Season 1

Episode 1, “I’m Used to It,” opens on an island the novel does not send Jinwoo to for three volumes. Three years before the story, warships ring Jeju Island, a raid party is overrun by giant red ants, S-ranks Byunggu Min, Eunseok Lee and Yoonho Baek wade in, and Jongin Choi rains fire on the swarm. A narrator lays out the world: Gates opened ten years ago, Hunters are ranked E to S, and no rank ever changes. Then the weakest of them turns up at a D-rank gate on a building site, bandaged from his last job and carrying a cheap knife, and tells Joohee Lee, the healer who scolds him, that he is used to it.

Around him the episode cuts away to people the novel keeps for later: Association President Gunhee Go and Jinchul Woo explaining essence stones as clean energy, Go telling a hall of new awakeners to be afraid, Jinho Yoo and Songyi Han being rank-tested, and S-rank Haein Cha taking a stolen purse back from motorcycle thieves. The novel’s first chapter has none of this. It has coffee that runs out just as Jinwoo asks for a cup, and Choi only as the S-rank everyone calls the Ultimate Hunter. The anime cuts the coffee.

In the dungeon Jinwoo’s knife shatters on a goblin, the party kills a werewolf boss, Jeongho finds a hidden tunnel, and the vote to go deeper ties. Jinwoo, with a vanished father, a mother in hospital and a sister in school, casts the deciding yes. The novel’s party is seventeen strong and its vote is called by Song, the veteran fire mage, who wants the treasure:

“There are seventeen of us, so let’s vote.”

The book’s vote ties at eight to eight, with Joohee voting no. The anime cuts the party to thirteen, ties it six to six, and makes Song the careful one who wanted to report the find. At the end of the tunnel is a domed hall that lights itself in blue flame, statues around the walls and a seated stone god at the far end. The doors slam; a statue cuts down the man who runs for them; the god’s eyes fire, and Jinwoo gets Joohee down in time.

Episode 2, “If I Had One More Chance,” plays out the temple’s commandments, worship, praise and prove your faith: kneeling stops the beam until the god grins and stands up, the statues holding a trumpet, a violin and a drum answer “praise,” and Jinwoo loses a leg reaching a singing one. An altar rises; in the end he sends Song out carrying the unconscious Joohee, the others having fled, and stays. The anime’s last stand is longer and bloodier than the webtoon’s, which gives him a wound across the chest where the anime takes his right arm at the elbow, and it drops the webtoon’s frozen moment in which he talks things over with the System. Dying, he is offered the chance to become a Player, and says yes.

Episode 3 wakes him in hospital three days later with every limb restored. Jinchul Woo comes to test him for a reawakening, the rare second awakening that can raise a rank, and the anime brings Taesik Kang along, an Association inspector the novel holds back for the chapter named after him. Jinah arrives scolding and frightened, threatening to quit school and work, then leaves to meet her friend Songyi; and over the bed hangs a window only he can see.

The novel starts with that window. Its first-person Prologue is a flash-forward to the Daily Quest, a hundred push-ups, sit-ups and squats and a ten-kilometre run, with a penalty for failure. The anime saves it for episode 3, where he shrugs it off and pays with four hours in a desert full of giant centipedes (in the novel, the fan wiki notes, the System at least rewards him for surviving). After that he trains, pouring the System’s stat points into Strength while the episode cuts back to his mother’s long sleep and his early days in construction work, and one reward is a key. The episode ends as he turns it in a door at Hapjeong Station, the novel’s own Seoul subway stop for this dungeon.

Episode 4, “I’ve Gotta Get Stronger,” is spent inside, where he cannot leave until the dungeon is cleared. He levels on lycans, earns the title Wolf Assassin (the novel’s wording; the webtoon says Wolf Slayer), and with his blade broken takes the boss, the house-sized Blue Venom-Fanged Kasaka, apart with his hands. Outside, a gate near the station has broken and a stone golem veined with blue is loose; low-rank hunters, Joohee among them, cannot scratch it, until Jinwoo throws his broken sword through its eye and walks off. The novel leaves Joohee out of that fight and gives the tank who holds the golem a name, Hansoo Lee.

Episode 5, “A Pretty Good Deal,” unveils the new Jinwoo: taller, harder, noticed by the nurses. He signs on as a porter with C-rank Dongsuk Hwang’s crew for an insect dungeon, on terms that he need not fight and gets no battle drops; making up the numbers is Jinho Yoo, a rich first-timer in expensive armour. In the boss room a giant spider sleeps among mana crystals, and when Jinho points out that crystals are not battle drops, the crew seals the two of them in with it. These are “lizards,” hunters who drop a weaker partner like a tail. In the novel Dongsuk recruits him by phone; the webtoon drops the call, and the anime has him answer a listing online.

Episode 6, “The Real Hunt Begins,” has Jinwoo kill the spider and the lizards sneak back for the loot. They order Jinho to kill Jinwoo; he refuses. A System quest tells Jinwoo to kill them or die, and he kills all six; the webtoon has eight. The two walk out with a story about monsters, into rain.

