A-1 Pictures’ Solo Leveling is a highly popular anime of the Winter 2024 Season and has already been renewed for season 2, but Japanese fans have rated the series below average.
For those unfamiliar with the Solo Leveling series, the anime is based on South Korea’s highly popular manhwa (comic) of the same name, which focuses on Sung Jin Woo’s journey from a low-rank hunter to a world-class hunter.
Ranking.net, one of Japan’s most visited websites with 7.5 million monthly visits according to SimilarWeb, allows users to rank various topics, from real-life people to anime/movie characters. Users on the website are known to be critical, as even One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda has been rated average in character rankings.
Surprisingly, Solo Leveling did not rank in the top 20 highest-rated anime of the Winter 2024 season on Ranking.net.
The anime series that won first place on Ranking.net is The Dangers in My Heart season 2, which is also the highest-rated anime of winter on MyAnimeList. The second highest-rated anime is Villainess Level 99: I May Be the Hidden Boss but I’m Not the Demon Lord, followed by Mashle: Magic and Muscle in third place and Dungeon Meshi in fourth place.
Solo Leveling, on the other hand, is ranked 35th, just above Synduality: Noir season 2 and below the Witch and The Beast anime series.
One reviewer on the website explained their low rating for Solo Leveling: “I had heard good things about it beforehand, so I was expecting it to get interesting from the middle, but the protagonist’s personality was so bad that I gave up at episode 7.”
Solo Leveling anime series Blu-ray sales were also reported to be below average in Japan.
Solo Leveling Continues To Dominate Outside of Japan
Despite its reception in Japan, Sung Jin Woo and Solo Leveling have been immensely well-received internationally. The series has a rating of 8.34/10 on MyAnimeList. Crunchyroll’s CEO Rahul Purini revealed in an interview with The Verge that Solo Leveling has been well-received by fans across the world.
Purini also indicated that Solo Leveling might not be specifically made for the Japanese audience: “..sometimes certain stories might not be something our partners might be able to create and produce primarily for the Japanese audience. So we step in and invest with our partners because this might be something that we believe strongly for our audience internationally.”
Furthermore, Solo Leveling has a drop rate of only 1% on MyAnimeList. The series currently has 583,392 members, with 203,635 members currently watching, 226,935 having completed it, and only 5,489 members dropping the series.
A deep dive into the MyAnimeList stats reveals impressive results: 21.5% of members rated the series 10/10, 26.6% rated it 9/10, and 30.6% rated it 8/10. Solo Leveling also scored highly on IMDB, with a rating of 8.4 out of 10.
What are your thoughts on Solo Leveling’s international success but underwhelming performance in Japan? Let us know your opinion in the comment section.
