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.

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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.

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.