Feb 26, 2025
Stronger,.... Stronger,..... EVEN STRONGER!
This is how ‘Boundless Ascension’ starts. A young man lives in a world in which monsters and abilities suddenly appeared a few years ago. To avenge his parents, who were killed by one of these monsters, and to ensure that nothing like this ever happens to him again, he trains like a madman for several years. In the end, he attains the body of a top athlete, but because no ability ever awoke in him, he can't match any of the true hunters (people with abilities are called hunters).
So far, so generic. If you have consumed manga, light novels, anime or any
...
other Asian medium in recent years, this should sound familiar. Magic appears, people with magic become famous and rich, protagonist wants the same, trains his bones to destruction but never gains strength and then because of his training he gains some powerful, mysterious power.
Does that mean that every one of these stories is bad? No. The concept works wonderfully, otherwise there wouldn't be so many manhwa (Korean manga) about it and even more readers of such stories. But because the market is extremely oversaturated, a twist is needed to make the story stand out.
In ‘Boundless Ascension’, that would be the fact that it's hardly about the earth. The protagonist's ‘mysterious ability’ comes in the form of an ‘invitation’ in a tower, a gigantic dungeon, so to speak, which holds various challenges on an unknown number of levels. On level 1 you have to defeat a sand golem, on level 2 destroy an orc village, on level 3...
The manhwa's extreme focus on the tower and the levels instead of glory, money and power on earth means that the story very quickly becomes less like the standard generic rubbish and more like the story of a young man forced to beat a dungeon. This may not seem like much, but if you (like me) know far too many of the ‘magic appears, monsters appear, hunters emerge,...’ stories, this difference is worth a lot, simply because you're not constantly reminded that you've read it all three times or seen it as anime.
So now that I've explained to you why I didn't cancel the manhwa as a ‘generic pile of rubbish’, I'd like to talk about it itself. Is it good now?
I honestly wouldn't go that far. It's... ok? Or in other words: it's entertaining, but I can't tell you anything that was really funny, sad, exciting or anything else. Frozen pizza, so to speak.
Just like frozen pizza, ‘Boundless Ascension’ doesn't really have any negative aspects - except that frozen pizza is somewhere unhealthy and it would probably be better for your mental growth to read other stories. The only real criticism comes from the fact that there are moments or designs that are obviously copied from the thousands of other ‘magic appears, monsters appear, hunters emerge,...’ stories. In such situations, I found it difficult to maintain the illusion that ‘Boundless Ascension’ is so different. Technically, there were also a few inconsistencies in the story, firstly when it came to the backstory, the character and the protagonist's relationships, and secondly with the abilities that appear in later chapters. But I was probably so lulled into my own illusion that it hardly bothered me while reading.
Conclusion: Delicious frozen pizza.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
 (1).png)
