Through the Webtoon

Season 1 begins at the Double Dungeon and ends, twelve episodes later, about where the novel’s chapter “Shadow Monarch” does, with Igris kneeling: all of Volume 1 and the first four chapters of Volume 2, the webtoon’s first forty-five chapters. Season 2, numbered on from 13 to 25, picks up at “The Plucky High School Girl” and runs through the Red Gate, the whole of Volume 3 and the Jeju Island raid, and stops in Volume 4 around “All Eyes on Jinwoo”, at the webtoon’s chapter 110, the chapter that closed that comic’s own first season in March 2020.

The pace quickens as it goes. Volume 1 gets ten episodes; Volume 2 about six, split across the two seasons; Volume 3 five; Volume 4, as far as the anime goes, five more. Something has to give, and the first thing is the novel’s interior. The Prologue is told in the first person, and from then on the narration stays close behind Jinwoo Sung: the reader hears him spend his stat points in fives so the numbers match, price a kill in won, and think of his sister as he votes to go deeper. Readers who know both say the webtoon hurries what the novel lingers on, and the anime follows the webtoon.

Whole strands go too. The ten web-novel chapters of Jinho Yoo’s raid party become three webtoon chapters and one episode. The zombie gate, the hunter classes Jinwoo looks up online before his job change, the new phone the Association issues him and a nurse’s unanswered texts were gone from the webtoon already. The Red Gate loses a C-rank, Kijoong Yoon, and the yetis and ice giants that wear Chul Kim’s squad down before the elves finish it (the yetis survive in the webtoon; the fan wiki mentions the giants only for the novel); the orc gate’s strike squad shrinks; the American offer that follows the Jeju raid, an agent named Adam White and an upgrader, Norma Sellner, who finds Jinwoo has no limit to raise, never makes it into Season 2.

Order changes more than events do. The novel opens on a window in the air and a hundred push-ups, a flash-forward to the daily quest; the anime opens on Jeju Island three years before the story and saves the window for episode 3. Following the webtoon, it puts Dongsoo Hwang’s vow of revenge for his brother in episode 7, before the Taesik raid the novel tells it after. It cross-cuts the father’s return from a gate in America with the first climb of the Demon’s Castle, and, in a scene the fan wiki lists as anime-original, states the Elixir of Life as Jinwoo’s goal before he climbs, where the novel’s Jinwoo opens the recipe at home at the start of Volume 3, after the fights are won. And with the webtoon it previews people the novel holds back: Thomas Andre passes through Korea before the Jeju raid, where the novel introduces him after it, and the finale glimpses China’s Zhigang Liu and two strangers the fan wiki identifies as Monarchs, whom the novel brings on in Volumes 6 and 7.

The comic began on KakaoPage in March 2018, nine days before the novel’s last chapter went up, and its main story ran until the end of 2021. Jang Sung-rak, who signed as DUBU, drew it, and it gave the novel’s sparsely described people the faces most of the world now knows: Jinwoo as a slight, shaggy-haired youth in a blue hoodie who becomes a tall, sharp-featured man; Haein Cha’s blonde bob and red armour; Igris’s four-horned helm and long red plume. The anime’s designers kept them; Jinah’s purple hair is the anime’s own touch, since the webtoon’s Jinah is brown-haired. This walk paints none of these designs on its book pages; it paints them, described in words, only on its anime pages and on the screen side of each pair below.

