Ore dake Level Up na Ken

Humanity was caught at a precipice a decade ago when the first gates—portals linked with other dimensions that harbor monsters immune to conventional weaponry—emerged around the world. Alongside the appearance of the gates, various humans were transformed into hunters and bestowed superhuman abilities. Responsible for entering the gates and clearing the dungeons within, many hunters chose to form guilds to secure their livelihoods.

Sung Jin-Woo is an E-rank hunter dubbed as the weakest hunter of all mankind. While exploring a supposedly safe dungeon, he and his party encounter an unusual tunnel leading to a deeper area. Enticed by the prospect of treasure, the group presses forward, only to be confronted with horrors beyond their imagination. Miraculously, Jin-Woo survives the incident and soon finds that he now has access to an interface visible only to him. This mysterious system promises him the power he has long dreamed of—but everything comes at a price.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Sung, Jin-Woo Main

Ban, Taito Japanese

Cha, Hae-In Supporting

Ueda, Reina Japanese

Igris Supporting

Sung, Jin-Ah Supporting

Mikawa, Haruna Japanese

Go, Gun-Hee Supporting

Ginga, Banjou Japanese

Lee, Joo-Hee Supporting

Honizumi, Rina Japanese

Yoo, Jin-Ho Supporting

Nakamura, Genta Japanese

Choi, Jong-In Supporting

Hirakawa, Daisuke Japanese

Baek, Yoon-Ho Supporting

Touchi, Hiroki Japanese

Woo, Jin-Chul Supporting

Furukawa, Makoto Japanese

Takahashi, Kanako Producer

Kaneko, Atsushi Producer

Kang, Kyewon Producer

Park, Jinhae Producer

Reviews

Apr 16, 2025

uchu_no_otaku

Recommended

There’s just something about this one that had me glued to the screen. From the first few episodes, I was already vibing with the character progression—watching Jin-Woo go from bottom-tier to absolute menace never felt rushed or unearned. The task-based level-up system hit the sweet spot for me. It's structured but never repetitive, which kept things from feeling stale.

Now, the animation? Honestly impressive. You can tell they didn’t cut corners, especially during the dungeon fights. The color palette, the camera angles, the effects—it all gave off that crisp, high-quality energy. That one dungeon scene mid-season? Fire.

That said, I do wish the side characters got more ... love. Some of them had potential, but they mostly existed to react to Jin-Woo being a beast. Would’ve been cool to see someone else step up now and then or at least get a bit of spotlight. Not a dealbreaker, but it stood out the more episodes I watched.

The execution was slick, the power fantasy was satisfying, and it left me genuinely hyped. If they give the supporting cast more depth later on, it might even push into 10 territory for me.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Apr 18, 2025

Belts

Mixed Feelings

For a long time, artists have experimented with phenomenology, or how art is changed by the way a person experiences the art. In visual arts, phenomenological experiences are usually achieved with optical effects, where art looks different when viewed from different angles, with ultimate results that are, in my opinion, gimmicky. But as a concept, I always felt phenomenology could find new artistic life in the medium of video games. Even in the most basic, non-narrative video games -- say, for example, the original Super Mario Bros. -- the way the player plays the game crafts a narrative experience. Mario can move carefully or aggressively, ... slowly or quickly, exploring for secrets or barreling to the end; he can die many times or none. However the game is played, it manufactures a "personality" for the character Mario unique to each player. In that interplay between the contributions of a game's creator and player, video games become a wholly unique art form.

Yet, as video games developed, and other art forms have retroactively become influenced by video games, I wonder if the real outcome of phenomenology in games has been an increasing tilt toward myopic individual artistic experience, or solipsism.

In my review of Sword Art Online, I mentioned that Solo Leveling's properly translated title is "Only I Level Up," which perfectly encapsulates the solipsistic focus of this genre of Gamer fiction. It is not simply about being powerful, it is about being the only one who is powerful. In Solo Leveling, this point is made at the end of the second episode, when protagonist Jinwoo receives a game prompt to become a "Player." As he is the only Player, every other character is necessarily a non-Player, or in Gamer lingo, an NPC.

