How I came across the series?
Sometime, back in February, I decided to go on Crunchyroll, a website that has a large collection of anime series and movies, to catch up on new anime content that is out there. Returning from my long hiatus of watching anime, because I had some time spare: for once. I logged into my Crunchyroll account, and waited for the main page to load up to go on a binge watch on a series or two. When the main page finally appeared with the list of the top new anime content on the page, and Solo Leveling caught my eye. I clicked the image, pressed play, watched a few episodes, and took a break from the series to wait for all the twelve episodes to appear. Finishing the series in June of this year. So, after watching the first season of Solo Leveling, let me tell you; I was waiting for the second season to appear, because I really enjoy the series and if you are interested in it too, you should give it a watch.
What is Solo Leveling?
Solo Leveling (or translated as Only I Level Up or Alone I Level Up (나 혼자만 레벨업)) is a South Korean web novel or manhwa, which is a Korean version of Japanese manga, and a general term Koreans use for comics and cartoons; it’s a specific term used for South Korean comics (Salao, n.d.), written by Chu-Gong (추공) (Unknown, Solo Leveling Wiki, n.d.). On the Fandom, which you should check out for anime, games, movies and other entertainment content about the characters, plot and other interesting knowledge about the content, the Solo Leveling Wiki page, the page talks about how the series was first serialized by Papyrus (The Wiki page did have a hyperlink to look up the Papyrus website, but when I clicked on it, the page displayed a ‘This site could not be reached’. Just a FYI.) on November 4, 2016 and ended with 14 volumes and 270 chapters (Unknown, Solo Leveling Wiki, n.d.). The series was then serialized onto a South Korean webtoon platform called KakaoPage, on April 13, 2018 (Unknown, Solo Leveling Wiki, n.d.). The webtoon was drawn by artist Gi So-Ryeong (기소령) and Jang Sung-Rak (장성락) (Unknown, Solo Leveling Wiki, n.d.). The series officially concluded on December 29, 2021, with 179 chapters released (Unknown, Solo Leveling Wiki, n.d.). There is even a spin-off webtoon series based on the web novel’s side stories that launched about 13 months later, from January 20, 2023 to May 31, 2023, with 21 chapters released. If you a full breakdown of the series and the spoilers of the series, check out the Solo Leveling Wiki Page on Fandom; just remember that there are spoilers. Give the Fandom site some love and check out any other content on their site that may be interesting to you.
So, the whole summary about the series. Solo Leveling, is a world where people are warriors; known as hunters, who possess magical abilities to fight off these deadly monsters that appear from these portal-like dungeons, where the hunters will go in and fight them to protect people from these monsters from entering their world. These hunters are ranked from S rank; obviously the superior hunters, to E rank; which are obviously the, let us just say weaker rank.
We are following this story from the perspective of an E rank hunter named Sung Jinwoo, who constantly gets his butt whooped and struggles to survive in these outings to fight these monsters that are considered easy to fight off. On one outing, where he was getting that beat down (which he’s used to), his group found a mysterious door that led them to a dungeon that was actually a very powerful dungeon that was close to wiping out Jinwoo’s team, which lead Jinwoo to have a mysterious program installed in him called the System. The System chose him as its sole player; hints the name of the series; in return, he is rewarded with extremely rare abilities to level up in strength, speed, and reach beyond the limits known for the hunters in this world.
Reviews
The reviews of Solo Leveling on Crunchyroll are very spectacular. The series has 4.9/5.0 stars on the platform from a total of 303.4K (when this article was currently written). Here are some of the comments from the platform:
Comments randomly picked on Crunchyroll.
My Thoughts
Watching the anime, I would say that the animation style is vibrant and clean. The interesting part that I noticed in the anime, was that the series gave off a more adventure RPG (role playing game) game with a hint of a MMO (massively multiplayer online) game; from Dictionary.com means any online video game in which a player interacts with many other players (Unknown, Dictionary.com, n.d.); type of style in the anime. A few examples that I can remember from the series were how Jinwoo would look at “The System” screen to follow his objectives. Another one was when Jinwoo wanted to retrieve a weapon, crystal, or potions from his inventory, I like how the creators of the series animate the items being materialized into Jinwoo’s world with a pixelated animation style to it. It gives a clean, video game type of feel to it. And whenever Jinwoo defeats the monster, the defeated monster would just pixelate away; which again, I love the video game feel to this anime. The pace of the story was kind of slow, but picked up a bit or seemed to bridge together, around either episode 5 or 6. But since the series is giving MMO vibes, where you would have to do a lot of grinding work to advance in the playthrough, I guess the series is moving at a reasonable pace. Let me know in the comments if you agree.
I understand that the series was trying to add some mystery and leave us guessing and pondering about what is going to happen next, or have you like, “Oh! I know something was off about that person,” and so on. I like how season one ended on a cliff hanger to prepare the viewer for season two. I also love the character development of Jinwoo from a weak man getting a whooping to a stone-cold fighter, and the other characters around him that changed themselves or took in the new changes of Jinwoo. To conclude this, be on the lookout for season two to be released. I cannot wait, there are just some loose ends that need to be tied up.
Where to Find Solo Leveling?
If you want to watch the animated series of it, the only place to find it is on Crunchyroll. If you want to read the 14 volumes of the series, you can find them on AbeBooks, Amazon, eBay, and YenPress. If you want to read it online, you can check out TappyToon (where episode 0 to 4 are currently free at the time of typing of article), and you can try Manwha.com, but when I tried to look it up, my Norton had to block a virus from the website; just giving you a warning about the website, if you do not have some type of malware protection for your PC, MAC, Android, and/or IOS devices, just don’t do it.
Also wanted to add that Crunchyroll dropped a teaser for the season two trailer for Solo Leveling: Arise from the Shadow,on Thursday July 5, 2024 on their YouTube (text will be hyperlinked). The news was revealed after the ending the series’ episode 12: Arise (Friedman, 2024). Finally, if you want to investigate people talking about the “controversy” about this anime/manhwa series, check out CBR’s or other peoples’ take about the controversy of the manga of Solo Leveling. If you like my take about the series, please leave a comment below and if you want me to do more of a deep dive into the series by reading the manhwa and make some comparisons, also add that in the comments.
Works Cited
Friedman, N. (2024, March 30). Crunchyroll News. Retrieved from Crunchyroll: https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/announcements/2024/3/30/solo-leveling-season-2-officially-announced-will-stream-on-crunchyroll
Salao, C. (n.d.). Your Guide to Manhwa: What it is and Where to Read It. Retrieved from TCKpublicshing.com: https://www.tckpublishing.com/your-guide-to-manhwa/
Unknown. (n.d.). Crunchyroll. Retrieved from Crunchyroll: https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/GDKHZEJ0K/solo-leveling
Unknown. (n.d.). Dictionary.com. Retrieved from Dictionary.com: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/mmo
Unknown. (n.d.). Solo Leveling Wiki. Retrieved from Fandom: https://solo-leveling.fandom.com/wiki/Solo_Leveling_Wiki
