Solo Leveling is Fine

April 12, 2025 · 9 min

After being blown away by the animation in season 2 of the Solo Leveling anime and hearing how incredible the manhwa and light lovel are, I decided to read this well-known and seemingly well-loved series.

It’s fine.

Spoilers for the entire main story.

The Good

Characters

Honestly, I loved the cast of characters. While most of the characters we meet end up being relegated to background cast after Jinwoo gets stronger, the few who stay are quite well done. Most of them feel more alive than a lot of light novel characters I’ve seen, and the evolution of them through the series makes genuine sense.

Let’s take a look at the golden retriever, little brother character, Jinho. In the beginning of the series, we see him as a rich bitch who doesn’t understand how the world actually works but wants to prove himself to his rich father. After Jinwoo saves Jinho and scares him into submission, Jinho takes on the underling character. In this role, we see the two slowly grow together and go from a master-servant relationship to a brotherly relationship.

At this point, Jinho has a definitive use. He provides funds for securing gates, gathers other hunters to meet a quota, and gathers the essence stones from magic beasts. While not the ideal life, it’s all to further his goal of becoming a guild master.

This changes, starting with the job change arc. Once Jinwoo acquires his shadow army, Jinho no longer needs to acquire essence stones. Once Jinwoo expresses his interest in establishing a guild, Jinho is cut off from his father and cannot provide funds anymore. Once Jinwoo establishes his guild and gets President Go to amend the laws, Jinho no longer needs Jinho to find hunters to fill a quota.

Where does this leave Jinho? Useless. Rather than relegating him to a background character at this point, we see Jinho struggling with this. He doesn’t want to be an accessory; he wants to help Jinwoo. As the guild gets bigger and Jinwoo starts being swamped by reporters and other “undesirable” administrative tasks, we see Jinho swoop in and find a new purpose for himself.

Away from the shining example, we see character growth in some other fun ways. Beru starts off as your generic “minion” who does nothing but praise his king, Jinwoo. While Jinwoo is off saving the world or whatever, he assigns Beru to watch his mother from her shadow. As the story goes on, we see Beru growing more and more melodramatic in his praise of Jinwoo. Why? Because Jinwoo’s mother loves watching historical dramas.

There are other examples of characters I really enjoyed reading, such as Jinchul, Lennart, Go Gunhee, Baek Yoonho, Igris, etc.

Power Scaling

Compared to the anime, we see Jinwoo’s stat screen a lot. While this takes up a lot of space on the page, I don’t really care. We get to see a numerical representation of Jinwoo’s strengths, weaknesses, and skills multiple times through the series. Not only do these numbers make sense, but we actually see the effects of them too.

The most obvious of these is his shadow army. The size of the army is based on his mana, which is influenced by his intelligence stat. Due to his neglect at first, Jinwoo’s intelligence stat is bad when he becomes the Shadow Monarch. What does this mean? He only has 30 soldiers to start. Those 30 soldiers may be strong, but they are few in number and can only regenerate a limited number of times. As time goes on, Jinwoo actively increases his intelligence and we see his army grow immensely in number.

This applies to skills too! Let’s take Ruler’s Hand as an example. It starts out being able to lift small objects, but, by the end, Jinwoo can basically fly with it. This doesn’t happen overnight. Through the series, we see Jinwoo actively practicing the skill, getting stronger at it and better at precise motions with this skill.

Overall, I’m happy with the power scaling progression…until the end of book 5. At that point, Jinwoo is more powerful than every other hunter. Except for the Monarchs, there is actually no one who can challenge him. Why do we need more power scaling at that point? Because the big bad is so bad that no human except Jinwoo can even dream of doing anything.

Foreshadowing

Ruler’s Authority foreshadowing that Ashborn used to be a Ruler? Chef’s kiss. This skill in general is used very well in the series. The name actually tells us exactly where the skill comes from, but we don’t have enough information to connect the dots until deeper into the series. Not just that, but it also foreshadowing that the National-rank hunters are shards of Luminosity? Fantastic. Go Gunhee being shown using Ruler’s Authority? Amazing.

Also loved Igris guarding the Shadow Monarch’s throne. I’m counting it as foreshadowing.

The Bad

Poor Writing

Let’s get this one out of the way first. Compared to a lot of famous western fantasy, including Watpad-coded romantasy like Fourth Wing, the writing is not good. It’s not horrific, but I would never recommend this book to someone without a disclaimer. From the odd word choice selection (who the fuck guffaws?) to the lack of setting description and the general pacing of each novel as an individual book, it’s bad.

The fight scenes are quite terrible in the first book or two, but they get notable better later in the series. Great? Hell no. Good enough? Yeah. Nowhere near as good as the scenes in Wind and Truth, though. I wish light novel authors would read books with good writing and then try to do that.

Is it unreadable? No. Good? Fuck no. If you want good prose, read Terry Pratchett. If you want epic fantasy with cosmic proportions, read the Stormlight Archives.

