The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow-

Jinwoo has become a formidable necromancer with an army of loyal shadows at his command. But he must master these abilities while keeping them hidden from other hunters, all while racing against the clock to save his mother. As he faces humanity's toughest foes, Jinwoo pushes his body and mind to the limit, and the full extent of his newfound power is revealed.

Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow- is based on the Solo Leveling K-Comic by Chugong and Dubu. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

January 2024's first season of Solo Leveling was a guilty pleasure for me. While many long-term anime fans dismissed it for being little but a naked power fantasy, it nonetheless became an international hit among more casual fans. I certainly understand why – it features a simple but compelling premise: a weak nobody desperate to provide for his little sister and sick mother stumbles upon a way to grow stronger while compromising his morals. Visualized via superb action animation and accompanied by an equally excellent Hiroyuki Sawano score, it's completely unsurprising to me that Solo Leveling attracted new anime fans much like Attack on Titan did over a decade earlier.

Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow- picks up where the first left off, with protagonist Jinwoo Sung having just acquired a new job title – Shadow Monarch. The accompanying skill allows him to raise and harvest the souls of his defeated adversaries, adding them to his undead shadow army, and forcing them to become loyal and fight for him, like evil Pokémon. Jinwoo's legions of the damned become useful immediately as he accompanies a group of hunters on a training exercise into a portal that suddenly turns red. Red portals are gateways to another dimension that prevent hunters from returning to Earth until the boss monster found there is defeated.

A-rank expedition leader Kim assumes Jinwoo is useless, abandoning him with the similarly low-ranked Song-Yi and a couple of other hunters to fend for themselves, while his higher-ranked party buggers off. Higher-ranked hunters are all arseholes in this show, aren't they? I get that Jinwoo wants to keep his absurdly-developed leveling-related strength secret, but the whole “idiot hunter disses Jinwoo for being weak, only for his true powers to be revealed, amazing everyone” is getting a little tired. Yeah, I guess it scratches that itch for folks who want to fantasize about a world where seemingly weak normal people might suddenly unleash their true power, saving everyone.

At least some high-ranked characters are starting to notice something isn't quite right with Jinwoo, so hopefully, his secret will be out in the open soon. Whether that stops almost the entire cast worshipping him is more up in the air. With his new K-pop boy-band haircut, his sister's classmates seem primed to throw their moist underwear in his general direction.

This fun opener gets to the action quickly and will likely do little to convince its detractors of its value. It follows much the same pattern as previously – Jinwoo enters a new dungeon, something goes wrong, and he fixes it with absurd skills/leveling up while exceeding everyone's expectations. It's not particularly smart, but it looks incredible as Jinwoo and his army of darkness smash monster skulls together. Solo Leveling doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is (an animated videogame RPG complete with ever-present stat screens) and comports itself well.

I'll give credit where credit is due: there's something satisfying in seeing how much of a 180 Solo Leveling's second season starts out compared to its previous. Jinwoo started as an object of pity who we saw get beaten into a bloody pulp and nearly die. Now we're seeing him control legions of the undead to go absolutely bonkers on some monstrous bears. Jinwoo has gone from pawn to chessmaster on the battlefield, and certainly, his power levels have gone through the roof since we first met him.

But this change is in power levels alone. In terms of personality, Jinwoo still feels as one-note of a main character as he ever was. There are hints that his confidence might have experienced an uptick, yet it barely signifies any significant change that could hold my intrigue. His motives to get stronger haven't changed, and for my money, he hasn't been given enough time to stop and ponder what his newfound strength means to everything surrounding him. And I get why, since a character like him is made to be an audience insert character. At its core, Solo Leveling is an escapist power fantasy made to be the highest tier of popcorn possible, and it wildly succeeds as such. Its high-budgeted direction allows for fight sequences that are always nail-biting, ultraviolent, and absolutely stunning (seriously, an army of the undead fighting against monster polar bears is metal af). But they always feel like smoke and mirrors for me. The best action always has a dramatic backbone supporting it, and with no emotion or drama to latch onto, Solo Leveling still feels absolutely spineless to me.

