The Gamer

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Ah The Gamer or the quintessential Webtoon experience, a fresh and new idea that makes you excited a world full of mysteries and a good sense of progression. Only for it to meander more and more over time, the chapter length starts to diminish there's less and less actual content per chapter and more and more filler that stretches the story without adding anything. And one day after finishing a chapter you realize "Holy shit this is exactly the same story as the last arc".
There used to be a time where I was genuinely excited when a new chapter of this came out. I ... was one of the early readers after all, picked it up around late 2014 early 2015, but honestly around the whole Arc company and church of mask bs I just decided to call it quits and took a break from the webtoon. Didn't read for years and then one day randomly decided to pick it back up as you can judge from the fact that as of writing this review I am fully up to date. It was so soulless tedious and boring that I wondered why I read this in the first place, and then I remembered. It wasn't always like this, long ago this webtoon used to be full of mysteries and fun each chapter giving you more about the lore and how the Abyss worked, sure there was the now reduced to absolute cringe Nietzche quote thrown in a few times and it wasn't nearly as gritty or serious as it wanted to be at times but it was fresh and interesting and oh by the grace of the gods there was character development. But then Webtoon formula of continuously putting out content to keep your audience interested slowly sucked it dry of any form of creativity and it slowly devolved into:
>MC is mastering newly found power
>New enemy pops up out of nowhere
>New enemy fight MC for some reason
>MC can't win but manage to escape somehow
>Grinding.exe "Now with new Crafting System"
>MC acquires new power and becomes unbelievably stronk
>Destroys new enemy
>side_character.irrelevant watches in awe/complain about how absurd the MC is
>repet
But why am I up to date then?
Sunken cost fallacy, there's nothing else to it, it's not even nostalgia I'm more attached to God of Highschool and Tower of God. I just read too much of it by the time I realized it was shit to get out of the cesspit it had become. I would like to say that at the very least there's one or two interesting side character but even if there are it won't be long before they lose all relevancy and just follow the MC around like a good puppy (hello Lolikiano and Shi-Yun) and then randomly phase in and out of the story (Rip Sun-Ill's relevancy you were best girl). Not to mention initially interesting plot lines getting thrown out the window in favor of random new enemy. Anybody else remember Jihan Han's mother and how she was supposedly related to the Harem king? Are we ever gonna get a proper explanation as to why she just up and left not long after Jihan awakened his powers? No? Everybody else already gave up and accepted this story as another fast-food Webtoon? Okay.

Finally, MAL has added this manhwa to the database. This is one of the few webtoons along with the big 3 (ToG, Noblesse, GoH) that were very popular years ago. It had a significant fanbase, which gradually diminished because of the story not going anywhere to completion.

Story: 4/10
When this manhwa came out, the concept of the plot was unique and everybody was invested in the series. Eventually, new and better manhwa came out that outdid this, and a lot of people gave up on the manhwa. Even though I was a fan of this webtoon, and still, try to catch up once every 2 years, ... the story has no progression. MC gains power, a new antagonist emerges, MC defeats him, and repeat. That is how the plot has been going for years. If the manhwa did this for half its length and ended, it would've still been satisfactory.

Art: 6/10
The art gradually improves as we go along the seasons. I do not have anything bad or good to say about the art.

Character: 3/10
The characters are very one-dimensional and stay that way for 400 chapters. Sung-Gon Hwan is probably the only somewhat good-written character I suppose.

Enjoyment: 5/10
As a huge early fan of the series, it was sad to see its decline and the way it is still going with no end in sight. I won't really recommend this manhwa to everyone, but rather only to diehard fans.

Much like amaanu01 from the other review, I, too, was one of the early birds in the webtoon scene with <The Gamer> being as popular as the big three <Tower of God>, <Noblesse> and <God of Highschool>, being some of the first manhwa I've picked up.

TG starts off with a very fresh story and an addicting plot that grows stale past 150 chapters or so, I'd say it's worth a read but after that point not so much. It gets repetitive and mundane very easily with no sense of plot or worldbuilding. It's quite a shame since I was very invested in this from ... the very beginning and it actually had quite the fanfare surrounding chapter releases.