The story follows our main hero, Sung Jin-Woo, as he lives out the zero-to-hero trope, going from the weakest at his job of Hunter to the strongest Hunter ever seen (that's not a spoiler, just the premise of the manhwa). Hunters are how this world calls people who "awaken", receiving powers beyond any normal human. Even the weakest Hunters are physically more powerful than any human could be. That's because the enemies they face are not regular humans, but monsters that appear inside "gates", portals leading to different dungeons and mini-worlds where a group of monsters of different types lives in, having a boss that needs to be defeated to close the Gate.
That is by itself a pretty basic premise, many times done before, with minor differences but the same overall structure. Monsters attack, they have ranks of power, a "hero" or "monster hunter" association arises and people take on killing monsters as a profession. One Punch Man did it masterfully with its satirical take on the over-saturated super-hero genre. So did Pacific Rim, taking on the Mecha genre, and with a much more serious, although not less badass presentation. Just from these two examples, you can see that the base upon which Solo Leveling is built is not the most ground-breaking one, even having a direct reference to Saitama's training routine built into it. Which is okay, to be fair. You don't need to create a new narrative setting every time you want to tell a story. The problem comes after you read 10, 20, 50, 100 chapters of it and realize that... It's just like any other fighting shounen gamer power fantasy with super-heroes ever made. Narratively, it does not create anything that would make it stand above its peers, or even stand out from them. It blends in, silently, with not a notch of uniqueness attached to it.
Why, then, has it gained such popularity? The art. It's because of the art. Solo Leveling is a studio produced manhwa based on an already written novel. Being drawn by a bunch of talented artists, inked by another bunch, colored by another and lettered by yet another, it comes as no surprise that the thing looks amazing, even releasing on a weekly basis. Which only serves to make the critical failures in it's writing seem worse. The character designs, the monster designs specially, the background art, the dungeons, the fighting choreography and flow, the framing, basically everything that makes this a great read, are all just surface level, a beautiful skin covering a decaying, poorly written, poorly paced story full of tropes and clichés, and characters so forgettable I could not tell you the name of a single one of them without pulling up google first.
Since the art is universally praised and known, I will not critique it. Instead, lets dissect the real bad shit below it, starting by the least outrageous flaw, the pacing.
The pacing in this thing is a mess. It goes extremely fast in certain aspects, and sluggishly slow on others. The power scaling is outright broken. You go so quickly from a weak good for nothing guy to a baddass that it becomes numbing. The last actual tough fight is around chapter 40, and from there, you have just firework shows and long lasting fights that look good to make up for how easy and unchallenging they feel, so much so that they start feeling boring after some time, namely once he gets so many powerful shadow servants he himself barely has to fight. He is basically already a demigod half-way through season one. Any challenge, any tension that would make the fights feel much more intense and compelling, those things are gone. It's just a matter of how long will he take to beat them?" instead of "how will he beat them?" or even "can he beat them?". The fights feel dumb-down and even tiresome in the later chapters, and no amount of badassery from the MC can save them.
At the same time, the pacing of the story is abysmally slow, contrasting heavily with the break-neck pace of the power scaling. The story presents all those threads, but follows on none of them. There isn't a scent of an over-arching plot, and it just feels like the author is throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. It feels sluggish, messy and chaotic, like it knows it has to move, but just keeps changing lanes and running around in circles. The story finally progresses a bit in the end of season one, but by that time, just about 7 possible paths were opened, and not one of them was closed. The super powerful hunter that came from america to face Jin-Woo? Just left. His father coming out of a dungeon after over a decade? He is there, somewhere. The system that gives Jin-Woo his powers? whatever, never explained. The hell dimension that overlaps with Seoul? Takes you nowhere and is solved in less than 10 chapters, leaving that big dull feeling of having created hype for nothing. The ant infestation on the island is solved, but just serves a finale to show off cool fights, and has nothing at all to do with any previous plot.
If you have a bad pacing, that's okay. Maybe the story really makes up for it when it picks up! But what if your story is not that interesting and does nothing to pay-off any slow build-ups? Well, at least you can have interesting characters there, so the reader doesn't get bored right? Pull them in with a little investment. I'm sorry to say, but Solo Leveling's most grave failure is exactly that - the characters are so uninteresting it hurts.
Not only are they painfully forgettable, bland and uninteresting, some are just bad written characters. Not a single one of them has a believable motivation, engaging backstory or captivating personality. They are 2D cardboard cut-outs of generic anime tropes. The cute healer, the clumsy rich kid, the OP bad guy, the wise master, the annoying stubborn teenager, the little sister, the sick mom, the missing dad, the semi-badass love interest, so on, so on. Just from making this list, I could think of two or more other characters from other animes that fit the bill for each one of those. I will not care to search for any names besides the MC because they don't deserve my 10 seconds of googling. You could just swap each one of them for any other generic anime character and not lose anything at all. You don't care about their struggles, you don't care about their lives, and so any tension a fight could have is completely gone, since them living or dying wouldn't matter anyway (not that they even die, since the MC just always saves them last minute).
So when you get a Main Character that is just boring edgy isekai trash, secondary characters so bland a smooth white wall has more personality than them, a plot so broken and disrupted that you don't even know where the story is going (and it really isn't going anywhere), what else can you say but that this Manhwa is just looks, no substance? The writing is atrociously boring, uninteresting and generic, the fights look good, but they don't feel good because the illusion that the MC could lose is not there. The tension is not there. You don't have a reason to care about these fights, you don't have a motivation to like the characters, or dislike the antagonists, or even care at all about the MC getting stronger. It's like a pasture of fake grass. Looks good, but feels awful.
In conclusion, Solo Leveling had a chance at being a great fighting Manhwa, with such a good art and fights, and a world open enough to add any interesting plot the author could want. But it follows up on nothing, resolves poorly and just feels dry of any real emotion, power, punch or hype it could have. It is generic shounen trash, and should be remembered as such in the future, unless it brings a major shift in direction and actually follows up on the paths it sets for itself. And I mean a really big change. Otherwise, I don't see any reason for it to keep existing at all.