I find something admirable about the nakedness with which Only I Level Up cuts to the quick. The most frustrating aspect of Sword Art Online as a viewing experience is how it attempts to hide its solipsistic power fantasy. The singleminded focus the show has on Kirito's power as the only power that matters undercuts everything else SAO claims to be, whether that's a tense death game, a heartfelt romance, or a story about the legitimacy of online community. Only I Level Up dispenses with pretense; its true face is right there in the title.

To frame it another way, I once watched Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, the first film in Late Tom Cruise's career as a psychopathic do-my-own-stuntsman, where the core appeal of a Tom Cruise film is to see what death-defying feat the actor pulls off. And, yes, the stunts Tom Cruise performs are spectacular to watch. The problem is that these stunts comprise, collectively, 10-20 minutes of a film that is well over 2 hours. The rest of the film is mired in tedious plot, weak stabs at character drama, banal comic relief -- all the things a Hollywood movie is "supposed to have," even if they are not the core appeal of the film at all. Because of this, I was much more impressed by The Raid, an Indonesian action movie that excises nearly all plot and character to provide 90 minutes of nonstop action, or Mad Max: Fury Road, a film that is accurately described as a two-hour car chase.

Only I Level Up reaches a similar level of efficiency as it pushes Jinwoo from encounter to encounter. The loop is simple: Jinwoo is too weak, gets pushed around, levels up, wins, and the moment he wins the story already has a new stronger adversary waiting to appear. All other characters are either helpful assistants/helpless innocents Jinwoo has to protect, enemies to overcome, or, in the case of the show's brief cutaways to other powerful figures in-universe, power goals that Jinwoo is striving toward (and will ultimately exceed). The last category, though seemingly the most extraneous, is pivotal for providing context to just how strong Jinwoo is, what exactly it means when his numbers go up, and also for fueling the core grievance of weakness that makes this show so tastelessly indulgent: "Look at these rich, strong, beautiful people at the top. Why shouldn't I have what they have?" Though this is a Japanese anime, it's an adaptation of a Korean manwha, and the class envy so prominent in other Korean popular works like Parasite and Squid Game manifests here too. The S-rank Hunters that Jinwoo is leveling toward are suited executives in penthouses, people who own companies and walk around in sharp suits, while Jinwoo starts the story nearly getting killed just to make ends meet. The show's power fantasy is thus not simply about getting stronger, but about class inversion; Jinwoo's first ally is a rich corporate heir who becomes Jinwoo's drudge laborer (carrying equipment, mining loot with a pickax) and gleefully calls Jinwoo "boss." There's a scene I can only describe as "job interview revenge porn" where a suited executive, noticing Jinwoo's hidden talent, attempts to headhunt him with a lucrative contract; Jinwoo effortlessly turns the tables, reveals he's worth more than the interviewer's entire company, and cons the interviewer into paying him obscene amounts of money for nothing. Despite being humiliated, the interviewer leaves happy because Jinwoo gave him his contact info -- a direct line to Jinwoo is just that valuable.

The flipside of the class envy power fantasy is the humiliation Jinwoo suffers before his ascent to the top. In true solipsistic fashion, just as his strength is ultimately superlative, so is his initial weakness; he is nicknamed, no joke, "Mankind's Weakest Hunter." The early episodes are rife with masochistic internal monologues emphasizing again and again this weakness, even at inappropriate times. When Jinwoo sees a living statue cut a guy in half, his immediate thought is "That guy was a D rank, and he was killed in one hit... what will it do to me, who is a lowly and pathetic E rank?" My guy, it'll do exactly the same thing. Since the statues can annihilate anyone regardless of rank, they're actually an equalizer as far as Jinwoo is concerned, but Jinwoo still has to belabor his weakness. It's all in the service of breeding resentment toward the unfairness of Jinwoo's situation, which makes his later ascendance more cathartic. Sword Art Online also pulled this bullshit, though in a different way, since SAO had a fanfic-like squeamishness toward ever showing Kirito in any sort of weakened state. Instead, after Kirito defeats a boss, everyone baselessly calls him a cheater (sorry, beater). The baselessness is the point. It's not fair they called him a beater! It's not fair! It's not fair! It's not fair!

