Review of Solo Leveling Season 2: Arise from the Shadow
“Y’all got any good writing?” “We got hype moments and aura.” Season 2 of Solo Leveling is more of the same; more irritating pseudo-chuuni sophistry, more interchangeable sakuga-interested fight scenes designed to be reposted rather than enjoyed, more characters with increasingly similar names we have to pretend care about, procedurally generated “TOP TEN COOLEST ANIME ENTRANCES”-ass entertainment wrapped in a layer of undeserved pretension. Clearly something’s working, though, because this is currently the twenty-fifth highest rated show on here and one of the most viewed series ever on Crunchyroll. Streaming sites crash whenever a new episode comes out. I’ve seen more people talk about Solo Leveling inthe past three months than the most recent MCU flop. I’ll give the show credit and say it looks appealing, because I’m not deliberately obtuse enough to pretend the flash over substance angle isn’t exactly what thrives in this modern viewing environment where everything has to be as concise as possible. But flash over substance implies the existence of any kind of substance at all. It’s just under 300 chapters worth of Timmy’s middle school Wattpad ego trip about beating up the mean kids at school after getting bullied for the last time, Tails Gets Trolled if the ironic self-awareness was feigned. This is not the kind of work that deserves a full-scale anime production, but you can chalk it up to corporate suits who keep throwing money at D-grade internet fanfiction until it becomes the “next big thing”. You wouldn’t be reading this if not for them, because Solo Leveling as a concept wouldn’t have advanced past the dumpster of the online serialization where it belongs.
The characters are still one-note and unlikeable. I don’t even know what Sung Jinwoo’s goal is anymore. The impetus for his transformation into an emotionless RPG slave is resolved by the halfway point of the season when he wakes his comatose mother. The moment where he heals ger is the single best moment in the entire show, because as SJW cries tears of relief, he begins to feel like a real person, someone you can sympathize with and relate to, if only for a minute (elevated to tearjerker levels by Taito Ban’s vocal performance); it comes as no surprise that this is the most disliked episode of the season. Apparently having the self-insert main character show any sort of convincing human emotion signifies that he “lost his aura”, because the only thing that matters now is how an anime presents itself and not what it stands for or how it conveys ideas. I’m not sure why people prefer that Jinwoo be an emotionless Gary Stu so badly like it’s a good thing if a character never feels or reacts to anything going on around them. Make him cry more! Even a smile or two would be enough! I can’t believe I’m defending fucking Solo Leveling – from its own fanbase no less – but the moment the show threatens to become watchable, they all seem to turn on it.
The story seems to bend over backwards to make SJW the strongest and most competent character in any given situation, which makes for an exhausting watch experience. His biggest trial this season is getting grazed by one of the bosses he’s fighting. He either defeats every single enemy without breaking a sweat or he lets his shadows do all the work for him. I couldn’t take any aspect of the narrative seriously after Jinwoo easily killed a supposedly unbeatable monster as everyone looked on in shock for tenth time in the span of five episodes. The only other times Jinwoo shows any appeal is when he foregoes his job as an S-rank monster hunter to hang out with his mom and sister to compensate for all the years of bonding his family didn’t get to experience and then go stand around on the roof of his apartment. Yet this somehow manages to undercut Jinwoo’s appeal even more as it takes place during a battle that involves several innocent people dying horribly, which could’ve been prevented had he been there. There’s layers to Solo Leveling’s incompetence – even when it’s doing something right it’s at the cost of something else like some kind of narrative equivalent exchange. RDCworld did a pretty funny video about it.
Put a gun to my head and ask me to name five Solo Leveling characters and what their personalities are beyond surface-level archetypal traits. It’s impossible. Anyone who isn’t Sung Jinwoo barely services the overall narrative and I’m convinced that if you removed 75% of the supporting cast this show would be at least five episodes shorter. This season alone introduces like fifty equally terrible new hunters, monsters and civilians who all have the memorability and personality of a rock. You already know none of these unlikeable, incompetent, superficial dipshits aren’t going to matter by the end of the season because Jinwoo does all the heavy lifting for everyone else while they stand around verbally fellating him. This season even brings in a staggeringly uninteresting future love interest whose loyalty towards SJW is only justified by the fact that she thinks he smells better than everyone else – I actually paused the episode here and had to go watch an entire episode of Medalist just to get my mind off how embarrassing it was that a grown adult could write something so insipid. The only good character in this season is Esil, a demon girl who shows up as a sidekick for one episode and she is the cutest goshdarn thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t complain about her minimal presence because she’d probably be ruined if she stayed around any longer than that.
