Solo Leveling: ARISE Review

Played on PC & iPhone XR

Developed by Netmarble Neo

Released 8th May 2024

'Solo Leveling' is easily the biggest manhwa series out there, having about half of all other manhwa try to recreate its success, and many praising and loving its simple yet compelling power-fantasy narrative, whether it be in its original light novel format, or the beautifully fluid drawn webtoon. This success and popularity have created a demand and supply of an anime adaptation with a second season arriving soon, a sequel light novel and webtoon, and now, a video game. If you can't tell, I'm a massive 'Solo Leveling' fan with it being in my top 5 favourite manga/manhwas out there so when I heard the series was going to get a video game release, I was ecstatic. Then it was revealed to be a mobile game; I was disappointed. And once it came out; I became addicted. The point is, my experience with the game has been a rollercoaster, playing it daily for 2 months straight after its release, and now getting back into it. The main reason I enjoy the game so much is because of my love for the source material, of which the development team worked closely with the original author, Chu-gong, to make the most authentic experience possible, borrowing and building off of the original story as much as they could've. I'm not the only one who enjoyed this as in its pre-registration phase, the game attracted over 12 million pre-registrations recorded within half a month and, after release, more than 15 million downloads worldwide, claiming the top spot on the “Top Free Games” chart on Google Play. But, it's not perfect.

Story

The story of 'ARISE' is simply a retelling of the original 'Solo Leveling' where, in a world filled with magical gates that open to release evil creatures like goblins, lycans and demons, there are also humans blessed with magical abilities called Hunters that fight these gates off. The protagonist, Sung Jinwoo, is considered to be the weakest Hunter of mankind before coming across a life-threatening gate that gives him the ability to progressively grow stronger in a world where the power dynamics are static. This increase in strength is shown to look like that of a video game user interface and why 'Solo Leveling' seemed like a perfect fit for an adaptation of this kind.

All the chapters are almost a 1-1 retelling, albeit with some scenes and lines of dialogue scrapped to make the narrative more snappy. Even the cutscenes follow this format, as they are just animated webtoon panels. If you have already read the manhwa or watched the anime's first season, then this retelling is a solid way to recap the story for fans. But if this is your first exposure to the narrative, it might serve as a nice bridge for you to cross to engage with the manga/manhwa medium. Yet, it will likely come across as underwhelming, empty and undeveloped as the context for some plot points is either diverted to side chapters, not explained well enough or completely abandoned. Additionally, the pacing will feel rough due to the story being halted by the grinding and damage-inflating that the gameplay sections contain. However, a redeeming quality is that many story chapters will also have bonus side stories that act as a way to build the characters' motives and personalities for the main chapter that has just occurred, some of which aren't present in the original webtoon but can be considered to be cannon due to the author's direct involvement with the game. While nice bonuses for both new and returning source material fans, they do have the same issues of coming across as plain as the main story.

Gameplay

The gameplay is not too different from what you'd come to expect from a title designed for mobile play. For a quick rundown; it's essientally a gacha game no different from 'Genshin Impact'. For something more in-depth, there are 3 core elements to what the game offers: the gambling in upgrade, the additional actions and the "solo" levelling. The part of the game that might interest you and you've most likely seen via screenshots and videos is the "solo" levelling - the action. This might be up there as the most enjoyable combat system I've seen on a mobile-focused game as it takes form in a third-person hack'n'slash where you can build up a combo and spam cool-ass, cinematic abilities.

You can play as the protagonist of the original story, Sung-Jin Woo, and track his progress with abilities and weapons that you can mix and match to suit your playstyle, or you can play as a strike squad trio of Hunters found in the manhwa's world with fixed weapons, combos and abilities. It was quite entertaining to become a "player" like Sung-Jin Woo does in his tale, and being able to use whatever weapons and abilities did satisfy that RPG fiend within me, making me feel like I could create my own 'Solo Leveling' story. Additionally, being able to play as the side-characters, especially the S-rank Hunters, and feel just as powerful as you'd come to expect them to be, further fuelled that power fantasy aesthetic that was achieved in the original manhwa, and what possibly made me and many other gravitate to its world and setting. For the actual gameplay loop, there isn't as much galore. In the game's early stages, there isn't much to this otherwise simple system as all you do is click attack and spam your abilities when they're off cooldown. Fortunately, the more you get into the game, the greater the challenge becomes as it's essential to perfect dodge and time which abilities to use when. That dopamine-rushed-idle-clicker mentality never dissipates, but with the range of enemies, visuals and cinematics that occur, combined with the occasional focus on difficulty (mostly found in bossfights), this critical fault can easily become excused.