When the first season ended, Jinwoo had just unlocked a game-changing new power: the ability to turn his defeated foes into “shadows” that he could summon. The action climax of this first episode of season 2, is all about laying down the rules to his new powers—i.e., watching him test them on a pack of giant polar bears while we jam to the rocking Hiroyuki Sawano soundtrack. This sequence serves as the eye candy of the episode—and it certainly delivers. The animation is both clean and expertly choreographed to make Jinwoo look as cool as possible.

But while Jinwoo is now, for all rights and purposes, a literal one-man army, that doesn't mean he is unstoppable—and that's what the portions of the episode set outside the Red Gate work to convey. We're given our first real introduction on what it means to be an S-rank hunter—i.e., that they can go anywhere and do anything. They're basically walking WMDs and the only ones who can stop them are other S-rank hunters—which they won't because the collateral damage caused by a fight between them would be worse than just letting them do what they want.

This knowledge adds a huge amount of tension to the story. Jinwoo may be reveling in his new powers within the gate but outside, a much more dangerous threat awaits—a threat he is completely ignorant of. And what's truly interesting about this whole situation outside the gate is what it shows about Jinwoo as a character. While much of the time we focus on how badass he is as he overcomes one challenge after another, he's still made mistakes. There are unintended consequences to his actions—and what's happening outside the Red Gate this episode is one of them. This serves to humanize him a bit, make him less of a Mary Sue than he otherwise would in a power fantasy anime like this one.

The other character work we get in this episode is a bit more subtle. Through Jinwoo's interactions with his new party inside the gate, we see that as much as Jinwoo has changed—as much of his humanity as he has lost—he hasn't turned into a purely selfish asshole. He's still more than willing to protect the innocent and help the helpless—even if that means putting his secret in their hands. However, each time he does, it becomes increasingly clear that his life as an E-ranker will soon be over—and he'll be stepping out of the shadows and into the light of a far more dangerous level of society.

The first season of Solo Leveling started out with a lot of promise, featuring stellar production values and a fairly strong vision for its interpretation of the “Humans from Regular Earth Explore RPG-Styled Fantasy Dungeons” routine. Jinwoo Sung also made for a relatively compelling protagonist, as we spent more than the standard five or so minutes with him in his life as a pathetic E-Rank Hunter before his reawakening grants him his silly RPG Stats Menu and his new, godlike powers. At the time, I felt like the show was establishing itself as a kind of platonic ideal for what this sort of anime can be, especially when it isn't setting out to rewrite any genre conventions or attempt any particularly exciting storytelling.

Sadly, as the first season went along, it squandered a lot of that potential, and eventually those consistently excellent production values were the only things distinguishing it from its many mediocre competitors. The first episode of the show's second season shows no signs of reversing this downward slope in quality, either, which is a damned shame. Solo Leveling could have easily become a staple of reliably exciting fantasy spectacle, the kind of thing that you watch every week simply because it's too much fun to ignore. Instead, it's become yet another anime that will likely find its most enduring legacy in YouTube compilations of its best action scenes. After all, it's not like anything happening in between those cool bits is worth watching in the slightest.

The biggest issue that is bringing Solo Leveling down so low (heh) is its main character, Jinwoo Sung. Simply put, he's devolved into the most somniferous, robotic, and two-dimensional kind of anime protagonist, where he speaks almost every line as if he's some exhausted ASMR influencer who is only even doing the job because he has literally no other marketable skills, and every other character in the show exists on some level just to validate his confidence and lack of effort. The one mildly interesting plot development of this whole episode is the return of Jinah's E-Rank friend as a kind of mentee for Jinwoo, and while I was interested to see if she could provide even a little bit of friction or meaningful character interaction that might make Jinwoo seem more recognizably human, it quickly becomes obvious that she's only around to be the starry-eyed NPC that leaps into the hero's arms at the first sign of danger and gets head- pats for being such a good little girl. I'm 90% certain that the show doesn't even bother reminding anyone of what her name is, just in case you were wondering if we're even supposed to care.

Speaking of things we cannot be bothered to care about, the premiere continues the first season's other unfortunate habit of constantly cutting back to the dozen or so ancillary characters that exist on the margins of Jinwoo's orbit as government threats and evil mafia types, only for them to do literally nothing but stall for time and talk a big game until the episode ends. Maybe the one good thing I can say about Solo Leveling at this point: It doesn't suck, exactly. It's merely boring as hell when it isn't sporadically providing you with something shiny to look at.