Note: there is a chance some, or even a lot, of these issues come from a poor translation. As you can probably infer from the language of this blog, I read the English translation of the light novels.

Cha Hae-In

She’s not a bad character, but she’s not handled well. While it makes sense that she’s going to be overshadowed by the power-scaling MC, I did not predict for her to be overshadowed in as little as one book. Cha Hae-In is shown to us as Korea’s most powerful hunter, save for Go Hunhee, yet she’s only ever given a single moment to show off her skills. Even then, compared to the anime, her skills are shown to be, at best, on par with the rest of the S-Rank Korean hunters.

Putting that aside, how about her relationship with Jinwoo? I genuinely do appreciate her confession early on in their relationship, I don’t appreciate how it’s handled from then on. Jinwoo ignores her for long periods of time between contact, and we only ever see them going on a single date. The date itself is my favourite part of the 2nd half of the series, but it’s still the only time we see their relationship really grow.

I want to see more of their interactions together. I want to see her comfort him. I want to see her be her own character outside of “UwU Jinwoo smells nice and I’m an awkward shut-in teehee :3”.

Aside, the sheer lack of powerful female characters is…telling. You’re telling me all of the National-rank hunters and all but one Monarch is male? Every single S-rank in Korea is male except Hae-In? Sure, buddy. Because that makes sense…

Plot

It’s not good.

The initial lure of the system did hook me, but Jinwoo only stayed a proactive protagonist until Jeju Island. After that point, it turned into “Bad thing happened; fix the issue, Jinwoo!” While it’s natural for conflict to happen to a character, it should not be the only type of conflict. The overarching goal for a character should be something they drive towards. Instead, we get a cycle of:

  1. Problem happens
  2. Jinwoo solves problem
  3. Jinwoo waits for the next problem to happen

This is not an interesting cycle for me. During the first half, we get relatively deep goals that require multiple steps to finish. Let’s take him waking his mother up.

  1. Jinwoo finds Elixir of Life Recipe (catalyst)
  2. Jinwoo wants to clear the Demon Castle, but it’s too hot :(
  3. Jinwoo wants to buy fireproof cloak, but he doesn’t have enough money
  4. Jinwoo wants to sell thing, but it’s suspicious if an E-rank hunter sells rare thing
  5. Jinwoo gets reassessed as an S-rank
  6. Jinwoo sells stuff
  7. Jinwoo buys cloak
  8. Jinwoo clears the castle
  9. Jinwoo wakes mom up

Wow! Look at how many steps that one conflict took. Now, let’s look at the second half (I am not cherry picking; I am trying to be generous here).

  1. Hunters are being hunted
  2. Jinwoo wants to protect hunters, but he can’t be everywhere at once
  3. Jinwoo wants to have his shadows follow hunters, but he needs to find all of them
  4. Jinwoo is informed that he will see every hunter at a conveniently timed dinner
  5. Jinwoo has shadows follow the target hunters in two paragraphs

I genuinely could not find a longer example in the second half of the book. Most of it comes down to a simple cycle of “Jinwoo finds problem, Jinwoo solves problem”. It’s disappointing.

Lore Dumping

While the lore felt nicely drip fed in the beginning, the lore dumps actually hurt. The firehose could have easily been split into many different streams of information instead of chapter-long flashbacks. In general, I’m not a fan of flashbacks unless it’s for mysterious characters we as readers genuinely care about.

The Ugly

SFX

This series wanted to be a Manhwa. If this is not made obvious by the lack of physical description of the world of the characters, it’s made obvious by the SFX tags commonly used literally everywhere in this book.

It happened the moment Jinwoo took a step forward for a closer look. In the blink of an eye, a large log-shaped object burst out of the water

FFSSHHH

Coming in hot!

~ Solo Leveling, Vol. 1, Chapter 5

While this seems like a tame example, it gets far worse in the fight scenes.

Arrows and magic attacks flewat the insects.

Fwssshhhh, fwit!

BOOM!

SKKKRRREEEEE–

SKKKRRREEE–

Once the hunters knocked some of the bugs to the ground, the rest took to the ground themselves, ready to fight.

Tanks were important at this point in the battle. Dongsuk got the magic beasts to focus on him by using hsi Aggravation skills. The beasts all turned to him at the same time, as if they’d planned a synchronized move.

“Over here, bugs!”

SKKKRRREEEEE!

Tens of insects all charged at Dongsuk.

CRASHHH!

CRNNN-Crash!

KRSH!

~ Solo Leveling, Vol. 1, Chapter 6

While the excessive use of onomatopoeias isn’t as common the later books, they’re still far more common here than any other book I’ve ever read. Rather than describing actions, we’re constantly audio clues to piece together the combat in our heads instead.

Nothing else urked me nearly as much as the fucking SFX.

Conclusion

First half? 3.5 / 5

Second hard? 2.5 / 5

Overall? 3 / 5

It’s fine.