn't further mentioned just like the existence of the dungeons is questioned once every 50 chapters (and this series consists out of 110 chapter atm...sooo). The arcs after the first one are all basically the same, Jinwoo is tasked with a seemingly unbeatable quest but in the next moment he is standing on top of the enemy, easy-peasy. What I do like was, that he still had to use some strategy at least but still...he is very OP and i am not too much of a fan of how quickly he got the hang of it since he was the weakest at first and how quick his personality changed as he is quite ruthless now. His only weakness is to memorize names, which I find quite charming - but that's just a side note. Personally I would've loved more interactions between the cast members, everyone else except for Jinwoo is cut pretty short and the only thing we get from the support cast is their thoughts on how incredible Jinwoo is now compared to before. I wanna know more about the other hunters and their motivations. I would've loved the squad from the Red Gate Arc to stick around, but this wasn't the case. The action is a huge element in Solo Leveling but I would swap some actions scenes for actual interaction between the cast anyday. Another thing that bothered me was that Jinwoo's motivation to become a hunter wasn't made clear at first and when his mother's illness came up again, I was quite perplexed that there was something going on behind the scenes that he has to take care of. Even though we spend almost the whole story with Jinwoo, he seems very distant to me as a reader. A little bit more insight to his thought process wouldn't do any harm in my opinion. Maybe the author left him as a bit of a mystery for self-insertion and usually I am a big sucker for mysterious charas but if you make this whole series a one-man show, I wanna know what's going on. The mutant ant arc was also quite disappointing, I really wanted to see the rest of the hunters go in for once. Not to mention that it was pretty much a knock-off of the CAA in HxH. The most interesting plot point to me is what happened to Jinwoo's father and the most memorable scene was when Jinwoo became a necromancer and said "Arise" for the first time, this made me really hype but the feeling quickly faded. All in all I would say that this Manwha is an entertaining read but for me, it doesn't live up to the hype around it. An anime adaption can be expected due to it's popularity and if it gets one, I hope that it will land in the hands of ufotable, I can imagine them going nuts with the animation and they would definitely do the art style justice and add a chilling OST!