Bạn đang xem: Is solo leveling inspired by sword art online? explored
Suffice it lớn say, the Solo Leveling anime had a lot khổng lồ live up to. After watching the first episode, fresh from Japanese studio A-1 Pictures – known for the likes of Sword Art Online, Kaguya-sama, Fairy Tail, Fate/Apocrypha, Wotakoi, 86, Blend S, và many more – I reckon it might actually measure up to lớn that promise.
What Solo Leveling is about
Solo Leveling stars Sung Jin-woo, a young man working as a Hunter in vaguely near-future South Korea. The story picks up over a decade after select humans around the world awakened as super-powered warriors alongside the emergence of interdimensional rifts trang chủ to invasive, otherworldly monsters immune to traditional weaponry. Hunters are ranked from S-tier name-takers to lớn Basically A Normal Person-tier, & Sung Jin-woo sits at the bottom of the bottom. He is just a dude with a knife and an absolute shock of hair. But he stubbornly continues his dangerous career as a Hunter in order to tư vấn his younger sister while his hospitalized mother receives treatment, just barely surviving with help from healers who make sure his insides stay inside.
As a lit
RPG – a genre of fiction that applies the mechanics and conventions of role-playing video clip games – the setup is extremely and proudly game-y, arguably more so than A-1"s Sword Art Online, which at least pretends to lớn be about actual video clip games. Solo Leveling depicts a modern world spliced with swords và magic and magic swords. We"re dealing with monsters lượt thích demons, undead, dragons, goblins, orcs, and giant spiders. The rift inhabitants will feel mostly familiar khổng lồ fans of RPGs, JRPGs, lit
RPGs, or just about any flavor of high fantasy. Hunters are loosely grouped into classic roles like tanks, healers, and damage-dealers, as well as archetypes lượt thích archer, mage, fighter, and so on. Rifts are literally called dungeons, people. It"s very easy to pick up what Solo Leveling is putting down, & it"s not breaking many molds in its world-building.
So why is Solo Leveling so fun? khổng lồ put it as simply as possible, it is cool as all get-out. This is exactly why it was crying out for an anime – perhaps the best medium ever devised for portraying Raw Coolness. As you may have gathered from the teaser trailer or just the fact that this is a lit
RPG, Sung Jin-woo doesn"t stay in the dumpster Hunter tier for very long. Through mysterious means I won"t spoil, he gets one heck of a power nguồn boost that not only steadily increases his fighting strength – a unique và enormous advantage among Hunters who are all locked khổng lồ a predetermined power màn chơi – but also gives him access to lớn abilities that blur the lines between the types of Hunters. He"s an anomaly among anomalies. He quickly becomes this world"s John Wick, basically, và it"s just a joy to watch him work.
(Image credit: Crunchyroll / A-1 Pictures)
The entire story of Solo Leveling is really just one big contrivance to lớn make Sung Jin-woo look lượt thích the most badass dude alive, & I"ll be damned if it doesn"t work. Fight scenes are inventive, intense, & plentiful, and given the scope of some battles, few series are more deserving of the word epic. Purely as narrative material, this would get old pretty quickly. But as a comic, or now an anime? As visual spectacle? Oh it is good. Put that in my eyeballs right the hell now.
Another interesting detail that shapes a lot of the cast"s motivations, as well as global politics, is how the series frames a society that"s evolved khổng lồ accommodate and depend on Hunters. A sense of real danger pervades Solo Leveling. Rifts are bad, y"all. People often die even when Hunters vì show up lớn dungeons in time, so it could not be clearer that normal people would be helpless without them. As a result, Hunters sit somewhere between superheroes, celebrities, mercenaries, and military personnel. The nguồn at their fingertips, physically and geopolitically, is hard to lớn overstate, và it"s fascinating to lớn unpack the guilds, laws, & societal systems that crop up around them. It"s superhero litigation done absolutely right.
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(Image credit: Crunchyroll / A-1 Pictures)
I"d say Solo Leveling"s second-greatest strength – after the art, which nothin" is touchin" – is that Sung Jin-woo is fundamentally a good person who avoids a lot of the traps và tropes that similar series often fall into or misguidedly embrace. There"s nothing particularly nasty about Solo Leveling, which is depressingly rare among nguồn fantasy stories lượt thích this. Sung Jin-woo isn"t a stupid or dramatic teenager, or a horny idiot building a harem to entreat the viewer"s assumed hetero male gaze.