Most of the changes a novel reader notices on screen were made in the comic first. The webtoon invented the vision in the job-change trial in which the weak boy Jinwoo used to be tells him he is still not good enough; by the fan wiki’s account the novel has no such conversation, and the anime keeps it with its harshest images cut. The webtoon brought Dongsoo Hwang to Korea during the Red Gate to nearly fight Yoonho Baek, a scene whose place in the novel is unsettled: Dongsoo’s name is among the most used in Yen’s second volume, but no source describes what he does there. It put the healer Joohee Lee into the fight with the stone golem, where the novel names a tank, Hansoo Lee; brought Jinchul Woo to hear Song’s story after the Taesik raid, which the novel does not; let the miners explain Haein’s nose; kept Esil at the Demon Monarch’s last fight, where the novel sends her home at the ninety-ninth floor; and gave Japan’s whole S-rank squad names and faces, where, by the fan wiki’s account, the novel names only Ryuji Goto. The names most viewers know, Baran, Tusk, the Holy Water of Life, come from the webtoon’s English editions.

Not every one of the comic’s choices survives. The anime has Jinwoo learn he is immune to poison from a beer that will not make him drunk, as the novel does, where the webtoon has him poison himself with Kasaka’s venom. It uses the novel’s title “Wolf Assassin”, not the webtoon’s “Wolf Slayer”, and its English credits call the ice elves’ chief Barca, as Yen Press does, not the webtoon’s Baruka. Whether anyone went back to the book, the sources do not say. What is certain is that a comparison of novel and anime is really a comparison of three versions in a row, and a change can belong to any one of them.

The producer, Atsushi Kaneko, has said the staff agreed in their script meetings to add anime-original scenes here and there so that no episode sagged, and Nakashige wanted a high-end look, with live-action framing and colour in place of the comic’s cartoon faces. The biggest addition is structural. Season 1 opens on a failed raid on Jeju Island, returns to it in Jongin Choi’s nightmare in episode 10 and a scouting flight in episodes 11 and 12, and ends on an eyewitness cliffhanger: the ants have grown wings. In the novel Jinwoo goes nowhere near Jeju until Volume 4, and the webtoon breaks the winged-ant news after the Red Gate, secondhand, when Byunggu Min tells Yoonho Baek in private. The anime gives one man’s private ascent a public clock.

It also seats the cast early. Haein Cha, whom the novel brings on in Volume 3’s excavation chapters, catches purse thieves in episode 1 and is back in episodes 8 and 11; President Gunhee Go and Jinchul Woo explain essence stones as clean energy; Jinho and Songyi Han are rank-tested; Jinho’s father and an elder brother the webtoon only mentions get a car ride and a family dinner. Anime News Network’s Richard Eisenbeis, who reviewed the series episode by episode, called the cutaways its weakest part, a “tendency to undercut its drama”, though by episode 8 he found them pulling together.

Some of its own changes reshape a scene. Its Double Dungeon party has thirteen hunters, not the seventeen of novel and comic; Jinwoo carries a cheap knife that shatters on a goblin, and the party kills a werewolf boss, where the webtoon’s Jinwoo goes in unarmed and the boss is a single explanatory panel. Its last stand takes Jinwoo’s right arm where novel and webtoon run him through the chest, and skips the slowed-down moment in which the System makes its offer, which both of them have. Its Taesik Kang turns up at the hospital six episodes early, in place of the webtoon’s unnamed agent.

Season 2’s additions lean toward conscience and spectacle. Choi briefs President Go on the winged ants. After the Red Gate, Jinwoo washes his face at a mirror, troubled at having killed again, where readers of the novel remark how coolly its Jinwoo takes Chul Kim’s death; in episode 21 he wonders whether he has crossed a line. The climb gets a montage of meals and changes of clothes, and Haein a scene at a swimming pool. Back from the castle, Jinwoo reaches his mother by Shadow Exchange alone, where novel and webtoon both have him fly the newly raised Kaisel to the hospital. In the nest Kaisel joins the battle, the Ant King leans on ice magic (anime-only, says one fan-wiki page; more than the webtoon showed, says another), and Jinwoo tries an Elixir on the dying Haein, which fails; Byunggu Min’s shadow rises at the first attempt, not the webtoon’s third. Its Jinwoo is also a little gentler than either source’s: the anime cuts the convict he leaves to the hobgoblins after the Taesik raid, a scene the novel and the webtoon share and a CBR reviewer of the novel singled out as brutal.

