>>3745I ain't gonna have you trash Eminence like that, much less in favor of this garbage.
I'm gonna compare the two using the "enemy tries to kill MC, MC resists, enemy powers up, MC bodies them" sequence that occurs early on for both. These events occur in volume 2 and 1 for each, pretty early on, the comparison is clearly warranted.
When Sung is fighting against the lizards, the sequence of events is pretty simple: it empowers itself, and Sung responds by slamming it into the ground, saying it's not going to forgive it, and decapitating it. But when Zenon drinks the cult pills in episode 5, going through a much more radical transformation, Shadow responds by
going motherfucking nuclear after giving a speech considerably more dramatic than anything Jin-Woo ever says. It's on an entirely different level, and there is no kill like overkill. There's a noticeable difference when it comes to how the two handle themselves, too. Whereas Sung is always simply fighting in order to progress the pile of numbers and ranks they mention fifty times per chapter, Shadow is constantly working towards making things as epic as possible, he has full control of the situation at all times. He doesn't teleport behind people merely for the sake of out-speeding them in combat, he does so as an art, which culminates in the magistral, flawless scene of his rooftop fight with Beatrix in episode 20. Sung fights because he needs to, Shadow fights because he wants to. The interspersed tomfoolery does not conflict with it, they complement each other.
Solo Leveling is just a guy playing a videogame. His main way of healing is delaying the rewards of a daily quest. His equipment comes from bosses whose ability is "has too much resistance to be hurt normally/be affected by debuffs" (reading the Hunters Guild Gate Arc right now and they're AGAIN, STILL doing this exact boring shit with the high orcs, then with Sung himself) so he uses the damage of his punches (however that works) or stabs them in a weak point. It's like he's grinding through dungeons with even character creation on autoplay, without putting any thought into it because all the abilities he gains simply fall into his lap. The pummeling he receives is superficial, he never actually fails, he simply pushes through. And the dialogue, they repeat so much shit so often and it matters so little that by the time I reached the Return to Demon Castle arc I simply glanced past most of it. It doesn't make a difference.
It's not as over the top as Maou Gakuin, it doesn't have the meta-enhanced extremity of Eminence, it's not the tabletop exploration of Goblin Slayer (throwing it in because edgy RPGs), it's nowhere close to the despair induced by the undead sovereign of Overlord, I wouldn't even put it on par Bofuri's easy-going power trip, what little it has going for it is just generic. So much of the cool stuff he does you could find by playing vidya yourself, like Wrath of the Righteous or PoE. It takes way too much time to ramp up, and it continues being thoroughly unoriginal after doing so, especially since all the drama is pretty much irrelevant. As the Jeju arc shows, only Sung matters, and none of the other hunters are given the time to be fleshed out either. They're just a buncha strong dudes. Unlike other stories that either take the time to build up side characters or shake up the situation (another thing Shadow consciously pursues), Solo Leveling keeps doing the same stuff all the way through. The scale is said to increase, except it's still decided by 1v1s between Sung and the current boss where they just beat the crap out of each other. Somehow it keeps adjusting the difficulty so that (at least up the Jeju's end) the difference between Sung and the main enemies isn't that big, meaning there are no truly powerful punches like
I am atomic or TGoALID and Iä Shub Niggurath. That's why the only thing people praise is the pretty colors.
So I'm voting for it again, since it's
bad.