Without the context of the remainder of the season, the intro to Solo Leveling actually isn’t bad, in fact, I’d even describe it as around average. Sung’s characterization as the weakest hunter of all time is interesting, albeit not nuanced since nearly every character in the story drills this fact into the viewer’s skull, with all the tact that a jackhammer has when it destroys a sidewalk. The double dungeon arc is a great introduction to the series, and the intro continues to be good up until the end of the first dungeon that Sung tackles alone, which is probably my favorite moment of this season. However, things go downhill fast, and the series shows a myriad of cracks in this promising facade.
Let’s start with the problems surrounding Sung. I mentioned that the intro, the first 4 episodes, does a pretty good job of introducing Sung’s weaknesses and having him move past them in the subway dungeon. This works well enough with the video game difficulty system that the series has outlined, as through grinding the menial tasks he has been assigned is a reasonably plausible method to beat enemies on the lowest rank. However, the plausibility of that is completely shat on in the next 3 episodes, where Sung: defeats a D-rank boss, defeats a C-rank boss, defeats a C-rank player, and defeats a S-rank enemy. Needless to say, the pacing of Sung’s ascension in the power system is dogshit, especially because he didn’t really struggle through any of the fights (except the last one but I’ll get to that). At the end of the season, he’s around low A-rank, which kinda devalues the relatively short amount of time he spent as the weakest hunter, as in twice that runtime, he’s now in the upper echelon of the power scale, but I digress.
Another problem is the concept of struggling in this anime. After the intro, Sung has a handful of fights where victory isn’t a foregone conclusion. These fights are usually signified by giving Sung a “teleportation stone”, which allows him to retreat from the battle if things happen to get hairy. These fights will start, and Sung will get his ass kicked by something. Sung will realize this and try to retreat, but oh no! The teleportation stone has fumbled out of my hands! I must win the fight to stay alive now! Spoiler alert, Sung always finds a way to win, which is perfectly fine, but I just wish they gave these situations a bit of nuance. Maybe don’t give Sung a teleportation stone every time, if you know he isn’t going to use it until the fight is over. Or maybe, have Sung use a certain strategy or technique to win, because usually, he just decides to try harder or something and proceeds to kick his enemy’s ass.
At the end of it all, this all points back to the fact that Solo Leveling is a blatant self-insert, wish fulfillment, power fantasy. Sung is not a character, he is just a cardboard cutout that the audience is meant to project upon— somebody that the audience wants to be. He doesn’t have any discernible character traits other than the fact that he used to be weak, and now he is strong. This is why he starts off as a typical Korean guy, before becoming 6 feet tall, getting jacked, and gaining some sort of aura that simultaneously drops the panties of any girl within a 12-mile radius, while allowing him to intimidate any man weaker than him into submission. The entire role of Sung is to be a self-insert character operating on the “rule of cool”; this underlies a lot of issues I listed above. You can’t have your self-insert character be a weak E or D rank for too long, because your audience doesn’t want to be weak. You can’t have Sung retreat from dangerous battles, as the audience doesn’t want him to run away. I shouldn’t have to say this, but having your main character, the complete focal point of your series, be a thinly veiled audience surrogate is not the way to make a story deeper than a puddle during a drought.
And trust me, even if you wanted to forget the extent that Solo Leveling props Sung as the greatest thing since sliced bread, you can’t, because the side “characters” constantly remind you of how great he is, like they are maintaining a Sung Jin-Woo cult, to a greater extent than what these same characters said when they were referring to him as the weakest hunter ever. In the same vein that Little Red Riding Hood analyzed her grandmother’s appearance, these side characters do the exact same thing. “Is it just me, or does Sung look a little stronger”, or some variant of that is presented 4 times an episode to reaffirm just how cool our main character is.
As for the side characters themselves, there is little to no point in mentioning any of them by name, as by and large, very few of them matter outside of their relationship with Sung. The biggest offender of this is Sung’s sister, who, I shit you not, doesn’t have a role in this season other than making small talk with him that reminds the audience how cool he is. An extension of this is Jinho, whose entire role is just to bankroll Sung’s guild. Of course, there are a couple of characters that are deeper than that, such as Mr. Kim, but they are so few and far between while also not being developed enough to be considered strong characters that it doesn’t save the sinking ship that is Solo Leveling’s side characters.
As I said earlier, this show operates pretty heavily on a perceived “rule of cool", and what is cool to 13-year-olds? Edginess! Solo Leveling shows off this edge through Sung’s schizophrenic episodes of… something related to the system (there is not a lot of continuity there). This causes some people to label Solo Leveling as a pseudo-psychological anime, albeit with the same psychological prowess as a fucking BuzzFeed quiz. Sung will hear some voices in his head or something, say some ridiculously edgy quote ripped straight from r/iam12andthisisdeep, and proceed to gain some inexplicable power boost that allows him to massacre whoever he is fighting against. The extent of edginess isn’t compelling to me, and since this doesn’t make Sung any more of a character than he already is, it just kinda furthers my lack of interest in Sung or the story as a whole.
Ok so the bad is the fact that the characters of Solo Leveling are shallow, the way Sung progresses the leveling system actively cheapens it, and the show is constantly conflicting with the idea of making a self-insert character struggle. But what’s good? Well, the story is decent in some situations, mainly the intro, but as a whole, it just serves as a vessel to get Sung to do something cool, whether that be in or outside of a dungeon. The story also foreshadows a lot of future events and characters that I am sure will become more important in later seasons, but I’ll get back to that. Also, the animation and music are pretty strong; I’d say well above the standard of your average Shounen battle romp. With all of the action that happens in this season, it allows Solo Leveling to be enjoyable as a turn-your-brain-off type of action anime. At least, most of the time, when the horrid pacing isn’t fucking it up.
As I said, Solo Leveling’s story heavily foreshadows future events, locations, and important characters. I would say that foreshadowing makes up roughly 1.5 episodes worth of the total season’s screen time. Now, on paper, foreshadowing is a necessary element of making any anime good. It’s perfectly fine to spend a lot of time establishing key aspects of future events. However, foreshadowing in Solo Leveling absolutely tanks the series’ pacing. Solo Leveling operates at an extremely slow pace, especially when you consider it is supposed to be a fast-paced action anime. It almost feels like the story is dragging along in many circumstances. This is the worst in some fight scenes, where the content of the fight scene will be cut with the story surrounding Jeju island or something, breaking the momentum of the fight scene while decreasing the value of whatever foreshadowing is taking place. Finally, almost none of the content foreshadowed this season was relevant this season, so as an anime-only viewer who only has knowledge of season 1, this foreshadowing does nothing for me and acts as an active detriment to the content of the season.
Overall, should you watch Solo Leveling? If you’re above the age of 13, I’d say no. With no strong characters and a story that is nothing to write home about, there is not much here outside of the combat, Sung’s journey through the leveling system, and Sung as a self-insert character. However, the combat is plagued with pacing issues, Sung’s progression through the leveling system follows less what would make sense from a story perspective and more what would be cool to the audience, and while Sung embodies many of the generic isekai self-insert tropes, he doesn’t embrace them like something like Eminence in Shadow, which by being self-aware, allows its self-insert character to satirize the genre. Instead, by being completely serious, it falls more into the vein of SAO and other bad generic isekai. Because of all of these faults, there is not a lot here for anybody, aside from children, people who can just turn their brains off and enjoy, and manhwa readers. That is very disappointing, as I had real expectations for this season, and I’m honestly a bit upset with how much I dislike this anime. Hopefully, future seasons will rectify this to some extent, so Solo Leveling is something truly worth watching.
Thank you for reading.
