Winter 2024 Anime: Solo Leveling

Synopsis

It’s been 10 years since “the gate” phenomenon occurred and connected the real world and the dimensions of magical beasts. To save humanity from that disastrous event, some people are gifted with supernatural powers and become Hunters. Sung Jin-Woo, an E-rank Hunter known as “the World’s Weakest”, hunts monsters in low-rank gates to gain money for his mother’s medical bill. After a near-death mission, he wakes up in a hospital with a mysterious “Quest Log” that mandates an intense training program, offering the potential to turn him into a formidable Hunter.

Comments

Mika Ghinannafsi (The Indonesian Anime TImes)

Currently, there’s a trend in Japanese fiction where the characters move from the real world to another world. This trend is better known by fans as isekai. Korean fiction, meanwhile, also has its own trend: Cultivation. Cultivation stories focus on characters who improve their physical or spiritual ability to reach higher levels of power through dedicated training. Cultivation stories often involve themes of perseverance, self-discovery, and the pursuit of enlightenment. Based on a Korean webcomic, Solo Leveling is another anime that lived up to that scenario.

The first episode of this series succeeded in bringing the terror from the Hunter raid to the viewers. Similar feeling when you watch a group raid in another popular anime like Sword Art Online or Attack on Titan. Fantasy terms such as guild, equipment, ranks, etc are easy to understand and make the cultivation plot progression of our main character, Sung Jin Woo, from zero to hero look neat. As we can see in how Sung Jin Woo uses the system, his leveling phase isn’t dragged or rushed.

And because this anime is set in our (real) world, it’s interesting to see how the government and society react to the supernatural issues that happen in their world. As a person who already read the source material, I love the way they do storytelling for this anime adaptation; they put material from further arc in the early episode to build the hype without spoiling anything.

Thanks to A-1 Pictures as the production studio of this anime, the scenes from the webcomic are visualized in beautiful animations. Come from the same studio that also produces animation for other titles like Sword Art Online, The Blue Exorcist, Fairy Tail, 86, and other masterpieces, the composition of the battle scene comes in a way to please our eyes. The flash effect is widely used in this anime to depict combat visuals such as magical blasts and sword flashes, and even to depict the power that the characters have through glowing eyes. The effects are visualized just right, not exaggerating to our eyes.

However, If you watch this anime with subtitles, you may see that the subtitles for character names are different from the dubbing voice because the production team uses Japanese localization for the character names. It’s a minor aspect that may feel “weird” for some people, especially those who already read the webcomic. Ultimately, Solo Leveling is another popcorn anime with a typical shounen-typed plot and “literally me” main character. I would recommend this anime as a good-to-go watchlist before your weekend end.

Facts and Figures

Screenshots and Trailer

The Indonesian Anime Times