No.

 

Finished it right now. The art is gorgeous.

 

So I burned through the 72 chapters that are out right now, here are my thoughts:

- art is excellent. I love the colors and movements. Some of the monster designs are outstanding.

- the story does manage to get emotional reactions of me from time to time. There are also some cool scenes, like that one knight boss disarming when the MC does. Or when he gets a new class, all of that was really, really cool.

- the last three or so chapters introduced some potentially interesting characters if they are allowed to matter in the long term, of which I have my doubts.

- Those were all the good points, unfortunately. Story peaked early for me, as the first dungeon was by far the most interesting and compelling piece of story-telling. The monster and dungeon aspects were visually fascinating and the mechanics threatening. Having a monster so much stronger that will kill anyone if you don't obey the rules is just so much more fun to read about than serious, OP isekai protag -esque boy who is just ceaselessly complaining that he is not strong enough while slaughtering whatever boring monster he faces with his leet skills.

Characters are not much to write home about. There was potential there at the beginning, but none of the starting cast really mattered, either dying or retiring. That the one girl was relegated to traumatized healer who quit was disappointing, since I tend to like healer characters and she wasn't given much to do but be afraid. Really hope she gets a come-back storyline where she overcomes her mental hang-ups and can not only live up to but improve her B-level potential but I doubt it.

The old man who lost his arm was kinda interesting as well but not by much, and then the story kinda forgot about him. The rich kid was just lame, and it kills me that the least interesting guy is the only one who stuck around. The friend of the sister didn't have anything to do either outside of stand there and be kinda hypocritically lectured.

The main character is...boring, all things considered. His initial motivation to make money for his sick mother and I think support his student sister which drove him to risk his life adventuring despite being shit at it was an interesting enough concept, all things considered. Not groundbreaking, mind you, but still, enough. Just too bad the story kinda forgets about it as the owing money issue is only paid lip-service to once and he pretty quickly accumulates a fortune. All there is to him is the drive to become stronger because being weak is bad which is just not that interesting or fun to read about, tbh, at least to me. Sure would have been nice to meet the mother before chapter 60, or get to know his sister on some level. Also not sure how the medical debt thing works since we learn how he constantly has to be hospitalized at the beginning, sometimes for quite some time, because of how often he gets injured but that never seems to amount to anything. Really feel the story would have benefited dedicating a longer time to experiencing the weakness-poverty spiral there.

Same with the fight scenes. Like the first dungeon was so great because it managed to carry the tension of being in over their head with a terrifying monster (and the artwork sold the threat and creepiness of that monster so well. Like that moment where he figured out they need to bow to live, they all do, the monster stops attacking and then starts to grin in a really threatening and unsettling way was such a great OH SHIT moment). Every fight after lacked both, the tension and creativity of that scene. It's just a mostly emotionless, kinda edgy protag killing monsters whose only motivation is being evil.

The story is just throwing a shit load of monsters at him and no matter how often his internal monologue keeps repeating the beats of "there are so many, I need to conserve my stamina/mana" or "I need to be even stronger" it just doesn't make me feel anything because I know he is going to just get through this and level up and get even more skills and items. There is no emotional anchor to any of these fights, it's just him fighting a bunch of level appropriate mooks to raise his stats, get XP and items. It's basically reading about someone grinding in an MMO. Would rather do it myself while listening to a podcast, if I wanted that experience.

Another issue I have with things like that is that once a character has too many of those, it's hard to keep track of all of their abilities. The story is not quite there yet but I have the feeling it is going there. It also makes things less fun if they have the perfect power for the situation at hand. Always found it more rewarding if a character could make their few skills work for the current problem via creativity, quick thinking, ruthlessness or whatever. Good example for that is Taylor from Worm or even Luffy from One Piece. Characters like this dude have so many skills, they merely just pull out the ability scissors if they face problem paper. And sometimes he just lucks himself into great powers. Like the did not do the daily quest thing when getting the job, would have been more rewarding if that had been his plan, exploiting that as a loophole rather than lucking into that by coincidence at the perfect moment.

Also noticed how skills like "MC gets a 30% increase in whatever" are important in games but are surprisingly boring to read about. Like in games they matter and feel good because over dozens of hours you will get into hundreds of fights where you will notice percentages in your capabilities. Get less damage by monsters is a cool skill to have for your tank after you have failed defeating a particular boss but then after getting that skill or raising your stats so that you can finally defeat it, but the story is not really building up the character or the monsters that way. He is getting too much stuff in too short of a time, imo. Like that knight boss, he should have lost the first time horribly, just barely escaping with his life, then grind to get better equipment and level up and try it a few more times until he finally got good enough to simulate that MMO feeling of finally beating a boss after many tries. I do get how that might also have been boring to read about but I guess I would have rather had that and fewer fights overall than him cruising through several monsters and a few shitty humans who love killing.

