Summary
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Despite the series' title,Solo Leveling, its protagonist, Sung Jinwoo, doesn’t seem to take advantage of his unique situation to level up effectively. While initially, this can be excused as Jinwoo being inexperienced, throughout the first two seasons, Jinwoo is continually saved by coincidences or luck that he could have mitigated if he had applied a better strategy to his leveling.
While the show seems to want to portray him as clever with the way he approaches his fights and strategy, he is continually forgetting about important aspects of the system or his powers. He drops the ball multiple times in simple ways. This article will explore some of the ways that Sung Jinwoo is actually not taking full advantage of his powers and ability to level up inSolo Leveling.
Navigating the System
Jinwoo Never Fully Explores the Potential
Despite being introduced to many aspects of the system he has at his disposal, Jinwoo never expresses a curiosity for fully grasping its mechanics. This is shown when Jinwoo constantly forgets one aspect of the system that later comes in clutch for him. He had, for the longest time, forgotten that the shop existed before accidentally discovering it again.
Jinwoo also shows a lack of insightwhen it comes to allocating his stats and choosing rewards. If he were min-maxing his stat allocation, he should wait to assign his stats until he absolutely needed to use them. That way, he could assign those stats during a fight to compensate for his weakness. His lack of foresight in stat allocation also came back to bite him after his job change quest, where he didn’t have enough mana to use his abilities properly. For a time, Jinwoo had to drink potions to make up for this shortcoming constantly.
When choosing rewards, Jinwoo also prioritized random loot boxes instead of stat points, which seems like an oversight if his goal is to get as strong as possible. While ultimately, his decision to prioritize loot boxes helped him with his goal of saving his mother, he would have grown stronger and faster if he had chosen skill points. Choosing the skill point reward more often would also have allowed him to fix his stat allocation problemswhen he became a shadow monarch class.
Another example of Jinwoo’s lack of diligence with regard to the system is the equipment screen. In the anime, he never utilizes it properly until the end of Season 1, still discovering the fact that he can turn the equipment invisible for the first time. If Sung Jinwoo had properly equipped items before that point, he would have been much stronger during all of his previous fights.
Improving Jinwoo’s Methods
A Better Solo Leveling Strategy
Jinwoo’s characterdoes not take full advantage of his situation,but it makes some sense in the story. The narrative establishes that his sister is the gamer of the family, and Jinwoo has problems in the beginning with basic menu navigation. However, it would be more compelling if Jinwoo was shown cleverly exploiting the rules more often instead of being saved by his own oversights. For example, when the penalty quest saved him, this was entirely by accident because he forgot about doing his dailies.
To maximize leveling efficiency,Jinwoo should have saved every daily quest rewarduntil the end of the day in case he needed the full recovery ability. Then, he should have prioritized getting and saving up his skill points so he could reach breakpoints of power when necessary. Next, he should have more thoroughly tested the effectiveness of each skill point, figuring out the value each point has so that when he did spend them, he would spend them the most effectively.
If Jinwoo was much better at leveling, it would have saved him a lot of early trouble he had in the series, though that also would have lessened the stakes for the viewer. While it makes sense from a story-telling perspective, it is interesting that Jinwoo is a lackluster leveler in a series calledSolo Leveling.
“Let’s meet again if fate allows it.” -Sung Jinwoo
Solo Levelingcan be streamed onCrunchyrollandAmazon
Solo Leveling
Cast
A-1 Pictures' Solo Leveling is an anime based on Chugong’s popular web novel. Set in an unforgiving fantasy world where hunters explore dungeons filled with monsters, the vulnerable Sung Jinwoo gains a significant power boost after he is picked to be a solo player by the System.
