Solo Leveling Isn’t a Good Anime — But I Know How to Fix It
Solo Leveling is one of the biggest missed opportunities in anime history. The series has become massively popular over the past several years, but it’s accomplished this almost exclusively through its amazing fights, and its ability to build hype. On virtually every other level, from its writing, to its characters, to even its direction and art outside fights, Solo Leveling is awful.
Solo Leveling is one of the most overrated anime of the 2020s, but it could have been amazing with one simple change. At the core of all its problems is that, beyond the first half of Season 1, it is content to be an anime about nothing more than Sung Jinwoo being a strong hunter who destroys everything in his path. Had Solo Leveling actually taken more advantage of its interesting initial premise, though, it could have been so much more, and completely unique within the realm of action anime.
Solo Leveling is a Painfully Generic Action Anime With Weak Characters and a Badly-Written Story
For the first half of Season 1, Solo Leveling isn’t great, but it is more engaging than it ever is afterward. With Sung Jinwoo still being weak and actually forced to struggle, there are a number of decent conflicts which arise, Jinwoo himself gets solid development and meaningful moments of introspection, and the characters around Jinwoo get to appear as if they’ll be more important than they wind up being. Grouped together with spectacular action animation and the high-potential concept of Jinwoo being the only hunter in his world capable of “leveling up,” and it’s easy to see how Solo Leveling could have been a decent series, albeit not an amazing one, even with its mediocre writing and poor art direction.
In practice, however, almost as soon as Jinwoo becomes sufficiently powerful and overcomes his initial mental hurdles, Solo Leveling devolves into meaningless, formulaic slop. All characters other than Jinwoo cease to matter, Jinwoo ceases to be interesting in the slightest, and the story becomes painfully predictable as Jinwoo grows increasingly stronger, and defeats one increasingly dangerous monster after another. The direction outside the fights remains sub-par, the fights themselves are all flash and no substance, and the series fails to ever engage with its audience on an emotional level, or say anything of meaning.
Solo Leveling Could Have Been a Masterpiece Deconstruction of its Own Genre
Since the rise of Sword Art Online, series that primarily function as self-insert power fantasies for teenage boys and men have become some of the most popular and successful anime in the world. This is a genre that rarely produces anything of merit, and it’s one that Solo Leveling fully leans into. Certainly, Solo Leveling would have benefited massively from not trying to fill the same niche as trash anime like Arifureta and The Asterisk War, but it could have been something truly special if it had gone ahead and served as a critique of series like these.
At the beginning of Solo Leveling, Jinwoo is given the one-of-a-kind ability to “level up,” which is what allows him to become exponentially stronger than every other hunter around him at an astonishing rate. Rather than Jinwoo’s distinct talents allowing him to grow into a cool, badass, paragon figure who fights for what’s right and isn’t afraid of anything, Solo Leveling could have examined the actual effects something like this might have on someone. There are multiple ways it could have gone about this, and all of them would have resulted in a significantly better anime than what Solo Leveling is in its current form. It could have chronicled Jinwoo’s descent from kind-hearted weakling to corrupt monster, it could have emphasized the emotional weight and pressure placed on him as the most special man in the world, or it could have pulled its lens back and placed greater focus on the perspectives and reactions of those around Jinwoo. None of these concepts, in and of themselves, are entirely unique, but never have they been used pointedly in the current anime market, where series with all the same tropes and problems as Solo Leveling continue to dominate.
When Solo Leveling Season 3 releases, it will be as uninteresting and forgettable as the horrifically overrated Solo Leveling Season 2. But, perhaps in another timeline, the Solo Leveling anime is living up to its full potential as a deconstruction of series like Sword Art Online, Rising of the Shield Hero and Overlord. This alternative version of Solo Leveling may not be as popular as the one that currently exists, but it would be far better remembered 20 years from now.
