Solo leveling is one of the most overrated manga i've ever come across in this platform. Having a staggering 8.97 score, I was hoping its fans were right when everyone claimed it ''wasn't just a generic power fantasy'', and that it would get better over time. Unfortunately that wasn't the case.

This was the first manwha I had ever read, and the art was the aspect I liked most about it. Altough the long stripes were a bit hard to get used to, I enjoyed the expressiveness of the characters. It's a shame the character designs were also a bit generic, but that's forgivable if the art is good enough.

The story starts out in the simplest way possible: Sung Jin-Woo is an E-rank hunter, the lowest on the power scaling of this world, and he's also considered the weakest hunter of that class. By chance, while he is participating in a raid with a crew, they end up trapped in a double lair dungeon, wich is way more than they can handle, and after getting their asses handed to them and having a bunch of people killed, the protagonist re-awakens, gaining a kind of power no one has really seen before. If there was a power fantasy automatic generator, this would probably be the default product. Being formulaic and generic isn't a problem when it's done right (if that were the case, 99% of battle shonens would be trash), but Solo Leveling brings nothing new to the table, and is completely predictable as a result. Every arc consists of the main character getting into a new location with powerful monsters, defeating them, leveling up, rinse and repeat. When there's no real goal the story is aiming towards, and the power scaling is done in the most lazy way possible, by just introducing more powerful enemies whenever an arc ends, it's hard to be satisfying or have any kind of stakes, especially when the worldbuilding is seemingly thrown in at random.

In spite of all that, there are times when the manga isn't completly predictable, more specifically, when the main character is forced to kill humans for the first time by the system. Here we get a glimpse of theming, wich wasn't seen before that, but unfortunetly it never gets mentioned or built upon again, just like the protagonist's ''change of personality'', wich stagnates after a few arcs. Even his desire to heal his mother is basically tossed asside for a long time before ending it in a really non-interesting way. The same can be said of most side characters, who barely get any characterization beyond their surface level personalities or any kind of development.

In the end, what's left is a shallow and predictable story that struggles to bring anything new to the table, wich is true for every aspect of this manwha.