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WARNING! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS!

Solo Leveling is a manhwa that always baffles me whenever I hear someone talk about it. They usually like to say nice sounding buzzwords whenever they praise it, but never bother to actually expand on it. It's always at the front page of whatever site or app you're using. But when I myself read it, it felt like I was reading a completely different manhwa than the one everyone was talking about. Let me break down the different aspects of the manhwa:

Art 8/10: Art is the one and only aspect I can praise Solo Leveling for. It's undeniable that it ... has fantastic art and I believe this is the second biggest factor for Solo Leveling's popularity (I'll get to the biggest factor later on). The shading and coloring is fantastic. The reason I have art at 8/10 instead of higher is because of the lack of details and background.

Story 3/10: Story...What story? The premise is that gates have appeared around the world with different levels of dangers within them. So they employ hunters to go into the gates and dispose of the danger within. We follow Sung Jin-Woo, a low ranking hunter who suddenly gains a power that allows him to grow stronger through quests and he quickly becomes a S-Rank hunter.

I'm gonna be honest, the first like 15 chapters were actually entertaining. And I thought it was gonna turn out to be a really good manhwa. The gate we entered in the prologue was so different than how they are presented in the rest of the manhwa. There were rules to be followed and if not followed it would mean death. This is not at all present in later gates, in later gates its basically just different monsters in different environments. Which means the gates themselves are not at all interesting after the prologue which is a shame cause you had this sense of dread and mystique surrounding the gate when they entered it for the first time.

Now I've only really touched on the prologue and gates. So how does the story develop after the prologue? Well...It doesn't really. We simply follow Sung Jin-Woo as he goes into different gates and strengthen himself at an insane speed. It just uses the same formula over and over again. He goes into a gate, something unexpected happens, for instance the gate was more dangerous than it seemed. He handles it with ease despite the difficulty change. And then rinse and repeat. It was very disappointing to have him become so extremely strong so quickly. There was no real sense of progress. One second he's the weakest and another second there is literally no threat in existence that can phase him.

Also a lack of overarching story makes it hard to be motivated to continue. There's no real goal Sung Jin-Woo set for himself. They did slightly touch on his mother being ill and he needing to heal her. But they barely explored his relationship with his mother or anything like that. It was more just a dumb reason for him to enter a gate. And it was resolved with ease.

Character 1/10: Now we get into the absolute worst part of Solo Leveling. The characters. Mainly Sung Jin-Woo himself. I mentioned earlier about the biggest factor for Solo Leveling's popularity, and this is it. That might sound like a praise, but it's definitely not. Sung Jin-Woo was made to be as bland as humanly possible so that people can insert themselves into him and live out a power fantasy. We barely know anything about Sung Jin-Woo. He doesn't have any real motivation that drives him. He doesn't have any clear morals. In fact, he doesn't really have any emotions at all. Almost every single panel he is in he will make the same generic emotionless edgy expression. He almost never smiles, laughs, look scared, nervous or anything like that. His expression is always like he's watching a mediocre movie cause his girlfriend wanted to see it.

He has no development at all either. He goes from being the generic weak main character that's surprisingly brave when the situation calls for it into the generic edgy overpowered main character. There's no transition. And even after he has become overpowered nothing still develops him. And besides, there's nothing to push him into development since the arcs never presents him with a dilemma that forces character change.

As for other characters, there aren't really any notable ones. They introduce some new characters each arc but then they just kinda forget about their existence and you never see them again. At this point I've stopped remembering the name of the characters because they've proven time and time again that there's no point to it. I also have a problem with how much they're pandering and using certain characters (mainly female characters) as tools for this. What I mean by this is that Sung Jin-Woo is made to be the ultimate edgy overpowered main character that you can self insert yourself into for a power fantasy. And they also uses characters as a tool to reinforce this, like him needing to rescue every female character as soon as they are about to get hurt (all the while the male characters gets slaughtered left and right).

Pretty much every female character he meets will at some point be rescued by him and/or fall for him. For instance there is one female character that is a bit obsessed with him cause he "smells" different than other people. And at another point where he's murdering monsters suddenly the last monster surrenders out of fear. And what do you know, that monster turns out to be a super hot monster babe that falls for him. All characters are just tools used to put Sung Jin-Woo himself up on a pedestal or as a measuring stick to see how overpowered he is.

Enjoyment 3/10: As you may already have figured out, my enjoyment for this manhwa is not really high. None of the characters are memorable, the arcs are uninspired and had no real purpose except to make the main character stronger. The main character himself was dull. Except early on in the story where it was actually interesting and he had emotions and there was a sense of overall dread.

Overall 3/10: I really can't give this any higher. Remove the art which is its only praiseworthy point and all you will be left with is the same generic self insert edgy overpowered main character power fantasy that has all the ladies fall for him. There's nothing memorable at all about this manhwa.