The Gamer

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I am honored to be able to leave a review for "The Gamer" after reading the very last chapter a few hours ago.
As many may know, this is one of the very first Manhwa's people were exposed too a long time ago. Manhwa's were a relatively new concept years ago, and "The Gamer" took the genre by storm.
It set the example of having:

long fully colored panels
detailed speech bubbles
drawings that span impressive lengths
an ever-evolving story
and so on

... This is the series that pulled purely Japanese Manga readers like me into the world of Korean Manhwa. Now let's address the series itself.

"The Gamer" had a genius concept for integrating real life into the world. While it may have seemed generic at first, it was heavily reinforced with impressive backings of gaming logic. The first many chapters of this series will pull you in, you will get hooked and enjoy every chapter.

That being said, the flaw with "the Gamer" started to become more visible within the past few years. If anyone has read any other Korean Manhwa series, a huge majority of them are just overwhelmingly better than this series. By better, I am just talking about everything from the art to the storyline. It's much more addicting to read fairly recent Manhwa's like the many other headliners that gained massive popularity within a matter of chapters.

10 years of keeping a series running is truly worth a handshake, however, "The Gamer" has fallen pale in comparison to numerous other Manhwa competitors. This manhwa became bland, and it started to feel like a chore to read. Where was the many others were easy to understand and you would feel compelled to read every chapter.

To conclude, "The Gamer" set the standard for Korean Manhwa and it's not an exaggeration to say that. This series has not failed in any way, even if it is to the wishes of the Author's health. It just hasn't been able to keep up and remain relevant for a while now.

So if you are seeking to get into the world of Korean Manhwa, give "The Gamer" a try!
It's a classic masterpiece!

Do you like games, are you a "gamer," well this guy gets video game power in real life, gets introduced and thrown into a side of the world he did not know, and proceeds to use his "gamer knowledge" to just show off to "non gamers" how generic game mechanics work. Then somehow just any time convenient or for any trivial matter gets new powers.

The concepts of the story are interesting but quickly fall apart as you realize a lot of the story fails to build up to anything.

If I were to explain this as a "gamer." It is as if you are playing ... a broken DLC class, power up your abilities, grind, and get the best gear. Then because you are using op broken skills, claim you are a "pro gamer" because you spammed those op skills in broken gear against a high-level mob. Then skip the rest of the cutscenes after the intro because you decided it was taking too long. Maybe fun to play as a player, if that is your playstyle, but not fun to spectate.

The story suffers from its follow-through, anything interesting fails to get followed up on or further explained, and the story gets quickly overwhelmed by new convient powers or enemies of the MC without any purpose but to get to some fighting. It is not the worst read, but it had the potential to be much more.

Ah The Gamer or the quintessential Webtoon experience, a fresh and new idea that makes you excited a world full of mysteries and a good sense of progression. Only for it to meander more and more over time, the chapter length starts to diminish there's less and less actual content per chapter and more and more filler that stretches the story without adding anything. And one day after finishing a chapter you realize "Holy shit this is exactly the same story as the last arc".
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.