Sung Jin-woo makes mistakes that aren"t brushed off by him being some galaxy brain edgelord who"s always 10 moves ahead. Yes, he"s got more plot armor than a superhero in the first episode of their new Netflix series, but he does face meaningful risks & conflicts even after gaining enormous power – a power that does weigh on his conscience. He"s a solid character & a genuinely decent person – more than enough to move this show along at a healthy pace.
Hopes for the Solo Leveling anime
(Image credit: Crunchyroll / A-1 Pictures)
I"m coming at this from the perspective of someone who"s seen a lot of anime, who read the whole Solo Leveling manhwa và enjoyed it, và who also read some of the original web novel series but didn"t enjoy it nearly as much. For my money, Dubu"s art utterly transformed an altogether adequate, but not amazingly written lit
RPG into something I can"t look away from. A-1 Pictures has the opportunity to vị the same, và is nailing it so far.
The highest praise I can give the comic is this: I read probably too many manhwa on apps lượt thích Tapas and Tappytoon (which both have Solo Leveling, if you want to lớn read it yourself, plus there are now seven physical English volumes), but I vày not read a lot of action manhwa. My manhwa library is filled almost exclusively with dramas and romance stories. Solo Leveling is exactly the kind of thing I usually ignore, but it"s drawn và executed so undeniably well that I simply can"t resist it. It"s the kind of thing I would have devoured when I was 15, but I still really enjoy it now that I"m 30.
The best thing I can say about the altogether excellent anime (after just one episode) is that it"s not only hitting the high bar of the comic"s art style, it"s also deftly layering in new story wrinkles that improve the viewing experience by introducing key ideas much sooner. The debut episode fills in the world, reminds us that A-1 is an animation powerhouse, và paves the way for episode two khổng lồ set the hook. The pacing of the first episode also suggests khổng lồ me that A-1 is banking on this being a relatively long-running series – a few seasons at least. We"ll see how the structure evolves there.
If you lượt thích action anime and Solo Leveling wasn"t already on your watch list, it absolutely should be. It"s airing exclusively on Crunchyroll, with new episodes out each Saturday. The source material is a twice-proven hit, and the anime is shaping up khổng lồ be some of the best and simplest kickass fun we"ll see this year.
For more, check out our guides to lớn the best anime shows & the best Netflix anime.
Austin freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and he"s been with Games
Radar+ since 2019. They"ve yet to realize that his position as a senior writer is just a cover up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he"s kept the ruse going with a focus on news & the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.
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| I believe the main reason people compare it to lớn sao is due khổng lồ a very popular You Tuber making a clip saying that it's literally sao but better. The video is called solo leveling is the sao you wanted with over a million views |
kriissyy12 said:SAO is basically a damn incest harem first before it becomes an Isekai, Solo Leveling actually focuses on the story & characters. It has more in common with Shield anh hùng than it does SAO (not saying it's lượt thích Shield hero either).
Over powered mc. Check
Level based power nguồn system. Check
Every girl the mc meats falls for the mc. Check
Big dungeons. Check
Everyone is not important apart from the mc. Check
Sao does have dungeons. All the quái thú rooms for the floors have a dungeon leading up to them. Và i never said romance, just that every girl they meet fall for them or make flattery comments about them.
SAO has levels but they're not dungeons, at least not by the literal meaning of the word. Danmachi has dungeons, SL has dungeons but SAO does not.
Dude, I know it's hard, but maybe you should rewatch SAO.https://swordartonline.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeon
| They're both nguồn fantasy harem with a bland protagonist self-insert, so there are way more similarity than that title. |
Hassan
IQ9 said:romance is almost non-existent in solo leveling lol. Và what?every girl Jin woo meets fall for him? bro I swear you didn't read the manhwa cuz ur completely wrong.
Dude I never said romance, but almost every girl they meet ether fall for them, or make some kind of phản hồi about there looks.
but bro aat the lat of the manhwa the mc net a yellow haird girl and according khổng lồ fandom they got married.....so romance does exist but at the last