The other S-Rank hunters are just as useless as they were in the manhwa. There’s this annoying nerd who looks like if Aizen was drawn by a fujoshi, some guy who turns into a werewolf, a really big dude with an afro, all of whom exist to stand around either monologuing, killing fodder enemies, or getting fodderized by the actual threats so Jinwoo can come save them – but only after standing around and letting a few of them die so he can look cool, of course. The Japanese hunters have it even worse; this is a Korean franchise after all, so anyone who represents a foreign nation is either a weaselly little bastard with no sense of honor or the most pathetic jobber on the face of the earth. And you’d better believe Solo Leveling will cut away from the fights multiple times per episode in service of another scene where these dweebs stand around in an office to deliver exposition as if they haven’t wasted enough time doing that already. The show’s pacing is dreadful to the point it keeps bringing back old plot points and then not resolving them until a later arc. Remember Wang Dong Suck’s brother who vowed to avenge his death in season 1? He gets offscreened by Jinwoo’s dad and his plotline gets dropped until the next season, where he’ll inevitably get folded again because nobody in Solo Leveling gets to do anything other than job unless they’re Sung Jinwoo.
This show isn’t just derivative, it blatantly lifts storylines from series I would rather be enjoying instead. The major focus of this season aside from the endless meandering and dropped subplots is a shameless rehash of the Chimera Ant arc from Hunter x Hunter, which suffers the most from the show’s terrible pacing; despite being the selling point of season 2, it gets condensed down to three episodes which is indicative of the season’s detrimentally rapid pacing. Instead of a complex and nuanced antagonist like Meruem, the character he was derived from, Beru is just another obstacle for Jinwoo to curbstomp. SJW could be fighting some fodder enemy for all I care, because there’s no tangible conflict here like there was in HxH. I think this perfectly summarizes everything wrong with Solo Leveling; it copies better works at a surface level and retains none of the underlying themes and exchange of viewpoints that make them what they are. I mean for God's sake there’s a scene halfway through the season where Jinwoo has a flashback of his mom getting burnt to save him and it’s lifted shot for shot, word for word from one of Shinichi’s flashbacks in Parasyte. I’m not sure how Chugong even got away with this, because it’s not exactly subtle.
When I was reviewing the first season, I noted that the technical competence was one of the few saving graces of the show, but now it feels like A-1 Pictures started experiencing budget cuts midway through the production. Season 1 wasn’t coming close to Dubu’s art from the manhwa, but it wasn’t constantly flipping between rejected character drawings from One-Punch Man season 2. I actually went back and compared episodes to their respective chapters, and it wasn’t even a contest between the two mediums. I can say with confidence the anime looks like a Deviantart user trying to recreate their favorite anime screencap in comparison, especially now that the overwhelming amount of off-model character art can be spotted without having to pause mid-scene like in the first season. The professionally constructed paneling and framing of certain events in the manhwa was woefully underutilized a lot of the time this season, if not outright butchered for seemingly no reason; there’s a moderately iconic panel where a villain rips off a character’s arms and walks away towards the viewer in the next panel with their opponent bleeding profusely in the background. I was baffled that such a clear-cut panel to adapt wasn’t included; rather, the director opted to show it at a different, less striking angle that made what could’ve been an effective moment of intimidation look boring in comparison. Little things like that make me wonder what the fuck is going on at A-1 Pictures and if they have any quality control in their studio.
I already mentioned last season how unmemorable and samey Hiroyuki Sawano’s score for this series felt to me, but it doesn’t even sound like him now. The opening is the best sounding track of the show so far and I’m not even sure if Sawano composed it or it’s another artist trying to imitate his style. It depresses hearing such a legendary composer phone it in to this extent. Even the fight choreography feels lazier than before. The twelfth episode is painfully inconsistent in terms of consistent animation fluidity, bad anatomy and lazily rendered CGI environments, which is made even more insulting by the fact that there are some genuinely great shots when the incomprehensible direction isn’t drowning everything else; stuff during the fight like the bug’s claw hovering inches away from Jinwoo’s eye, or Jinwoo staring down his reflection on a wall of ice are visually phenomenal. It's clear the storyboarders are trying during major sequences, are their efforts are commendable. Contrarily, the final battle between SJW and Beru has them do that thing from One Piece where they turn into brightly colored streaks and fly around in midair interspersed with that nauseating faux-shakycam thing anime directors do now. I had a hard time keeping track of what was going on at certain points because the camera was moving so fast it felt like I was watching on 2x speed, or even worse, watching a fight scene from Magia Record. The final attack is portrayed by a bunch of looping frames and a lazy panning shot complete with speed lines. I’m not sure why this episode was so highly praised considering how glaringly obvious the flaws were, so I have to assume most viewers were probably too disoriented from the fight scene to notice.
Giving this season a 1/10 would be dishonest because compared to the first, the positive aspects were more abundant. Unlike the previous season, there were moments that felt like they made me see what fans see in this show.Episode eight looks fantastic aside from being a genuinely enjoyable experience compared to the rest of the show, mostly in part to Yoshihiro Kanno’s storyboards. Jinwoo punches a demon in the face so hard it creates a nuclear explosion. I liked that one moment significantly more than anything else that happened this season. And as previously mentioned, episode twelve has fantastic storyboarding at times in contrast to the overcomplicated scene direction. I rarely have anything good to say about this anime, because when there are positives they hardly last more than a few minutes and make you wish you were watching something else.