Review of Solo Leveling Season 2: Arise from the Shadow

If I haven’t been clear before, because I didn’t do a review of such a soulless and manufactured, by-the-numbers product like the first season of this show, then I will just say it clearly, I loathe Solo Leveling, I’m disgusted by it, it’s one of those abominations called “Webtoon adaptations” that are a completely different medium creeping into anime by the power of American companies such as Crunchyroll, who shamelessly shill these Korean series and call it “anime”. Can you really see this series and tell me that it was made because the author has anything worth to tell? Of course not, because Solo Levelingis even more shameless than any generic low quality isekai that get forgotten a day after they finish airing that people have been complaining about for like a decade now. In fact, Solo Leveling reminds me of this absolutely terrible isekai called IseLeve, because in that show this fat ugly guy suddenly stumbles upon powers and from one day to the other becomes this super hot guy that girls fawn over everywhere he goes, and he is so OP he can basically do anything, and that show was mind numbing. If you ask me if I prefer to watch that show or Solo Leveling, then I would watch that one again, these two shows are basically the same, but one was rightfully relentlessly mocked while Solo Leveling gets praised to high heavens by “people” who sound no different from bots, as I have never seen an organic Solo Leveling discussion, when I say that Crunchyroll has people shilling it, I mean it seriously.

This series couldn’t possibly have been written by someone older than 13, this show is an infinite repetition of itself and there’s absolutely no variation at all, you can easily see the formula: jobbers get sent to a dungeon, they get defeated by the super strong enemy, MC appears and easily defeats the super strong enemy, rinse and repeat until the end of times. Even before the anime came out, I saw people comparing it to SAO, but there isn’t much similarities between these series beyond the game mechanics, and while they make sense in SAO because they are inside a literal videogame, in Solo Leveling they just are there for the protagonist. I mean, at least SAO isn’t shameless enough to make Kirito’s friends completely useless, they get their time to shine and sometimes Kirito faces hurdles that he couldn’t complete if he didn’t have these companions, but Solo Leveling is different since, in its absolutely moronic world building, people cannot get stronger except for the MC, so even S-Ranks are absolutely useless in comparison to the protagonist, because fuck any character who isn’t the protagonist, right? And this protagonist whose name I couldn’t bother to remember is a wet tissue of a character, it’s basically seeing a caricature of a caricature of a caricature, this guy has no character at all, I don’t think you could give me a description of his personality because he doesn’t have one, I have seen people describe him as an “aura farmer” and I don’t know what the fuck that even means, it seems like words randomly put together by an AI or maybe something a 12 years old kid on TikTok came up with, but anyhow, there aren’t characters in this show, because only the protagonist matters and he doesn’t have a character. The plot of this series is also palpably non-existent in ideas, it’s basically a ripoff of the author’s favorite light novels and at some point he decided to add some parts of Hunter x Hunter, but as the author has absolutely no ability to write and you could probably find something better written in Wattpad, these little points of the so-called plot fall so flat on its face that you will feel that you wasted your time, because, as I said at the beginning of this paragraph, this show is just a repetition with no variation where the GOD CHAD MC beats everything effortlessly because of his gifted powers, because unlike what some people tell you, no, he didn’t work hard for his powers, even Saitama worked harder for them and the way Saitama got so powerful was literally told as a joke for the series, but this series take itself super seriously as if it wasn’t some kid’s wet dream where even his smell makes girls wet.

Did you expect some kind of good soundtrack because of Hiroyuki Sawano? Prepare to be disappointed, because this is the driest soundtrack he has ever composed, it’s like this series is lacking so much on having people with soul working on it that it removes the soul of people that are talented, I mean, it doesn’t matter if you think Sawano can get repetitive after a while, but he has composed extremely recognizable and unforgettable stuff, the fact that I don’t hear in my head a single track this series had should tell you all. Did you expect good animation because it was A-1 Pictures? Well, think again, some battles are literally colors traveling around the screen with absolutely no choreography to speak of as if you’re watching Dragon Ball Z, but that’s a 300 episodes long anime, it at least has an excuse to have many lows in animation and even then it tends to have much better battle choreography than this show, I’m not going to say the animation is low quality all the time, but it definitely isn’t the best A-1 Pictures have put out even in recent years and I don’t consider them even close to the best studios. Did you expect literally anything at all because of the popularity? Sorry to ruin it to you, but there’s nothing for you to be attached to here, no plot, no characters, no nothing, I refuse to believe people who praise this aren’t bots or shills, it’s obvious that Crunchyroll is going to far lengths to promote the series and you have seen this kind of thing with basically every Webtoon adaptation, this isn’t the first and definitely won’t be the last poisonous plague that will come out from there.

I think I’m disappointed in myself for getting so far into this show, it’s probably the most uninteresting Korean adaptation I have seen so far, which is an extremely high bar because no other “Crunchyroll Original” originated from Korean has been interesting in the slightest, it is honestly embarrassing that something like this is even allowed to exist and to be considered one of the best Korean series, do Webtoons really have nothing worthy to offer aside from porn? I have seen better writing in porn than in this. Recently, I was sick for like 10 days with ugly coughs and even felt like I was getting choked when going to bed because of all the phlegm, and that’s probably a better experience than watching these Webtoon adaptations, and the fact that we are getting another one next season seems dreadful, I’m probably going to watch it and give it a 1/10 again or simply not watch it at all, but the problem is not if I’ll be watching it or not, the problem is that these products are worthless garbage that doesn’t deserve being called anime, even if you were to call them such, you would have to be either a kid or have never seen anything else in your life, anime or not, to be impressed about a show so devoid of everything such as Solo Leveling, everything about this show is as artificial as the jawline surgeries that are so popular over Korea.

Thank you for reading.