Apr 1, 2024
Do you enjoy decently animated fighting scenes and don't care about anything else? Then I highly recommend you stop reading this and start watching already!
Still there? Great. Apart from the fluid animation during fights, this anime has no redeeming qualities at all.
The characters are all unbelievably bleak. Of course, it's called SOLO Leveling - still, after watching all 12 episodes during the last three months, not a single character of this anime lingered in my mind for even a second. Jin-Woo goes from a timid, weak dude to a cold-hearted Gigachad with a flat, deep voice in the matter of about 4 episodes. That's all
...
the character development there is - he carries his husky tone and ice-cold mannerisms all the way through the finish line. His sister, like all the other characters, seems to merely exist as reason-givers or stepping stones. Why does he fight? For his sick mother and for his sister, of course... right? It's hard to believe this, given his complete refusal to engage in friendly, light-hearted interactions with others. Even his oh-so-beloved sister only gets the cold shoulder from him whenever she tries to talk to him. Why should the viewer care for Jin-Woo's quest if he himself doesn't seem to care in the slightest for anyone or anything?
Then there's the world-building. I don't even need to go into much detail here. It's just the world we live in, but there are portals to mostly gloomy, fantasy-like dungeons. Some people awaken to powers that can neither get stronger nor weaker; a bit like in a caste system, you're forever locked into your rank. They have to go into the dungeon portals to slay the monsters, keeping the world safe from them and earning some bucks. It's not all that creative, and there hasn't been a single surprising moment. The world goes on as usual, but there are portals now. It doesn't seem to change society in the slightest. To top it off, the whole story unfolds in one place - a grey, anonymous city with nothing interesting to see.
This point is so important to me that it deserves its own paragraph. Everything looks SO boring. There's the city and there are the dungeons, which are mostly just caves with no interesting features. Visually, this whole anime has no imagination at all. It completely lacks character and beauty. Why do even the fantasy world caves have to look so dull? Even Sword Art Online, a show often cited as an example for how not to do... anything, gets this right!
And the show can't even make up for it with an interesting plot. The main storyline is basically "Jin-Woo has to become strong and faces some obstacles". Even the fact that he's the only one able to level up and get stronger isn't particularly interesting, as it doesn't seem to have any implications or downsides. It's just... there, instead of being presented as a mystery of some kind. Hell, if something like that happened to you, you'd be dying to know the "why" and "how"! Jin-Woo however just accepts it as it is, confiding in no one, never trying to find out if anyone else experiences this...
What makes it worse is that it takes itself extremely serious. I don't mean to say every anime has to include comedy of some kind - but Solo Leveling just doesn't contain any light-hearted moments at all. The only thing that made me chuckle was the sudden transformation from weakling to muscular chad - but even that seems to have been intended as a serious matter. His surroundings at least accept it as the most normal thing ever, even though one can barely recognize him after this.
The opening is just utterly silly - "Now I'm racking up the kills - I got to pay the bills" probably sounds like a cool line when you're about 10 years old. Yet, one could say the lyrics are kinda revealing - they're about as deep as the show itself.
I can only advise anyone with any standards at all not to give this series a chance. It's not even bad in a funny way, but rather a slugfest lasting 12 episodes, interspersed with decent but basically meaningless fights.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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