The novel this walk follows is Yen Press’s, which writes Korean names given name first: Jinwoo Sung, Haein Cha, Jinchul Woo. The anime’s English subtitles and Crunchyroll dub use Korean order, Sung Jinwoo and Cha Hae-In. Terms shift with the names. Kargalgan’s shadow is Fang in Yen Press, the word that titles Volume 3’s sixth chapter; Tusk in the English dub; Kiba, “fang”, in the Japanese. Balan, the Demon Monarch, is Baran, the Demon King. The Elixir of Life is the Holy Water of Life in the webtoon’s English. The aside at the foot of this page lines the forms up.

In Japan the anime goes further. Its broadcast uses the names of the Japanese edition of the webtoon, which moved the story to Japan and renamed everyone: Jinwoo is Shun Mizushino, his sister Aoi, Haein Shizuku Kōsaka, Jinho Kenta Morobishi, President Go Kiyoomi Gotō. Ryuji Goto becomes “Ryu”, Japan becomes a fictional island nation called “DFN”, and Jeju becomes Kanan Island, the name the official site gives the Season 2 raid. Crunchyroll’s Japanese-audio version, recorded with the same actors, keeps the Korean names, and both versions put English on every sign and status screen, so one set of pictures serves both. Reports that the Japanese version moves the city to Tokyo have no official confirmation. The international version keeps the novel’s Korea: Seoul, the instance dungeon at Hapjeong Station, the Hunter’s Association, and a raid on an island anyone can find on a map.

Season 2 stops before Haein Cha walks into Jinwoo’s two-man guild to apply, so the end of Volume 4 has never been animated, and nor has anything after it. The Architect and the return to the Cartenon Temple (Volume 5); the giants in Japan, the trip to America and the night President Go dies (Volumes 5 and 6); the Monarchs’ war on Korea and the father’s last fight (Volume 7); the end of the war, the bonus stories and the epilogue (Volume 8). The webtoon has drawn all of it, its main story ending in December 2021 and a side story following in 2023; no screen has shown any of it.

What comes next on screen is a film. Solo Leveling: Beyond the System was announced at Crunchyroll’s Anime Expo panel on July 3, 2026, and the official Japanese site’s notice the next day calls it the long-awaited sequel to Season 2, made for cinemas. A-1 Pictures animates it and Tao Tajima directs; Nakashige is not named among its staff. As of October 2026 it has no date and no announced arc. The next stretch of the novel is the end of Volume 4 and Volume 5, but nobody making the film has said it starts there. A television Season 3 has not been announced; in June 2026 Screen Rant and Game Rant reported that investor materials from D&C Media, the webtoon’s publisher, listed one as “expected 2027–2028”. Netflix’s Korean live-action series, filming now, is on the Adaptations page.

On its own terms the anime is a triumph. Season 1 was Crunchyroll’s most-watched anime of 2024, scored 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from nine reviews, and won Anime of the Year at the 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards; Season 2 won Best Action and Best Animation there in May 2026. Eisenbeis stayed warm through both seasons, finding in the mother’s waking “simply a boy who loves his mother”, though he thought the Season 2 finale “leaves the season on a confusing note” when a Jinwoo set on staying home founds a guild without explanation. On ANN’s preview panel for Season 2, Kevin Cormack enjoyed it for what it is, “an animated videogame RPG complete with ever-present stat screens”; not every critic was won over, and Jeremy Tauber still found it “absolutely spineless”.

Readers of the novel tend to say the same thing about both adaptations: the plot holds, and the inside of Jinwoo’s head goes. The novel’s Jinwoo talks to himself on every page, is colder in places than the screen lets him be, and lingers where the screen cuts away. The anime is a faithful adaptation of a faithful adaptation: between the page and the screen lie two short steps, and the comic took the longer one.