"Average" is exactly the word to describe the feeling of reading Solo Leveling. As much as it's fun to read some parts, a lot of things ended up annoying me and that took off most of the excitement of every new chapter. Here I will try to briefly say some positives and negatives of this story so far. Hope it will be helpful.

The first few chapters start up really good. We're introduced to a character struggling to survive as a hunter, a professional that raids portals filled with monster that appear randomly in the world, despite being one of the weakest in in his rank, that's also the lowest. Sung Jin-Woo's problems and fears feel very real and it's easy to sympathize with him, until a certain incident happens while in a mission inside a portal.

After the incident, Jin-Woo receives a unique power never seen before in his world and things go pretty much downhill from there. The personality he had is slowly lost while he becomes more and more powerful, falling into the very old trope of "mysterious gloomy character that somehow everyone likes, specially at least 3 girls that have a crush on him". In the latest chapters Jin-Woo doesn't even break a sweat in the challenges he faces, and while it's exciting seeing how powerful he is, it takes a lot of the thrill of the fights. He met his original goal and his other smaller objectives are easy to deal with, he doesn't need to fight to survive anymore and is strong enough to defeat enemies with ease, so what *is* the point of the story?

I ended up being more interested in secondary characters like Baek Yoon-Ho, Min Byung-Gyu and Choi Jong-In, who had different views and personalities, and that's what truly kept me curious about where all of this is going. Specially in the last chapters the author introduced us to a lot of interesting characters with great designs that intrigued me quite a bit, but in the end neither them nor the main character are really explored well so it's kinda disappointing. Specially with Sung Jin-Woo as he has a lot of opportunities to grow and change psychologically because of all the risks and problems he had to face. Ultimately nothing of this happens and we just have a shallow main character and even shallower secondary ones.

The worldbuilding is ordinary, with some engaging notions but nothing too impressive. As for the plot, whilst having some really cool original concepts that weren't really explored in anime in general, at a lot of occasions I caught myself thinking "wait, I'm sure I've seen this somewhere before" with a lot of events in the story, which was kind of boring sometimes. Of course, nowadays it's pretty difficult to come up with a totally original concept and really, that's okay! Because what truly makes a story fresh and captivating is the narrative: the way the author shows the information and makes us think.

And that's something that also disappointed me a bit with Solo Leveling. Important information being shown only at convenient times, a lot of relevant characters appearing in the span of a few chapters that we end up forgetting about shortly after and some really, really poor attempts at plot twists. It's not terrible writing, but so average that these small things make us notice other frustrating parts, specially the same overused tropes of basically every fantasy manga/anime ever.

All in all, it's actually not so bad. I enjoyed a lot of characters and moments, was awed by the eye catching art, but as time passed it became just really bland and forgettable. As each chapter is released I notice more and more the tons of clichés and questionable narrative and this just tosses in the trash all the emotions I initially felt with the story. It's a good webcomic (now manga I guess) for those who don't really care for plot details as much as I do and enjoy really cool fighting scenes, but at the same time I think some parts could have been done differently and maybe better than it is.