Author: reubenroyk@gmail.com

Solo Leveling was voted as the crunchyroll best anime of the year. Which is such a let down, considering all the great anime that came out alongside Solo Leveling.

Here is trends graph of Attack on Titan vs Solo Leveling and Frieren. Attack on Titan is a show everyone knows of at this point, Frieren has held the title of the best anime every on MyAnimeList for the past two years, and Solo Leveling is all about Aura Farming.

And Aura Farming absolutely crushed good story telling brought forward by Frieren. Solo leveling almost surpassed attack on titan at one point, which means it was likely more popular that several Hollywood movies.

I believe Aura Farming is going to have even more of an impact on anime for a while, because of how well Solo Leveling performed.

Even as a manhwa, it was immediately evident that this series was all about Aura Farming, because of that, the protagonist is never in any real danger. Of course Sung Jinwoo will be victorious and save the day somehow. The show was still fun to watch though.

But then One Punch Man season 3 came out. This was one horribly animated show. Compared to that, yeah, solo leveling was leagues better.

Hiroyuki Sawano made several sound tracks for this show, I guess they really had high hopes for the show, and it did live up to that. All the manhwa readers who proclaimed that this would be one of the most popular anime to come out were proven right.

Still quite a let down that aura farming beat all the other good show.

I watched this since it was so highly rated, I figured the series would be absolutely amazing by the end perhaps. But I truly don’t know. I’m watching Clannad After-Story at this point, and the show is quite boring.

The best part about the show to me is how un-addicting it is. It takes little will-power to close the tab and go back to work, which is see as a huge win. But it would be awesome if the series was fun as well.

You can truly see that animating things back then was far more difficult. The series is very slow, not that it wastes time, but animation was simply harder to do back then.

I saw reviews mentioning how the anime completely broke people and left them sobbing. And here I am watching it at an increased speed and skipping through emotional bits. I know what they’re going to say, it’s incredibly predictable, I don’t need to see it.

Wasted time:

The show does waste time though, there are ghosts and spirits, who we spend hours and hours with, after which they seem to have no relevance what-so-ever. Why did we invest so much time into this ghost if nothing important was to happen concerning the ghost?

Outside of Clannad having an after-story which shows difficult parts of a relationship, I can’t really see what’s special about this show.

The show is as interesting or often times less interesting than your own life. Mostly nothing happens.

I’ve heard it was the bees knees back in the day, it doesn’t seem that way to me now.

Has really really nice fight scenes, and the story is cool, sound tracks are cool, action sequences are awesome.

Each noble phantasm and their summoners have different powers and limitations. And everyone is one mistake away from death. The limitations along with their varying ideologies make the show feel so alive.

One of the best world building I’ve seen in anime. Studio orange who animated this kinda stood out with it’s choice to heavily rely on CGI. But it is largely agreed that it was a fantastic decision considering how well this anime turned out.

The character development was so good in this series. If the characters in this series get chipped or lose parts of their body, they literally lose parts of their memory. And if they replace it some other item instead of the piece they lost, their character is altered according to how large the modification was. And there are a lot of instances exactly where this happens.

There is only one human in the whole story and he has special powers. The gem stone people go around destroying sun spots, and it’s not clear why they’re doing this or why the sun spots are trying to steal the gems. My initial guess was that maybe they can combine different things and create a human, but I am too uninformed to say if that’s true. There is no much mystery, so much to discover, and it’s all so well laid out.

The sound tracks created for the show work wonderfully together as well.

It feels like I’ve only seen a small portion of what the story has in store and I’m really excited to see or read what’s up ahead.

I had high hopes for this anime, since I’d read the manga quite a bit and liked it a lot. It had all these cool terms and designations for different types of lords and beasts.

Something I really liked about the story was how the main character would build things which would end up making a huge difference for MC and his crew. I thought this was really nice to see since innovation was set on high pedestal and this is often true in real life as well.

But I did not like the harem like nature of the show, it seemed childish and lame.

The anime however did not live up to my expectations and while it was engaging, it was nothing to write home about.

Several cool details like the awakeners of god were simply mentioned and forgotten. The original manga contains much more details and world building.

In the anime I was able to notice important points like how the MC wasn’t truly a very good person, not the typical protagonist. He was manipulative and calculating.

He would beat up and kill fellows to make an example out of them. Favor women over men, so that he could eventually sleep with the women and eat the men. Give captured enemy soldier the freedom to leave, but later go and kill them once they’re far enough away from headquarters. In every step the main character is thinking about how something can benefit himself or his familiars. And it’s truly evident that the crew only matters to him because it becomes an extension of himself after a while.

He and only he mattered to the MC for much of the beginning of the show. And that really made the show quite unique.

This is a good adaptation, but perhaps not the best series to adapt into an anime. Without better script keeping it interesting, it becomes rather boring a show.

Decent animation. The story is rather peaceful at the start, and I was somehow reminded of Frieren. Later on, I found out that there really wasn’t all that much behind the anime in terms of story. It was simply, there’s this really strong water mage, because he’s the main character, and we get to watch him show off to others just how strong and superior he is.

A lot of animation looks really good though.

And thankfully not every scene ends with MC showing up and saving the day. Although all the important ones come to an end with the MC’s help.

I wasn’t sure I would like this, but decided to give it a shot anyway since the trailer received a lot of attention. The first episode was alright and I was somewhat impressed by how well the animation studio made use of the short run-time.

After the first episode though, it quality of the show fell off a short cliff. Nothing much really happened throughout the other episodes. Plenty of time was wasted going over meaningless details, like the arrangement of the rooms in cleaners headquarters, food and mc eating food – which added almost nothing to the story, backstories of side-characters who would be killed off very quickly and much more.

Every other shot was a little too long. Several episodes can be completely skipped and you would have missed nothing.

The show acts like it doesn’t have enough material to work to animate into a nice show, it’s literally the first season, they should have plenty of material to use.

The show kept me interested enough to watch the next episode. But every few minutes I would be reminded of how absolutely nothing important happened in the whole episode.

Overall: Disappointing