Episode 7, “Let’s See How Far I Can Go,” brings Jinho to a café with an offer, a building worth thirty billion won for helping him found a guild. The anime’s Jinwoo turns him down; the webtoon’s accepts on the spot. He tests the immunity he was given as a Player, Kandiaru’s Blessing, by drinking beer and staying sober, which is the novel’s test; the webtoon has him poison himself with Kasaka’s venom instead. Doing double his daily quest earns a key to the Demon’s Castle, an S-rank instance dungeon whose prize is the recipe for an Elixir of Life that might wake his mother. The gatekeeper, Cerberus, takes an arm and nearly kills him; he leaves with the key to the castle beyond and the recipe. In America, S-rank Dongsoo Hwang learns how his brother Dongsuk died and swears revenge, a scene the novel tells later, after the Taesik affair.

The next week’s slot went to episode 7.5, “How to Get Stronger,” a recap of the first seven episodes with newly recorded narration by the characters.

Episode 8, “This Is Frustrating,” sits Jinwoo at his mother’s bedside and has him take Jinho’s guild deal after all, on condition that the two of them raid alone. Then it scatters into side scenes: Jinho’s father Myunghan Yoo explaining the plan, Song teaching kumdo, Yoonho Baek meeting Jongin Choi, who means to retake Jeju, Joohee quarrelling with her mother by phone. Richard Eisenbeis, reviewing for Anime News Network, had called the cutaways the show’s weakest part, its “tendency to undercut its drama,” and judged this, after the first two, its best-built episode, because here the side scenes finally pull together. An urgent call then reunites the Double Dungeon’s survivors, Jinwoo, Joohee, Song, Kim and Jeongho Kang, with three handcuffed convicts working off their sentences, all minded by Taesik Kang. The novel brings Song back by having him run into Jinwoo while shopping.

Episode 9, “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills,” splits the party at a three-way fork. Taesik, paid by a father whose daughter the convicts drove to her death, murders them, then kills Kim and Jeongho when they stumble on it. Jinwoo stops pretending to be weak and kills Taesik, and Song tells the Association he did it, to cover for him. The novel’s Taesik fakes an injury to draw the healer close; on screen he lunges at her from the shadows instead. The screen also brings Jinchul Woo to hear Song’s story, where the novel, the fan wiki says, never brings him. And the anime cuts a scene the novel and the webtoon share: the convict who survived by playing dead, whom Jinwoo leaves to the hobgoblins, a passage one reviewer of the novel singles out as brutal.

Episode 10, “What Is This, a Picnic?,” says goodbye to Joohee, who retires and gives back the essence stone Jinwoo once gave her, and has Jinchul warn Jinwoo that Dongsoo Hwang may come for him. Jinho buys up rights to C-rank gates and hires a crew of misfits, truant schoolgirl Songyi among them, to sit outside and make up the required eight while the two of them clear three gates a day. Sangmin An of the White Tiger Guild smells a reawakened hunter, shadows them, makes his pitch, and is sold three gates at a mark-up. The novel’s Volume 2 opens on that stakeout, from Sangmin’s side, and its café scene has Jinwoo answer the recruiter’s offer with one question: “Can you give me the building?” The novel also puts zombies in one of the gates; the anime adds a nightmare of the failed Jeju raid, through Choi’s eyes. At level 40 the System offers Jinwoo a job change, and he drives off in a red truck to take it. The novel has him look up hunter classes online first.

Episode 11, “A Knight Who Defends an Empty Throne,” opens the quest at dusk in a wood: a purple gate laced with lightning, and inside it a castle where potions, the Store and leaving are all forbidden. Knights, assassins and mages wear him down. The anime cuts away to a Yoo family dinner at which Jinho’s elder brother, never seen in the webtoon, warns him off his guild, and to a helicopter taking Choi, Haein and others to scout Jeju. Then the throne room, and the knight of the novel’s chapter title, Igris the Bloodred, in red plate before an empty throne. He lays his sword down when Jinwoo’s dagger proves useless and nearly wins bare-handed, until Jinwoo, thrown onto the throne itself, gets his dagger past the visor. The rewards are barely counted before the real test begins: endless knights, and no way out.

Episode 12, “Arise,” finds him bare-handed and bleeding, hearing the old taunts, until the boy he used to be appears behind him to say he is still not good enough. The vision is the webtoon’s invention, not the novel’s, and the anime keeps it while cutting its harshest images, of Jinho and his family dead. Rescue comes from the chore he forgot: the Daily Quest expires and the Penalty Zone yanks him out of the castle, into a desert under a blazing sun and red clouds where potions are allowed, centipedes level him back to health, and the Store sells him a dagger, Knight Killer. Back in the hall he finds the mages who summon the knights and kills them; he has lasted four and a half hours. The class he is given is Necromancer, a hidden class, and it becomes Shadow Monarch. At the word “Arise” the fallen knights stand up as shadows. Igris resists twice and, asked to fight for someone instead of an empty throne, rises on the third try and kneels.

Eisenbeis’s review of the finale asks the season’s question, “Do we ever really change?”, and answers that the one thing in Jinwoo that has not changed, his resolve, matters most. In the last minutes the anime turns to everyone else. Gunhee Go watches the dawn and tells Jinchul he dreams of a hunter who defies expectation, and on Jeju, Choi’s team finds that the ants have grown wings. The webtoon breaks that news later, after the Red Gate, and secondhand: Yoonho Baek hears in private that the Jeju ants are growing wings and that a dead winged ant has washed up on a beach in Japan. The anime makes it an eyewitness cliffhanger. Season 2, Arise from the Shadow, was announced right after the finale aired.