What can't be excused, is the egregious need to grind hours on the game or spend money simply just to progress, as the case of artificial difficulty imprints itself on the game's identity. Not even by the halfway point of the 18 chapters that are currently available (as of the time of writing this) the experience finds itself swarmed with enemies that have inflated health and damages values. With the ability to dodge and use ranged weapons, this would be fine (for a moment) if it wasn't for the 3-minute timer that can be found on every level and results in a fail if the time runs out. Why is there a timer? Why? It's the most unnecessary, rage-inducing fail mechanic that you can add to a game like this, as it encourages speed over precision and forces duels between enemies (especially bosses) to feel rushed rather than like spectacles. The game's solution to this? Aggressive monetisation.

When you first boot into the game, you'll be greeted with several ads and offers on how you should spend real money on summon tickets. These tickets are then used to randomly give you either a new character or weapon, with higher rarities appearing less often. Standard gacha stuff so far. What really sucks about this system is that getting an SSR-tier character or weapon is less than a 1% chance occurrence and you need to use 64 summon tickets to improve these chances to just over 1% and, if you're really unlucky, will need to use a total of 80 tickets to get a guaranteed SSR-tier. These probabilities reset once you get an SSR tier. Are these tokens easy to come across? Can you get SSR-tier any other way? Is this crucial to the base gameplay loop? No, no and yes. The monetisation of this game is violently aggressive and beats down on the rest of its elements. Needing to essientally gamble to unlock a character or weapon just to progress in the story damages the flow, commitment and patience a player has for the game and even turned me, a hardcore 'Solo Leveling' fan, away at some points.

The last aspect of this game is a collection of additional activities that you can do. There are boss fight speed trials, a hard mode of the campaign which makes every enemy inflict elemental effects, character stories where you play through a Hunter's starting days at their guild, an encyclopedia of weapons and armour, minigames related to a recently released Hunter; there is a lot of extra stuff you can do, all of them aren't as meaningful to upgrading yourself as simply doing the main story or gambling your money away on summon tickets, but the inclusion of this extra stuff does freshen up the game when its in desperate need of it. The whole package is overall not too bad, it suffers from its potent monetisation that fuels an otherwise scummy and cheap way to progress, but with the content being faithful to the source material and genuinely being entertaining to engage with, I was able to look past some of its faults to see it simply as a fun time, but I know many, if not most, won't be able to forgive these damages.

Bossfights

As for the bossfights, they definitely bring out the best of the gameplay as these duels consist of tight timing, attack patterns that are as challenging as they are cinematic and epic to deal with, and narrative significance that made my inner fanboy joyous at witnessing them in game-form. The Kasaka, Cereberus, Baruka, and Igris; are all excellent fights that, while still limited to that mobile gameplay feel, do live up to the expectations I had set with them. The visuals are clean and flashy, if not occasionally clustered with effects, and while it's not as audibly good as it is optically, the soundtrack does make enough of an effort to make itself pronounced.

Characters

Unlike the story, there isn't much for me to say about the characters as the segments that the main story cuts out are these crucial character-building moments, and the side chapters do little to bring out that necessary effect. It's hard for me to truly say the quality of how these characters are presented given how invested I was in the manhwa, anime and now sequel, but if I were to attempt to strip away this clear bias towards them and focus solely on their performances here, they're still enjoyable caricatures. Sure, they're not as interesting as I'm giving them props for now, but the game does a solid enough job of portraying all of their core characteristics in the short time frame that the cutscenes and dialogue allow them to be, even if they do come across as one-dimensional more often than not.

Atmosphere

The atmosphere is not too different from other games that are based on anime/manga/manhwa titles with the standard, highly eccentric colour palette on cel-shaded models. The artistic design of 'Solo Leveling' was never at its forefront, with the webtoon utilising the movement of the drawings and the contrast between the black and blue Shadow army to make it stand out so much. Besides the relatively gorgeous environments, this effect doesn't translate so fluently to the video game format as everything is moving and such contrasts aren't possible with 3D models. As a result, the enemies look like the basic expectation of fantasy creatures like goblins and orcs, while the Hunters don't carry the same flair despite having their designs faithfully adapted. This issue is partially fixed with how much the special effects swarm your screen covering up the less interesting parts of the visuals, but that does make it a burden at some points to not be able to see the screen as clearly. As for the audio, it's effective in terms of the sound effects, but not so much for the music. The sound effects are visceral, high-energy and exactly what was needed to make the combat all the more enjoyable and fit that over-the-top energy you'd find in an anime/manga/manhwa. The soundtrack, unfortunately, doesn't evoke the same kind of feel, being quite minimal and, dare I say, bland.

Story - 6/10

Gameplay - 6.5/10

Bossfights - 7/10

Characters - 5.5/10

Atmosphere - 6.5/10

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