Story: 4/10
Tower of God is supposed to be an epic adventure with great world building that should make the reader want to know more and more about its world. However, the anime fails to accomplish this, mainly due to cut content, changed dialogue, and horrible pacing. The anime is very, very rushed. This was to be expected however, as they had 13 episodes to adapt a whopping 79 chapters, averaging out to about 6 chapters per episode. That’s way more than other shows with long source materials. To give you an idea of how absurd 6 chapters per episode is, One Piece is about 1 chapter per episode, Hunter X Hunter is about 2 chapters per episode, Yu Yu Hakusho is about 1.5 chapters per episode, you get the idea. From the start, it was absolutely ridiculous to believe that a good adaptation would be possible when they’re cramming 79 chapters into 13 episodes which resulted in a good amount of cut content that is important for the world building of Tower of God, such as completely removing the Phantaminum incident from the anime. Pacing and cut content isn’t the only issue either, the rules of the games were poorly explained and confusing, resulting in the viewers not knowing what the characters had to do in order to win. The dialogue when explaining the rules was modified in a way that just made the already complex manwha rules even more confusing in the anime.
Art/Animation: 4/10
I should give the anime props for wanting to make the characters look like they’re straight out of the manwha, but the animation itself is very poor. Some of the fight scenes just look plain ugly and the rest of the show isn’t exactly visually pleasing either. The animation does look very nice for a certain scene on episode 12, but that’s just one scene out of many
Sound: 8.5/10
Now this is definitely the best part about this show. Kevin Penkin, also responsible for the ost in Made in Abyss and The Rising of The Shield Hero, did a phenomenal on the ost for Tower of God. The opening and ending songs were also very nice.
Characters: 6/10
The characters are one of the bright spots in Tower of God. The cast is full of likable characters that each seem to have their own motives and somewhat selfish reasons to climb the tower. Some want revenge, some want power, and some want something that transcends all of these things. The reason why the characters are still a 6/10, which is still above average by the way, is because season 1 doesn’t allow the characters to get enough development and the bad pacing comes up here again to speed up some of the backstories and thus making them less impactful. I should also mention that the main character Bam comes off as extremely obnoxious in the anime.
Overall: 5/10
Tower of God is an anime that ends up being just about average, despite its tremendous potential. It could have kickstarted a new era of anime in which webtoon adaptations become common, but its pacing, animation, and the director himself, let it down. If you wanted to get into the series, I’d personally recommend the manwha over the anime. If you made it to the end of this review, thanks for taking the time out of your day to read this :D
