Solo Leveling, Vol. 1

2.5 stars. The plot of the comic/manhwa is enjoyable enough. I'm a sucker for stories with an underdog protagonist who rises up the ranks, and that is exactly what we get here. Sometimes it's to the extent where the stakes are significantly diminished since even before a battle you often know that Jinwoo (protagonist) will end up winning by virtue of [eventually] being a borderline overpowered MC. Also, I think you need to have some suspension of disbelief in order to buy into the way this story's society works with all the hunters and the in-game screens appearing in front of them, but I didn't mind it too much.

I liked Jinwoo as a protagonist. He was very easy to root for and despite being a pretty standard and frankly bland character, just seeing him prove everyone wrong was really satisfying. But his arc was very predictable. From the very first episode, you know that he's going to go from being scrawny and helpless to being this fit, overpowered eye candy. He didn't have much of a distinguishable personality either. I have no idea how this character would act in a given situation since his personality was just so... basic. He didn't have a personality, the plot was what dictated the personality he would need to have in a given moment, which is not good. But his bland characterization was the most noticeable through the dialogue. The fact of him being this weak, disadvantaged hunter was constantly reiterated in a very on-the-nose way.

Also, him being labeled as the ‘weakest hunter of mankind' (or something like that) seemed like a very contrived and convenient way to hone into Jinwoo's ineptitude amidst all these hunters. It was also very hard to buy into. Like seriously, why would so many people go out of their way to label some random kid as the ‘weakest hunter', like don't they have better things to gossip about? Who would care about a weak hunter enough to go so far as to create a universally acknowledged nicknape to represent his ineptitude? It just seemed like a lazy authorial choice to drill Jinwoo's initial pitiful state into the reader's mind.

The side characters' characterizations don't get much better either. Around the episode 20 mark, the antagonist that shows up is drawn in some panels with having the pitch-black void-like face with glowing red eyes to show that he's evil. It was a very mustache-twirling-villain type of storytelling choice. the readers can already tell if a character is good/bad/morally gray, so having such obvious and frankly, juvenile storytelling methods kept making me roll my eyes. This coupled with the fact that Jinwoo kept verbally expressing how pitied and disadvantaged he was—while it may sound like a very nit-picky thing to point out—kept taking me out of the story even more. At least have thought bubbles so it looks like the character is thinking about this, because who the hell would verbally talk up a storm throwing a pity party for themselves in the midst of a full-fledged battle? Wouldn't Jinwoo's priority in that moment be to beat up all the monsters instead of crying a river about his past? Again, these may seem like minor things, but they all accumulate to end up hampering my enjoyment of the story.

I would like to point out some positives though since this story wasn't all bad. The artwork was really amazing; it had clean lines and the characters' proportions were drawn really well, which I appreciated during the battle scenes as drawing proportions during scenes like that must have been very difficult. Speaking of battles, the actions scenes themselves were executed brilliantly. Often with comics, it's easy to just show the characters doing an incomprehensible sequence of random moves to defeat their opponent, but that wasn't the case here. You could tell, step by step, the sequence of movements the characters were making when fighting their opponents and it was all very easy to understand and made sense. I really appreciated that aspect of the artwork.

Overall, this comic isn't bad by any means, but it is perhaps a tad overrated.