Obviously, this mindset is puerile, both in SAO and OILU, and in all the endless imitators of their ilk. The more interesting question is: How did we get here? How has this become the face of Gamer fiction?

In my Sword Art Online review, I framed the ascendance of SAO in 2012 as a byproduct of a longstanding culture-wide sneering at video games, emphasized by Roger Ebert's declaration that video games could never be art, but also demonstrated by the dismissive and insincere way video games were adapted into film during the preceding two decades. Either you got silly children's movies (Spy Kids 3D, The Wizard) or hysterectomy-like disembowelments where a D-list director's vanity project wore the original material's skin Buffalo Bill-style (Resident Evil 2002, Super Mario Bros. 1993). One has to go all the way back to 1982's Tron to find a film that treated the concept of video games with any sort of respect, and that was a film from the teenager-driven arcade era, before Nintendo indelibly associated the medium with kids toys.

In this milieu, the Gamers were being humiliated. Their hobby, their passion, the guiding focus of their nascent online communities and identities, was kid stuff, nerd stuff, not worth shit in the culture at large. It's no surprise that Gamers would glom onto media that tapped into their feelings of resentment. Kirito is a real-world misfit who is all-powerful in the game world. The virtual world is presented as a location of power inversion, where the weak becomes strong, similar to the class inversion that guides Solo Leveling -- and this correlates to the idea that the Gamer in real life is a humiliated underclass.

Yet, there is a crucial difference between Sword Art Online and Solo Leveling: Solo Leveling doesn't take place in a virtual world.

One of the few elements of SAO I actually like is how it depicts Kirito in the real world. I mentioned before that the show is allergic to showing Kirito in any state of weakness, but this is only true in the game world. Kirito is never weak; Kazuto Kirigaya often is. The Aincrad arc ends with an emaciated, atrophied Kazuto weakly limping across a hospital; the next arc begins with Kazuto getting his ass beat in kendo by his little sister. The show's only exciting action scene comes at the end of the otherwise lifeless Alfheim arc and doesn't involve flashy magic or swordplay, but rather a tense and realistic Waffle House-style knifefight in a parking lot between Kazuto and Average Adult Male. Kirito is fully dependent on the virtual world for his power, which explains SAO's insistence on the virtual world being as legitimate as the real one: that way, Kirito can matter.

In its typical pretense-dispensing fashion, Only I Level Up instead drapes game logic on reality. Jinwoo's Gamer power is real-world power; leveling up gains him increased strength, money, and status in a recognizably modern Seoul, South Korea. This difference comes at the cost of the fantastical environments and paradise-like alternate reality so prominent in SAO. It's not that OILU is less of a Gamer work for it; its video game system is more fleshed-out and true to real video games than SAO's is, and it is at times comedically insightful about the modern video game landscape. (I laughed out loud when Jinwoo, rejecting a message prompting him to change class to Necromancer because it would screw up his build, immediately reconsiders when a FOMO-inducing follow-up message cryptically says "Are you sure? Necromancer is a hidden class.") But the video game system exists only as a system. There is no sense of place or worldbuilding, virtual or otherwise; dungeons are either draped on the real world or take place in generic caves and castles. The virtual world was paramount to SAO's themes and aesthetic. In 12 years, where has it gone?

The answer is more fundamental to the way people experience video games today, or even more broadly, how they experience the internet as a whole.

Communities on the early internet were typically niche and nerdy and existed in chatrooms and forums. The thing about chatrooms and forums is that, though digital, they embody a sense of place. (It's called a chatROOM for a reason.) A forum's structure is static, divided into boards and threads, and remains that way for each user who accesses it. For instance, everyone who goes on /vg/ at the same time will see the same messages. /vg/ exists independently of any one user, and will continue to exist even if individual users log off. Due to this consistency, the forum takes on a sense of place, like a building people can go into and leave at will. MMORPGs, the focus of Sword Art Online, add a visual component to this same idea. Everyone is in the same World of Warcraft. Though they may do different things in it, go to different cities or dungeons, play in different ways, the World itself retains its shape and character.