Also really don't care about that S-rank brother guy who is just a powerful, selfish asshole with nothing interesting or threatening about him. Just a bad person with a lot of power out for revenge for an equally shitty person with less power. Same with the father, there don't seem to be any surprises there. It's all just so boring.

I did like the fact that the story kinda acknowledges/hints at that his single minded pursuit for strength is not actually a good thing and that it is hurting the few social relationships he has. Too bad it was just one scene of his sister worrying that he might not show up but instead of exploring that dynamic it was just used to show how hot and cool he was not to all the young students in his sisters school. I wish it went there and did something interesting.

The last few chapters, introducing the larger world with the guilds and S-class people picks the pace up again after the roughly 50 chapters of boring grinding but dunno if the story will commit to those or just have the dude get stronger and crush them all. Hope the new characters can matter there.

So yeah, artwork is brilliant and I did read everything so far, so clearly it is working on some level but it just seems so much wasted potential and lazy story telling, just hitting the same tropes.

 

I love these kind of ad-hoc RPG systems, so this was actually a name I'd heard before this thread. I'd tried to read it and dropped it because I found the beginning excruciating, but there's some strong positive comments here so I gave it a second chance. I'm glad I did. The beginning was dire, and although I'll agree the artwork was nice, it felt like there was an excess of bloat background panels to scroll through endlessly - perhaps intentionally as a cheap way of content production without needing any plot to fill those pages.

It's never particularly deep and barely qualifies as a story, but I enjoyed what's been translated so far. It's given me the craving to play an MMO - thankfully my internet connection is so poor that I'm at no risk of that particular weeb disease.

There are hints of interesting characters - well, not so much characters as interesting human tropes. Those have been forgotten about as soon as they've been introduced, but there's always a possibility that these will be revisited over time and see progress. Surprisingly, this does a decent job of giving me a willing suspension of disbelief whenever we wind up in a dire situation. Yeah, of course we all know the protagonist is going to pull a secret skill out of his ass every time, but I found myself looking for an actual game to play with mechanics vaguely like this afterwards, so the rule of cool moments managed to carry me through.

I won't be following every release on this, but six months or something I'll be reminded that it exists and be excited to read however much has been translated by that point.

 

I dunno if anyone else has noticed, but due to scanlator drama all chapters of Solo Levelling were removed by the scanlators.

Short & biased summary of what happened:
When Batoto went down, mangadex rose from the ashes. It promised a bunch of things: non-retarded moderation, a safe haven for scanlators, and no ads. Somehow it actually manages to achieve all three, even with some other sites regularly trying to DDOS it into an early grave.

However, if everyone reads everything on mangadex, then there's no way people will go to the scanlators' sites and give them ad money. This was a problem. Therefore, when one of the admins said they might eventually look into going "legit" (whatever that meant), a bunch of these scanlators rebelled.

To summarize a long list of names no one except those that are way too invested in scanlation recognize, Jaimini's Box was the most prominent scanlator that pulled all of their manga from the site. They'd already been given a lot of extra leeway by being given a delayed release schedule so that chapters released on mangadex two weeks after they were released on their own site, so I think this proves they're just greedy dicks. Anyway.

JB's series are popular, though, so now you've got at least four different groups all "working" with different degrees of seriousness on Solo Levelling. Current list of chapters that are out on MD: 0, 75, and two versions of 76. The second of which is a shitpost, as evidenced by the following:

Spoiler

 

The admins later specified in a post that going legit would be essentially impossible due to various rights. Besides, the main issue as I understand it was an issue of moderation (as in what belongs where and who gets to say what) - some groups wanted to address some stuff in chapter discussions but site rules forbade that, and some groups felt that they got too much negative feedback (undeserved too - bunch of "more" and "shit translation").

Lots of groups were generally pissed off, and lack of dialogue led to them leaving. Some of the issues were addressed, but the big ones remaining are negative feedback that isn't deleted, because there isn't a large team figuring out if "shit translation" is fair or not, and of course the money issue.

This is admittedly based on what the admins said and what I gathered from a few threads, so who knows how accurate this is.

 

One could, of course, just go to JB's site and read their version still. It's what I'd been doing from the beginning.

 

Manga's going on a short break now that its "first season" is over, so if you want to catch up, now's not a bad time.

 

Second 'season' of Solo Levelling has started. I like what we're seeing some far. Some more world-building. There doesn't necessarily appear to be a break in the formula, but enough of what made it enjoyable while presenting changes in circumstances that seem interesting, what with running his own Guild, and the eventual return to that first dungeon.

 

Thanks for bumping this. I binged it and I loved it. The art is outstanding and it’s easy to follow. Does anyone got anything similar out there?