Solo Leveling:ARISE Preview

Based on the hit anime/webtoon/manhwa, Solo Leveling:ARISE puts you in the shoes of Sung Jinwoo, an E-rank hunter who is known as the weakest hunter in the world. Hunters enter dimensional gates to fight back monsters and protect the world — at least that’s what I got from the game. It seems to assume that you’re familiar with the concept, at least at first, but honestly, I’ve not seen the anime or the webtoon, or read the manhwa. The gameplay consists of you controlling Sung in a familiar third-person action-RPG fashion.

The game starts at the beginning and runs through what I take to be the same storyline fans will be familiar with, with Sung gaining the ability to level up after a bit of a disaster. By the time you’ve finished Chapter 2, you’ve been introduced to what happened in the gate, and how Sung’s life is now literally a live service videogame. Luckily, that doesn’t bleed too much into ARISE, so you don’t actually have to do 100 push-ups to prevent a penalty.

The version of ARISE that I played only contained up to Chapter 7, which was long enough to get a feel for a couple of the classes that Sung gets access to. From the looks of things, there will be at least 15 chapters, though I understand that the developer has announced a slew of post-launch content. However, the main story is bolstered by some side story chapters, showing off some of the other characters with story and battle scenes.

Cutscenes take three forms; fully animated cutscenes, visual novel-style side-by-side talking, and animated manhwa-style which seem to be calling back to the source material with how panels are laid out. While it’s cool to see Sung run along a massive snake, I prefer to see the manhwa-style ones more as they’re much more expressive.

Apart from the main and side story, you can tackle Gates which are random and based around your current power level. When you reach the next “tier” it will tell you that you can find harder (and thus more profitable) Gates if you rescan, but it’s up to you. The main reason to do Gates, other than for random equipment drops, is to level up Sung because just the main and side stuff won’t give you enough experience to tackle anything past the second chapter. However, you’re limited to a set number of Gates per day, unless you buy more keys.

Once you’ve completed a Gate, you are able to send in a mining crew to gather resources. The higher the Gate rank, the better the stuff, but the longer the mining will take. For example, an E-rank mine will take 15 minutes, while an A-rank will take two hours. While you can only have three mining crews out at once, there’s no limit on how many Gates you can mine per day, so long as you’ve cleared them.

The thing that I really like about Gates is that you can set your characters to battle on automatic, leaving you free to do something else for up to three minutes. That’s the time limit in Gates and some normal levels, so you need to finish off the objective before the timer expires! You can’t set any other fighting on auto, though, so Gates are ideal if you need to get up while the game plays itself.

While playing ARISE on PC, I noticed some pretty bad lag when leaving the mission results screen and returning to the lobby or menu. As if the game is checking that it’s still online, and not doing so very quickly. Also, it seemed to crash multiple times, with the results screen not showing, forcing me to manually close the game — but it did at least acknowledge that I had completed those levels.

Solo Leveling:ARISE is shaping up to be a decent adaptation of the popular anime and manhwa. I just wish that I could have reached Chapter 9 to find out what happens when Sung says “Arise”…