By contrast, the way most people interact with the internet today is via social media, which eschews spatial consistency in favor of individualized "feeds" of algorithm-driven (or user-curated) content. When you go on Twitter, the content you are presented with is a wholly unique combination, yours alone. Your Twitter is different from your friends' Twitter, even if -- sharing similar interests -- your algorithms have presented you with some overlapping content.

Due to this individualized transience (this phenomenology, let's say), Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are not "places" the way forums or MMORPGs are. You couldn't describe them as a building, or depict them as a mansion the way Julian Dibbell does an old Multi-User Dungeon in A Rape in Cyberspace. And the removal of this sense of place erodes the feeling of community present in old forums and MMORPGs, where there is a static world outside the individual and thus an external existence toward which a person can feel a sense of duty or responsibility. Similarly, social media promotes a greater sense of inequality and anti-democracy. If you post on a forum, your post will exist at the top of the board, at least until other people post and push it down. Every poster has the same opportunity to be seen and interacted with. In social media, your capacity to be heard when you make your shouts in the dark is entirely tied to the algorithm's decision on whether to present your shout to enough individualized feeds.

Solo Leveling is Gamer fiction for the social media age. Whereas SAO, and its significantly more community-minded predecessor .hack//Sign, are deeply concerned with online environments as a distinct place, Solo Leveling sees its game environments as nebulous, pseudo-spatial pockets that exist briefly and are then destroyed. Jinwoo displays nonexistent interest or curiosity in these environments as anything beyond leveling challenges, compared to Kirito, to whom the world of Aincrad holds deep significance. Likewise, Jinwoo is distinguished by his ordinary clothing; all of his gear is, for seemingly no reason, invisible. (Everyone else in setting wears ridiculous fantasy armor, often to the point of being a joke.) In Solo Leveling, video games are only important as a determiner of skill, a way to establish superiority over others; anything suggestive of an alternative world or culture or even aesthetic is outright rejected. Hence why so many of its enemies and environments, scant as they are, are modeled on Dark Souls, a game that has become synonymous with hardcore challenge (while still being a single-player game that the developer has designed for you to win). MMORPGs, and online communities in general, are passe. The online experience now is individualized, perfectly phenomenological, each in their own bubble, the solipsistic hero of their own story. Everyone else is an NPC.

Likewise, Solo Leveling is not an escapist fantasy, the way SAO or any isekai is. Perhaps there's something quintessentially Japanese about the isekai: an appeal specifically to the otaku NEET who has retreated from society at large. It invites its audience to forsake the real world in favor of a fantastical one, compared to the Korean class consciousness that stages its definitive power fantasy in reality. And as the internet and the real world have continued to blend together in real life, to increasingly bizarre political and economic results, I wonder if Solo Leveling's real world adaptation of the isekai formula might wind up being significantly more prominent in the pop cultural landscape moving forward. Solo Leveling is already the hottest show airing today; I expect to see high-profile imitators soon.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Apr 17, 2025

Sephiria09

Not Recommended

This anime is the definition of overrated. I really have a high hope for this anime due to its hype but turns out this anime is not that good. What I define as a not good anime is when the protagonist didn't have any development at all. He just overpowered from the start and it really didn't make sense to me. When there is a super strong enemy, he just win the fight like it's nothing and that's all the main story of this anime. No development, no exciting battle scene (it just a fight for aura), even the others character doesn't seem important at ... all in this anime. The only thing that I can say good from this anime is the animation and yes that's all. The story is super mediocre and very predictable. Overall, for me this anime is the definition of overrated

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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	Poll: Ore dake Level Up na Ken Episode 12 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) Yuyuichi - Mar 30, 2024	515 replies	by mukundv »» 2 minutes ago
	Poll: Ore dake Level Up na Ken Episode 11 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) Stark700 - Mar 23, 2024	332 replies	by Schmuckie »» Apr 15, 8:01 AM
	Poll: Ore dake Level Up na Ken Episode 10 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 ) Stark700 - Mar 16, 2024	186 replies	by Schmuckie »» Apr 15, 7:37 AM
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	Poll: Ore dake Level Up na Ken Episode 6 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) Yuyuichi - Feb 10, 2024	446 replies	by bureact »» Apr 15, 6:11 AM