Manwha

I read the Solo Leveling manhwa years before Crunchyroll ever touched it, scrolling through chapters on my phone half convinced no studio would do Sung Jinwoo’s fights justice on a screen. Too much scale. Too much shadow. Too many panels that only land because a webtoon page can freeze one single frame forever. Then A-1 Pictures picked up the rights, Crunchyroll locked a premiere date, and on January 6, 2024, episode one dropped.

I watched it with the specific dread of someone who’s seen a favorite book flattened into a movie before.

That dread lasted about ten minutes.

An E-Rank Hunter With Nothing Left to Lose

The setup: mysterious gates connect our world to monster-filled dungeons, and a fraction of humanity has awakened as “hunters” to fight what comes through. Sung Jinwoo drew the short straw. He’s E-rank, the lowest tier that exists, and the show doesn’t soften how pathetic that makes his life. He’s injured constantly, mocked by hunters who outrank him, and barely scraping together enough to cover his mother’s hospital bills. He keeps walking into dungeons anyway, terrified every time, because there’s no other option on the table.

Then the double dungeon hits. The animation during that whole catastrophe is genuinely stunning, lighting and sound design working together to make the dread feel physical. When Jinwoo chooses to shield the others instead of running, it’s the setup for everything that follows: a mysterious System selects him as its sole player.

The System Turns Grinding Into a Plot

Jinwoo wakes up in the hospital with a game-style interface only he can see. Quests, stats, an inventory screen. As someone who reads a lot of LitRPG, this is exactly the mechanism I show up for. It scratches the same itch as Iron Prince by Bryce O’Connor and Luke Chmilenko, where the appeal isn’t the power itself, it’s watching a character claw their way toward it one earned point at a time.

Early on, Jinwoo’s quests are push-ups and running, and there’s something genuinely funny about how much he celebrates one measly stat point. By episode 3, he’s taking on his first solo dungeon, and the animation team stops holding back. Every strike has weight behind it. There’s a beat where he registers he isn’t afraid anymore, and his face sells the whole moment. It plays like someone discovering a superpower they didn’t know they had.

The Betrayal That Toughens Him Up

Episode 5 brings Yoo Jinho into the picture, though the season’s ugliest turn belongs to Hwang Dongsuk, the party leader of the C-rank raid Jinwoo joins who abandons the weaker members to save himself. It’s the kind of casual cruelty the early episodes have been building toward, and it’s what pushes Jinwoo to start trusting his own instincts over anyone else’s chain of command.

By episode 7, the System drops him into an instant dungeon built entirely around him, a hundred floors guarded first by a three-headed Cerberus. No party, no backup. Two episodes later he’s up against Kang Taeshik, a Hunter Association agent sent to quietly eliminate him. It’s a nasty, close-range fight, poison and a severed tendon, no tricks involved, and it proves Jinwoo’s strength is real even without whatever the System is still holding back.

Arise: The Ending That Changes Everything

Then episodes 11 and 12 detonate the whole premise. A job-change quest drops Jinwoo in front of a knight guarding an empty throne, and the fight reveals what he actually is: not just a leveled-up E-rank, but the reincarnation of something called the Shadow Monarch. When he finally speaks the command that becomes his whole identity, “Arise,” and pulls his first shadow soldier, Igris, out of a fallen enemy, the season recontextualizes everything that came before it. All that grinding wasn’t just survival. It was setup.

Jinho and Cha Hae-In Keep Jinwoo Human

Despite the title, Jinwoo doesn’t actually go it alone. His friendship with Yoo Jinho, a sheltered, well-off hunter who sees something in Jinwoo before anyone else does, gives the show real heart. Jinho’s wide-eyed enthusiasm plays nicely off Jinwoo’s growing stoicism. There’s a scene where Jinho is visibly terrified going into a dungeon and trying to hide it, and instead of the mockery he’d get from anyone else, Jinwoo just walks him through it. It’s a small moment, but it shows Jinwoo hasn’t forgotten what being weak actually felt like.

Cha Hae-In, an S-rank hunter who can smell other hunters’ power levels, gets a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in the premiere, handling a purse snatcher before vanishing from the plot entirely. It’s a tease, not a meeting. Manhwa readers know she becomes a much bigger part of Jinwoo’s story, but Season 1 is content to just plant the flag.

If you’re into anime built from webtoon source material the way this one is, The God of High School is worth a look for a very different take on the same pipeline.

The Animation and Sound Do the Heavy Lifting

A-1 Pictures earned the hype Crunchyroll built ahead of the premiere. The fight choreography has real weight to it, the monster designs (the high orcs especially, and the Cerberus in the mid-season raid) are legitimately unsettling, and the System’s UI could have been a cheesy overlay but instead feels sleek and built into the scene. Level-ups and skill acquisitions land with visual and audio cues that make progression feel earned rather than announced.

The standout sequence is the Igris fight in episode 11, the one where Jinwoo’s power finally reveals itself as something more than stat points. It’s widely regarded as the best-animated episode of the season, and it earns that: speed, weight, and a scale that makes clear this isn’t the same character from episode 1. I rewound it more than once just to catch what I’d missed.

And the opening theme, “LEvel” by TOMORROW X TOGETHER, has been stuck in my head for weeks. It’s not decoration. The score ramps tension in the quiet stretches and pushes hard in the battles, and there’s a specific cue tied to leveling up that gets me every time.

Why It Works Even If You Skip the Manhwa

Solo Leveling balances power fantasy against actual character growth better than most shows in this genre attempt. Watching Jinwoo go from E-rank punching bag to whatever he becomes by episode 12 is satisfying on its own, but the show never lets you forget why any of it matters to him. Every stat point traces back to a hospital bill he can’t pay and a mother he can’t lose. The finale doesn’t erase that. It just hands him the tools to finally do something about it.

Every new ability feels earned instead of handed out, which is the difference between a power fantasy that works and one that doesn’t.

The Verdict

Season 1 is a 9.5 out of 10. The only reason it isn’t a 10 is that I already know how much bigger this story gets, and now I have to wait for more of it. For newcomers, it’s an easy way into a compelling world. For manhwa readers, it’s proof the adaptation was worth the wait.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an “Arise” to rewatch.