The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Solo Leveling

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It's been over a decade since the sudden appearance of the "gates"—the paths that connect our world with a different dimension. Since then, certain humans have awakened to supernatural powers. We call these individuals "hunters." Hunters make their living by using their powers to conquer dungeons inside the gates. In this world of tough customers, the low-ranked hunter Jinwoo Sung is known as "the weakest hunter of all mankind." One day, Jinwoo gets fatally injured when he runs into high-rank double dungeons hidden within a low-rank dungeon. Just then, a mysterious quest window appears in front of him. On the verge of death, Jinwoo accepts the quest and starts leveling up... while the others aren't.

Solo Leveling is based on a manhwa written by Chugong and illustrated by Dubu. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays. ANN was given screeners for this anime and can publish these reviews early.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I've said it before, but it probably bears repeating: ever since my mother's accident almost three years ago, I have lost any taste I once had for violence, or at least excessive gore. Technically speaking, the gore in Solo Leveling isn't "excessive," per se – if someone has a limb cut off or gets cut in two by a giant axe, I suspect there's going to be a lot of blood and other bits and pieces. But if you don't like that, or at least would rather read about it than see it, this may not be the show for you, because even though it starts relatively mild, it gets gruesome very quickly in its second half.

The story, however, is pretty interesting, even if you've had it up to here with D&D-inspired stuff randomly popping up in the real world. In this case, that happened about ten years ago, and people who had the skill to defeat those dungeons "awakened" as hunters. Now, that's a regular job you can do if you have the aptitude for it, which is very much questionable in the case of protagonist Jinwoo. He's the lowest rank of hunter, and even then, he's astoundingly weak, to the point where other hunters have begun to say that if he shows up, things will likely be pretty easy. Maybe that's true most of the time, but it's an attitude that gets everyone in a lot of trouble when they discover that the dungeon they're clearing is a double dungeon with a hidden, much harder, boss room deeper inside.

The episode up to that point is just okay. It's a lot of world-building, as characters explain (largely without info dumping) about the world while others wave giant death flags, but once the party ends up in the danger zone, the story kicks it up a notch. For most of them, the problem is that they have to think, not just fight, and there's a specific method to defeat the truly terrifying boss. It's also where Jinwoo proves his worth: he's so used to almost dying that he's gotten good at observing, and if anyone dies, it's not because he failed to figure out the traps. The tension in these scenes is good, making it clear how much panic is in the air and how quickly it's spreading to each party member, while Jinwoo tries his hardest to find a way to ensure that everyone gets out alive. The twist is that, when it doesn't look like he will, a strange game-like screen pops up telling him he completed a quest and asking if he wants to become "a player."

That's groan-worthy and nothing we haven't seen before. But having read the first few novels (Yen On is releasing them), I think the story uses the trope a bit better than you'd expect. In any event, if it's not an instant dealbreaker, this is interesting enough to give it a chance to explain what it means by "player" and how that stands to change Jinwoo's world, especially since if anyone requires a little luck, it's him.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

I try not to let hype cycles influence my expectations of new shows. I figure that just because a marketing department has decided to put all its juice behind a title to make it The Next Big Thing, that doesn't mean anything for or against its quality. Yet, while I went into Solo Leveling with as open a mind as possible, I couldn't help wondering through the whole thing why, exactly, this was the seasonal Chōsen One.

This double-length opener isn't bad by any means. It's excellently produced and competently written, the occasional bout of awkward exposition notwithstanding. Conceptually, however, it's like it was assembled from spare parts. All the fantasy elements operate on RPG logic like any given isekai, though there are thankfully no stat screens. The grim and disastrous conclusion to the central dungeon raid is reminiscent of other gritty fantasy series like Goblin Slayer, though this one thankfully spares us any exploitative sexual violence. Even the action scenes, with their constant gore and blaring Hiroyuki Sawano score – not to mention the towering giant statues and man-eating monsters – can't help but feel like store-brand Attack on Titan. This whole premiere is like a greatest hits medley of stuff popular in anime over the last decade or so, right down to our hero getting a mysterious upgrade that will doubtlessly lead to him becoming uber-powerful in no time.

