Feb 28, 2024
Don't let the colossal amount of hype this show has affect your expectations: Solo Leveling is a perfectly average video-game-adjacent reincarnation power fantasy, and nothing more. It's got a clever hook of being in modern times both before and after reincarnation, but other than that, it's about what the average anime enthusiast would expect from your typical seasonal reincarnation arc. The aesthetic of an average dude in a hoodie fighting generic fantasy monsters in the city streets with a knife is really the only thing new it brings, so if that sounds enjoyable to you, then go ahead and give this a watch.
Here's a few
...
other thoughts:
- The animation is high quality and is honestly one of the only stellar things about this show. Fight scenes are some of the best animated in the industry right now, and the atmosphere changes between real-world and dungeon are pretty on point. Really, just watch the fight scenes and don't pay attention to the plot, it's only there to lead into the fight scenes, which are well worth the wait.
- Since this is your average power fantasy, any other characters outside the main character are extremely flat. This show makes this worse by cycling through characters super fast, to the point where side characters will only appear in two episodes then never appear again. The most prominent side character so far is the main character's sister, which is a fine character I guess but is just there. She acts as an anchor for the main character but if you swapped her out for a pet dog the plot really wouldn't change.
- The aesthetics of the modern world and the dungeon world clash *really* hard. It is hard to overstate how jarring it is to see extremely generic fantasy mobs like goblins and such facing off against characters in modern street fashion, or people walking along urban streets wielding swords and aggressively video-game-like armor. Personal opinion here, but I got to the point where I felt like this should have been a mecha or sci-fi instead; just make the mobs robots or something, explain away the dungeons with some technobabble, then give everyone futuristic power-suits and bam you've got something cool and original.
- People familiar with the genre will recognize the video-game-dialog magic system and roll their eyes. Main guy wakes up after reincarnation and can now see floating game dialogs that tell him what to do. That's all we get, no explanation or anything, we're just supposed to roll with it. While I'm sure the show will explain it further, the main character doesn't seem interested in figuring anything out either, and is content to use the magic dialogs like they're a natural part of life, not even questioning anything about them. It's even worse than it sounds, because unlike other dialog-magic systems, main guy is an exception and the dialog-magic runs contrary to the mainline magic system established in the first few episodes. Yet the show doesn't even give the viewers the smallest hint at the origins of this system; it's just lazy writing.
In conclusion, if you like generic power fantasies, you'll like this show, and if you don't like them, well, don't watch, it isn't worth it. This show doesn't live up to its hype, but is enjoyable enough as an average seasonal anime.
(As an aside, within 30 seconds of the start of the first episode we establish that naval bombardment is not an effective strategy to decimate fantasy creatures and I find that exceedingly lame. That is all I have to say on the matter.)
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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