Solo Leveling is one of the more popular new anime series for Winter 2024. While I don’t find it unpleasant at all, I’m slightly aggravated about this anime’s widespread popularity. From my perspective, it’s a show full of overused ideas acted out by overused character types. The story is unoriginal at its core. A very weak boy finds a mysterious power, becomes strong, and fights monsters. That’s like 80% of anime in a nutshell, and Solo Leveling is not significantly different.

Considering how unoriginal it is, Solo Leveling doesn’t live up to the hype. It’s an utterly average story with mediocre characters. In my opinion, this anime doesn’t deserve to be so acclaimed. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad anime, either. Solo Leveling has some undeniably good elements, such as entertaining visuals, exciting action sequences, and excellent music. There’s also a bunch of relatively new voice actors in this series that I’m interested in getting to know.

For these reasons, I’ll keep watching Solo Leveling, at least for now. It’s low priority for me, and if I get too bored, I’ll drop it. I’m 4 or 5 weeks behind on episode reviews for this anime, by the way. Hopefully, I’ll catch up soon. As for today, I have notes and responses to episodes 5, 6, and 7. Let’s begin.

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Episode 5: A Pretty Good Deal

This episode was fairly enjoyable and I had no trouble paying attention due to the suspense and action in the second half. In the first half, most of the focus was on Jinwoo adjusting to his newfound strength and smoking hot body. The female nurses in the hospital are all crazy over him, and one of them even asks to exchange contact details with him. Jinwoo’s sister, Jin-Ah, also notices the changes in her brother. She seems glad about his obvious improvements.

This show is clearly serving as a power fantasy for a lot of viewers, and it’s self-aware of the fact. Audiences get to feel great vicariously as Jinwoo goes from loser to popular. There’s nothing wrong with this – not on the part of the show nor on the part of the audience. It’s fine to use an anime to engage your power/popularity fantasies. However, personally, I’m really not “feeling it.” If I do have power fantasies, they are more abstract than gaining muscles and having nurses gush over me. Maybe it’s because these fantasies are so stereotypically “male,” but they don’t appeal to me much.

One interesting aspect of this show so far is watching Jinwoo decide how to level up. Specifically, I like seeing where he puts his stats. After leveling up in the dungeon with the wolves and the snake boss, Jinwoo gained more points which could be distributed over his stats. Usually, he puts the bulk of his points into strength. However, in this episode, Jinwoo puts a lot more points into Agility and a few into Perception. Despite the fact that I’m not much of a gamer, I enjoy watching characters increase and divvy up their stats.

Moving on, Jinwoo goes to clear a C-Rank dungeon with a group of six experienced Hunters. There is also one young D-Rank by the name of Jinho Yoo. I like this character. He’s so lively, sweet-natured, and random. Additionally, Jinho seems well-educated and knowledgeable. The show seems to paint him as well-meaning but annoying due to his over-the-top extraversion and the way he makes assumptions about Jinwoo. I would probably be annoyed with him too, at least in real life. In anime, however, I like goofy, loud and awkward boys like Jinho Yoo.

As usual, the music for this episode was epic and the visuals were pretty good, too. I especially liked the scene where the Hunters fought the ant monsters. It shows good production value, because even though there’s a lot of still-shots and not a lot of animated motion, the way in which it’s executed is creative and exciting. In a more general sense, I’m glad this anime uses a distinct art-style rather than going with something that may look more polished but also more generic.

This episode did a good job with communicating that something wasn’t right without outright giving away the twist too soon. It still wasn’t super surprising when Donsuk betrayed Jinwoo and Jinho, but it wasn’t as predictable as it could have been, either. Speaking of Donsuk, he is one nasty psychopath. That’s why it’s unnerving that he could act so genuine and warm before.

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Episode 6: The Real Hunt Begins

The sixth installment of Solo Leveling took quite an interesting turn in the last third of its runtime. After defeating the spider boss, Jinwoo and Jinho are threatened by Donsuk, the murderous group leader. The thug nearly kills Jinwoo, which causes the System to give him an impromptu quest: kill the enemies. If he refuses the quest, his heart will stop. So, Jinwoo stands up and proceeds to slaughter Donsuk and all five of his cronies despite their superior ranks.

This was surprising for what has so far been a fairly standard shounen anime. The typical, idealistic shounen protagonist would never kill fellow humans. It looks like Solo Leveling will be a darker shounen or perhaps more of an action/fantasy seinen. To me, that’s not automatically a good thing nor automatically a bad thing. But it certainly piques my interest. I want to see what this means for the psychology of Jinwoo.

(By the way, just to be clear, I think Jinwoo was justified in his decision. He would have died if he didn’t kill the other men. They were obviously scumbags, anyway.)

