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.
