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Since its announcement, the Solo Leveling anime has been poised to become one of the hottest shows not just of this season or this year, but potentially the next few years if the adaptation has a long enough tail. It's an action fantasy series based on the immensely popular Korean comic (or manwha) illustrated by artist Dubu of Redice Studio (who sadly passed away in July 2022), which is itself based on a popular web novel by Chugong. If you're an anime-only kind of person, just know that Solo Leveling is almost peerlessly popular in certain circles. There are a lot of manhwa just like it, many of them flagrantly imitating it right down to the title, but it still stands out through sheer style.
Suffice it to say, the Solo Leveling anime had a lot to live up to. After watching the first episode, fresh from Japanese studio A-1 Pictures – known for the likes of Sword Art Online, Kaguya-sama, Fairy Tail, Fate/Apocrypha, Wotakoi, 86, Blend S, and many more – I reckon it might actually measure up to that promise.
What Solo Leveling is about
Solo Leveling stars Sung Jin-woo, a young man working as a Hunter in vaguely near-future South Korea. The story picks up over a decade after select humans around the world awakened as super-powered warriors alongside the emergence of interdimensional rifts home to invasive, otherworldly monsters immune to traditional weaponry. Hunters are ranked from S-tier name-takers to Basically A Normal Person-tier, and Sung Jin-woo sits at the bottom of the bottom. He is just a dude with a knife and an absolute shock of hair. But he stubbornly continues his dangerous career as a Hunter in order to support his younger sister while his hospitalized mother receives treatment, just barely surviving with help from healers who make sure his insides stay inside.
As a litRPG – a genre of fiction that applies the mechanics and conventions of role-playing video games – the setup is extremely and proudly game-y, arguably more so than A-1's Sword Art Online, which at least pretends to be about actual video games. Solo Leveling depicts a modern world spliced with swords and magic and magic swords. We're dealing with monsters like demons, undead, dragons, goblins, orcs, and giant spiders. The rift inhabitants will feel mostly familiar to fans of RPGs, JRPGs, litRPGs, or just about any flavor of high fantasy. Hunters are loosely grouped into classic roles like tanks, healers, and damage-dealers, as well as archetypes like archer, mage, fighter, and so on. Rifts are literally called dungeons, people. It's very easy to pick up what Solo Leveling is putting down, and it's not breaking many molds in its world-building.
So why is Solo Leveling so fun? To put it as simply as possible, it is cool as all get-out. This is exactly why it was crying out for an anime – perhaps the best medium ever devised for portraying Raw Coolness. As you may have gathered from the teaser trailer or just the fact that this is a litRPG, Sung Jin-woo doesn't stay in the dumpster Hunter tier for very long. Through mysterious means I won't spoil, he gets one heck of a power boost that not only steadily increases his fighting strength – a unique and enormous advantage among Hunters who are all locked to a predetermined power level – but also gives him access to abilities that blur the lines between the types of Hunters. He's an anomaly among anomalies. He quickly becomes this world's John Wick, basically, and it's just a joy to watch him work.
Why Solo Leveling is so good
The entire story of Solo Leveling is really just one big contrivance to make Sung Jin-woo look like the most badass dude alive, and I'll be damned if it doesn't work. Fight scenes are inventive, intense, and plentiful, and given the scope of some battles, few series are more deserving of the word epic. Purely as narrative material, this would get old pretty quickly. But as a comic, or now an anime? As visual spectacle? Oh it is good. Put that in my eyeballs right the hell now.
Another interesting detail that shapes a lot of the cast's motivations, as well as global politics, is how the series frames a society that's evolved to accommodate and depend on Hunters. A sense of real danger pervades Solo Leveling. Rifts are bad, y'all. People often die even when Hunters do show up to dungeons in time, so it could not be clearer that normal people would be helpless without them. As a result, Hunters sit somewhere between superheroes, celebrities, mercenaries, and military personnel. The power at their fingertips, physically and geopolitically, is hard to overstate, and it's fascinating to unpack the guilds, laws, and societal systems that crop up around them. It's superhero litigation done absolutely right.
I'd say Solo Leveling's second-greatest strength – after the art, which nothin' is touchin' – is that Sung Jin-woo is fundamentally a good person who avoids a lot of the traps and tropes that similar series often fall into or misguidedly embrace. There's nothing particularly nasty about Solo Leveling, which is depressingly rare among power fantasy stories like this. Sung Jin-woo isn't a stupid or dramatic teenager, or a horny idiot building a harem to entreat the viewer's assumed hetero male gaze.
Sung Jin-woo makes mistakes that aren't brushed off by him being some galaxy brain edgelord who's always 10 moves ahead. Yes, he's got more plot armor than a superhero in the first episode of their new Netflix series, but he does face meaningful risks and conflicts even after gaining enormous power – a power that does weigh on his conscience. He's a solid character and a genuinely decent person – more than enough to move this show along at a healthy pace.
Hopes for the Solo Leveling anime
I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who's seen a lot of anime, who read the whole Solo Leveling manhwa and enjoyed it, and who also read some of the original web novel series but didn't enjoy it nearly as much. For my money, Dubu's art utterly transformed an altogether adequate, but not amazingly written litRPG into something I can't look away from. A-1 Pictures has the opportunity to do the same, and is nailing it so far.
The highest praise I can give the comic is this: I read probably too many manhwa on apps like Tapas and Tappytoon (which both have Solo Leveling, if you want to read it yourself, plus there are now seven physical English volumes), but I do not read a lot of action manhwa. My manhwa library is filled almost exclusively with dramas and romance stories. Solo Leveling is exactly the kind of thing I usually ignore, but it's drawn and executed so undeniably well that I simply can't resist it. It's the kind of thing I would have devoured when I was 15, but I still really enjoy it now that I'm 30.
The best thing I can say about the altogether excellent anime (after just one episode) is that it's not only hitting the high bar of the comic's art style, it's also deftly layering in new story wrinkles that improve the viewing experience by introducing key ideas much sooner. The debut episode fills in the world, reminds us that A-1 is an animation powerhouse, and paves the way for episode two to set the hook. The pacing of the first episode also suggests to me that A-1 is banking on this being a relatively long-running series – a few seasons at least. We'll see how the structure evolves there.
If you like action anime and Solo Leveling wasn't already on your watch list, it absolutely should be. It's airing exclusively on Crunchyroll, with new episodes out each Saturday. The source material is a twice-proven hit, and the anime is shaping up to be some of the best and simplest kickass fun we'll see this year.
For more, check out our guides to the best anime shows and the best Netflix anime.