Even with how familiar – and frankly, rote – it feels, the writing and overall execution here is pretty solid. The disastrous dungeon crawl is suitably tense and bloody, making for a speedy viewing. The characters aren't anything special, but they at least feel believably human, even when they start to panic and betray each other. Characters make bad or morally questionable decisions, but they do so while feeling like actual people rather than one-dimensional props. There's honestly a lot of potential in how most adventurers are just working-class schlubs, trying to kill fantasy monsters and sell mana crystals as their 9 to 5. The powers that be have turned real-life RPG dungeons into a means of resource extraction, with regular people being sent in as sacrifices waiting to happen, led along by the carrot of making ends meet. If the show decides to follow up on that thread and examine the ramifications of it all, it could be pretty interesting.

Unfortunately, I don't get the impression that it will. Our main character may not have been permanently sent to another world, but his central motivation is built on the same inferiority complex of being "the weakest" as countless isekai protagonists. His increasingly venomous final speech tells me we're probably in for a lot of anger and angst revolving around him getting stronger, rather than examining the exploitative business model of RPG adventurers. I hope that turns out less cringe-inducing than I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too. The competency of this premiere makes me confident that it will be, but that's more relieving than enthusing.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

As someone who has read the original manhwa, I'm coming into Solo Leveling already aware of what the story is and where it is going—so any cliffhangers or "shocking twists" are anything but. So, with this double-length episode, I was expecting to see the opening few chapters of the story that lead up to the moment where Jinwoo's life changes forever. However, what we get is actually that and much more.

While there are no major changes to the story, a fair number of additions foreshadow events to come and introduce characters that will become important later. Moreover, these extra scenes help build the world by showing things outside Jinwoo's limited viewpoint. The opening scene shows us how large battles are fought. Then, we get to see the celebrity status of top hunters through Haein's introduction. And by following Jinho and Songyi, we learn how new hunters are examined and scouted.

So, as a fan of the original, I am more than impressed with the first episode. Not only does it look great in motion, but the anime actually improves on the original story in a definitive way. I have no complaints.

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James Beckett
Rating:
I will admit that I usually end up having higher expectations of a show whenever a show decides to come running out of the gate with a double-length premiere; my philosophy tends to be that, if a show is going to take up twice as much time as most of its peers to get the ball rolling, it better damn well use that time well. On that level, Solo Leveling doesn't make an especially great first impression, spending the vast majority of its elongated runtime going through the motions of establishing a premise that we should all already be plenty familiar with: There's a system of heroes and monsters that is functionally identical to the mechanics of a Monster Hunter-esque RPG video game, and our hero just so happens to be the weakest and most pathetic "hero" of them all…until he isn't. The main twist on the gimmick so far as we can see in this first episode is the way that the fantasy world has begun to creep into our world, which isn't exactly novel so far as anime go, but it's not something you see a lot of in this specifically isekai-adjacent sub-genre of "World That Operates Exactly Like a Generic Video Game For Some Reason" stories that we've been seeing so much of over the last ten years.

That's my long-winded way of saying that I found a lot of Solo Leveling's first episode to be fairly underwhelming, but fear not! Hope is not lost. For one, despite how tired I am of seeing the same old shtick trotted out to do its usual dance every season, I'm a firm believer in strong execution trumping a lack of originality, and Solo Leveling's execution does pick up by the time it's forty-four minutes are almost up. While I wasn't moved much either way by the "shocking" gore and dark turn that our hero Jinwoo's journey into the supposedly low-ranked dungeon takes, I did appreciate that his party actually had to do some puzzle-solving and whatnot to deal with the scary giant golems they unwittingly unleashed. I still don't like it when stories twist themselves into knots to force their universes to adhere to gamey cliches, but I at least can dig when we're using more cliches than just the usual stat menus and guild ranking systems.

Also, despite the show operating in such well-worn territory, it still manages to make a basic case for its story and its world, which is the bare minimum of what I need to be interested enough to check out a second episode. Jinwoo is a likable enough lead, or at least; his nondescript niceness is much preferable over the edgy dweebs that you sometimes get as the heroes of these kinds of fantasy power trips. I'm also curious to see what becomes of the other, more powerful S-rank heroes we only briefly see in this intro. In an anime like this, when my feelings about the protagonist rarely end up rising above lukewarm tolerance, the story can live or die on the strength of its supporting cast. If Solo Leveling can supply enough solid action and some interesting characters for Jinwoo to play off of, then maybe the show can rise above its derivative nature and become a worthwhile way to kill some time.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.