Series Review: Solo Leveling – Chugong

On By Varun VasudevIn Completed Series, Reviews, Series Reviews
Left: Solo Leveling Light Novel, Right: Solo Leveling manhwa Vol.1

    TL;DR – Clichéd story with mediocre writing further hamstrung by an over-powered MC. You’d be better off watching the anime.

    I started this writing this review well over a year ago, and in the interim my feelings towards this series hasn’t changed much.

    Solo Leveling is a Korean webnovel turned light novel turned webtoon turned anime. You can see that the series gained popularity fairly quickly with the number of iterations we have. The series follows the traditional LitRPG trope of a zero to hero journey involving game mechanics such as leveling up and dungeon crawling.

    What makes this series a bit different is that our protagonist appears to be the only person in this world that can benefit from these game mechanics. More specifically, the ability to ‘level up’. In this dystopian world (focus being Korea in the webnovel, lightnovel, and webtoon, while I believe it is supposedly Japan in the anime; interesting) people were one day granted special abilities when magical portals started appearing all over the world. These portals led to dungeons filled with monsters, and should the dungeon boss not be defeated, these portals would break open releasing these monsters into our world. Weird I know, but the reason for this one-way portal nonsense is explained later.

    The people with these special abilities decide to band together to fight these monsters, and in time, special guilds were formed filled with these people now called ‘hunters’. Once a person awakens their abilities, their strength appear to be fixed for the rest of their lives, unless on very rare occasions when a person has what they call a second awakening. Now in comes our protagonist who unfortunately, but aptly, is considered by one and all to be the weakest hunter of them all.

    You can see how this is going to go right?

    What starts off as a fairly interesting series with a decent premise soon devolves into a hack and slash with an overpowered Main Character (MC) who, of course, always swoops in to save the day. Don’t get me wrong, it is quite entertaining and the artwork in the webtoon is really good, but the repetitiveness does get rather tiresome. It’s the same formula over and over in the series.

    The anime, from its first season, seems to be visually quite a treat to watch. Unfortunately, they seem to be rushing through which makes the story seem even more mediocre. Not like there was much of a story to begin with but its hard to empathise with the MC if you’re going at breakneck pace whcih makes it hard for any form of continuity.

    **spoiler ahead**

    That being said, after reading through both the webtoon, and the light novels, the ending was a bit disappointing. The same pattern continued where the MC got too strong too fast and in the end everything felt rushed. I mean nothing really fazed the MC or even seemed like a bother. He was always smarter, stronger, quicker. I would have liked a slightly more nuanced ending than everything being hunky dory for the MC. The webtoon did leave a lot of questions unanswered but I found there to be a bit more context in the light novel which does help to tie up a couple of loose threads.

    I think this may be one series it would be better to watch the anime for the highly entertaining and well crafted animation rather than slog through mediocre writing only to be left disappointed in the end.

    Rating: 2/5

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