In what has now become a pattern, Solo Leveling follows its slower premise with incredible action, animation, and direction. While this just makes me wish these episodes were released in hour-long chunks (like a premiere for some), I appreciate what the show is doing with tempo.
Complaints aside, the anime is fantastic. Great and doing a great job adapting the source material. The Solo Leveling manga moves a lot quicker through the more foundational aspects of Jinwoo’s powers, and has fewer moments of characterization due to the amount of text that can appear in a few panels. In contrast, the anime episodes lengthened certain scenes, emphasized dialogue, and of course used Taito Ban’s legendary voice acting as Jinwoo.
Episode 6 is interesting and entertaining for many reasons. First, this is (obviously) the episode where Jinwoo fights the boss that appeared in episode 5. His team left him dead, and what started out as a relatively simple job turned into a life-giving job. death. However, as we saw at the end of the previous episode, Jinwoo’s reaction was not afraid at all.
Instead, he seemed excited about the opportunity to prove his strength to himself and see the results of his recent promotion. This episode builds on the change in characterization in many aspects, making this an episode with both continuous action and story development. (Details revealed about episode 6 of Solo Leveling: The Real Hunt)
A nice boss fight
For me, the spider boss fight easily takes the number one spot in Solo Leveling in terms of animation quality so far. Jinwoo’s newfound skills involved a lot of high-speed movements, and the boss he was taking on was quite large. This means that most of his movement is running around and looking for weaknesses, which this episode conveys quite well. Shots from Jinwoo’s perspective rushing towards the boss were followed by shots of him preparing to attack from above.
Unlike many other shounen, the middle frames are quite detailed. Furthermore, the combination of normal and slow motion makes it possible to put these detailed scenes in slow motion while also using it to emphasize things. This way, slow motion makes fast scenes feel faster by comparison. It was no surprise that Jinho was shocked throughout the battle.
This fight is the earliest point in the episode where Jinwoo’s loss of his soft features and seemingly loss of humanity begins to emerge. From the jump, his main concern was whether he was strong enough to defeat this boss. Unlike before the mission, when he thought about taking care of his sister and having enough money for rent, his entire inner monologue was now based on strength.
When fighting the boss, his eyes darkened and his voice became hoarse; in the manga, these moments are represented by dark text in speech bubbles, and Solo Leveling is tweaked just right thanks to Taito Ban. He wasn’t even particularly worried about the fact that a whole group of people had just announced they wanted to kill him. Of course this could be because he feels like he can take them all down, even before leveling up from the boss, but I feel like he’s so focused on taking down the opponents in front of him that he even didn’t even consider it.
Losing humanity when leveling up alone
The second half of the episode pits Jinho and Jinwoo against the rest of their dungeon group. This moment brings up three things in particular that I want to delve into. More broadly, Jinho and Jinwoo are natural foils for each other, and Jinho is a typical representation of how a normal, albeit somewhat idealistic, person might react in this situation. He was afraid of others but more afraid of Jinwoo, and he chose a reaction that was both consistent with his morals and maximized his chances of survival.
Two, for Jinwoo, he finally had the chance to see the end of the jungle mindset that he felt was everywhere in the world. The strong take advantage of the weak, and the weak cannot do anything. It’s a philosophy that the other Hunters agree with, something Jinwoo himself notes, but they clearly look more evil, even when compared to Jinwoo’s darker, edgier moments in battle. boss. Third, the most important thing was how Jinwoo reacted to the emergency mission, which was quite obvious, killing the 6 people who were attacking him.
When asked directly if he had ever killed someone, he had no reaction. Instead, he trains himself to fight, not for what it means to win that fight. Like the boss, he immediately becomes short-sighted when there is a risk of having to fight him. The emergency mission shook him, and that was probably because it made it clear that he needed to kill someone to “win” this case.
He was distracted enough to not notice someone throwing it at his face, even though his sensory abilities had improved. This is the part of the episode where Taito Ban (whom I will never stop praising) did an incredible job, as did the people behind the sound engineering for Solo Leveling. The headphones really make this scene different as Jinwoo’s directional and mood sounds combine with the blurred screen to really immerse you in his despair.
Unlike the first episodes, where he swallowed the reality of weakness and let everyone else escape the double dungeon, he blasted it out to fuel the six-fold killing streak he was about to achieve. His first kill caused a reaction from him, but it was quickly thwarted. It seemed like he was more surprised at how easily he killed someone than shocked at the implications of doing so.
He didn’t hesitate before beheading someone. His eyes, which had previously been very dark, were obscured for almost the entire duration of the war. Even the possibility that he was killing the brother of someone extremely important didn’t stop him. He becomes ruthless at the slightest prodding.
The ending scenes in the rain are excellent backdrops for the remaining scenes. The Hunter Association reacted very calmly to the bloodbath inside. Even with the false version of the story where almost the entire attack team died, the representative calmly smiled and even made light jokes. It reinforced the weight of what Jinwoo had said and was painful.
Even though he didn’t say it, he probably understood how those 6 people could credibly trick and kill so many people. No one wonders if a weak person dies. But, at least, Jinwoo felt happy that he gave his sister an umbrella to cover the rain, hinting at his remaining self.
I’m excited about how the series turned out, and I’m getting more used to the pacing (even if the slower weeks have me reading the comics). Next week, it looks like we’ll see some consequences for Jinwoo and some more world-building using brief moments of S-rank hunter actions and guild explanations meeting in the middle of this episode.
If you enjoyed Solo Leveling episode 6 then be sure to vote for episode 6 in our weekly poll! The series is streaming on Crunchyroll with new episodes airing on Saturdays. As of January 20, Crunchyroll is also streaming the English dub of the anime.
© Solo Leveling Animation Partners