The scene in which Jinwoo kills the band of thugs was very well-executed. It felt intense and grim as it should when a person is driven tothe brink and forced to kill to live. The insert song that started during this scene was really great, helping to set the mood for the scene. The song sounded desperate, eerie, and beautiful all at once. It was definitely composed by Hiroyuki Sawano, but I don’t yet know the name of this epic OST.

This episode introduced a number of new characters, including “Chul” (Jin-Chul Woo), a young adult male hunter who is training in martial arts. Three female hunters were shown talking at a café. All of them must have been high-ranking, because they were on the same hunter team as Hae-In Cha. (Or at least, two of the ladies were in that group.) The character designs for the three women were undeniably attractive, but the camera framing was way over-the-top in sexualization. This is annoying, but at least the women all seem to be adults. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case in anime.

The way new characters are introduced in this anime is a bit boring and simplistic. In most well-written shows, new characters are smoothly worked into the protagonist’s story. But in Solo Leveling, new characters are just suddenly shown without any connection to the protagonist. Sometimes, the topic of their conversations beckons back to what’s happening with Jinwoo, but that’s not the same as actually linking their stories in a smooth way. Just my two cents.

(Note: I realized after writing this that we had met Jin-Chul once before, and his path did cross with Jinwoo’s in an interesting way. He interviewed Jinwoo after surviving the double-dungeon massacre, trying to determine if he had awakened to new power. Sorry for the misunderstanding.)

My last note is that I appreciated the final scene with Jinwoo and Jinho. After reporting that they were the last survivors of a dungeon raid, they stepped outside. A light rain begins, and Jinwoo’s expression changes as he stares at the evening clouds. We don’t actually see his face, but I think he must have looked forlorn. When asked what was up, Jinwoo remarked that he was glad he gave his sister an umbrella that morning.

That ending sentence seems very random, but I liked it. There are at least two potential meanings behind it. Firstly, Jinwoo was just so zoned out and exhausted that he mentioned a random life detail to a stranger that didn’t really matter. Alternatively, Jinwoo is trying to process the cognitive dissonance that he’s going home to his cute, innocent sister right after violently killing six humans. Either way, Jinwoo has been deeply affected by the events in the dungeon.

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Episode 7: Let’s See How Far I Can Go

Episode 7 revealed that Donsuk was the brother of a famous and wealthy hunter named Donsu Hwang. I suspect he’s one of the seven S-Ranked hunters in Japan, but I’m not certain. His schedule is busy with running a guild, so he isn’t going after Jinho and Jinwoo right away. However, he ominously promises to himself that he’ll kill them once he can make some time. Donsu is played by Junichi Suwabe, and I’m happy for the opportunity to hear his amazing voice.

A few other moderately interesting but low-action things happened before the action picked up again. We learned that Jinwoo has poison resistance and regenerative abilities. He won this ability as his reward for the double dungeon in the first few episodes. Also, Jin-Ah is studying to be a doctor, which I think is awesome. At one point, Jinho called Jinwoo to a meeting to discuss his plan to become a Guild Master.

To become a Guild Master, one must beat twenty dungeons and pass an intense written test. They can then run guilds of hunters, essentially small but lucrative businesses. Jinho was hoping that Jinwoo would join the plan, as he would be a valuable asset. He even offered 30 billion yen in payment. Jinwoo did consider it, but in the end, he decided not to participate. Now that he can level up to become as strong as higher ranks, Jinwoo believes he can do better on his own.

The action picks up again with Jinwoo entering a new instance dungeon. This one is S-rank. The reason he’s driven to go in is because the reward is the Elixir of Life, which can cure any illness. Jinwoo’s ultimate goal is to cure his mother, so an Elixir is the perfect thing to strive for. After entering the fiery dungeon, Jinwoo is greeted by Cerberus, the monster who guards the gate into the main castle. An intense fight begins.

Cerberus was an extremely tough opponent who almost killed Jinwoo at many different points. It was a bloody and painful fight for the human. In the end, he used his poison resistance and regeneration powers to give him enough health to survive Cerberus’ rage state for a few seconds. During that time, he stabbed the monster repeatedly with the debuff dagger until the negative status effects made it topple over. Jinwoo won the fight.

The episode ends with Jinwoo leaving the dungeon and promising to return soon to explore the actual castle. For now, he’s too worn out to keep fighting.

The fight with the Cerberus was exciting and had great music and visuals. However, it doesn’t seem truly epic to me. All that’s at stake is one young man and his family. So it was weird to see this portrayed with the type of music you hear in Attack on Titan, where there are always huge stakes. That’s my main criticism of this episode, and it isn’t really a serious one. More of a random personal response. Anyway, that’s all for today.

Thank you for reading~

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PATREON