The whole story not only is filled to the brim with weird onomatopoeias and unnecessary details, but the main drive seems to be obnoxiously linear: some guy kills some monsters to level up and then kills some more monsters to level up again.
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| When I picked up the book, it had this boring lether-imitation cover, not like now that it has illustrations. |
Now, I know that there's an awful lot of LN with the main character in one way or the other making the power of their enemies their own, and although the idea is simplistic and quite shonen to speak the truth, some people manage it better than others.
Solo leveling is disgustingly tracing Overlord up to the point where the main character becomes a "shadow monarch" (a powerful type of necromancer) but with a total lack of politics and panorama, not to mention that Chugong (the writer) seems to be writing a very self centered power fantasy.
Unlike Murayama, he puts the dungeons (the fantasy elements) in the modern world, overriding all the medieval ambiance that's a core part of the fantasy. The places where Jinwoo enters have a very rough description and all the female characters seem to be in love with him. There are unanswered questions, that might be answered in the future but probably won't;
Like what differentiates a "player" from a "hunter", why there's no register of "players" before Jinwoo, what's the temple with the dense laser-eyes god statue that almost killed him, why it has never appeared before, why are the riddles of the temple so stupid and why is Jinwoo the only one to solve them, etc.
Amidst all this, there's some kind of masturbatory pleasure in the leveling system, and every five pages Chu reminds us what Jinwoo's stats are, even the unchanged ones. With that method, I could make even the little prince a 5000 pages book.
Update 13/9/22
As it turns out the whole killing monsters to level up was the fun part. Later comes the plot part.
Some god puts a bunch of light guys in a pit fight with a bunch of dark guys, and it's stupid enough to get killed by his creations because they realized that this was all a plot of "the absolute being" (If he's so absolute then how come he's dead?) and that the war will never come to an end while he's still breathing.
Guess what happens after he dies? the war continues.
At all that the dark guys began to call themselves "sovereigns" because it sounds cool and the light guys were like "Hey, me too!" and began to call themselves "rules". As for what they rule, god knows. Or not. Because he's dead.
Anyways, at all this, there's the sovereign of shadows (AKA the shadow bastard) that's somewhere between the dark and the light. Also, he's a fan of the black sabbath. So much so that of all the names he could have chosen he choose Osborne.
Anyways, "the architect" build "the system" (the whole leveling thing) to help "the vessel" (Jinwoo) to become stronger so that he wouldn't break when Ozzy came down to earth. Ozzy says "Nah" and backstabs him, and now Jinwoo is killing all the sovereigns to save the planet.
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