Solo Leveling Season 2 Makes a Major Change to the Story

The first season of the Solo Leveling anime was immensely successful and brought forth a phenomenon that has taken over a lot of the discourse this Winter 2025 anime season, with the sequel to the anime airing on January 4, almost a whole month after the film compilation of season 1, with the first two episodes of the second season, hit US theatres on December 6, 2024.

Even within this taste of the season to come, a number of changes were made to the Solo Leveling narrative that may have major ramifications for the overall experience of the anime, especially when compared to the manhwa. Here are some of the biggest changes made in Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow-.

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Pacing and Tone

The Anime’s Pace Has Gotten Faster for Season 2

What has changed the most for Solo Leveling when it comes to its adaptation from manhwa into anime is the story pacing, which has increased in the anime in order to get to major story beats faster. While it has been done in a way that retains much of the core developments, the change in pacing has also had a big impact on the personality of the series.

Readers of the manhwa will recall even more moments of comedy, brevity or silliness throughout the story, but the anime has taken up a more serious tone in lieu of the shift in focus on Sung Jinwoo’s personality. The pacing has only gotten faster with Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow-, in which the first two episodes adapted about ten chapters’ worth of content.

To put that into perspective, the entirety of the first season of Solo Leveling adapted around 45 chapters’ worth. The anime also addresses the horrors taking place on Jeju Island much earlier than the manhwa does, identifying the upcoming Jeju Island Raid Arc as one of the series’ most pivotal moments. As for tone, as mentioned previously, the manhwa featured more humor to offset the darker, violent moments littered across the narrative, an aspect that is missing somewhat in the anime, especially as Jinwoo has gotten stronger.

Most fans watching the anime will notice subtle differences in the personality of the series’ main man, Sung Jinwoo. While both iterations of the character are spurred on by the same motivations and experience the same traumatic events, there’s a lot more grappling with his fleeting humanity in the anime version.

Jinwoo’s Changing Personality Develops Differently

Manhwa Jinwoo is Much More Ruthless Earlier On

Whenever he has had to kill another person, Jinwoo has done so, without fail, but in the anime, the weight of such a decision is much more obvious, especially in the aftermath of killing Hwang Dongsuk and his slimy friends. In the manhwa, Jinwoo is somewhat desensitized to violence, and is the kind of guy who’ll dice up an enemy and drop a cheeky one-liner afterward, or eat dinner with his sister after killing six people like it was nothing.

In the anime, these decisions, and their consequences for his character, weigh heavily on him even after the fact. Kim Chul’s death and subsequent “Shadowfication” are major in illustrating the differences between the iterations of Jinwoo.

Originally, Jinwoo orchestrated Kim Chul’s death. Seeing how his ordeal in the Red Gate pushed Kim Chul to the edge, manhwa Jinwoo provokes the A-Ranker into attacking him so he can forge a new shadow that will help him defeat the Red Gate boss, Barca. In the anime, this altercation was primed more as self-defense, with Jinwoo taking advantage of Kim Chul’s hostility to kill him and turn him into the Shadow known as Tank.

Given that Jinwoo’s humanity slipping away is a core theme during this part of the narrative, especially inside the Red Gate, the idea that he killed another person for the utility such an action would grant him is indicative of a more ruthless, pragmatic Sung Jinwoo, but given that the anime is trying to add some complexity to this “diminishing humanity” of its main character, having Jinwoo outright murder Kim Chul in the way he did it in the manhwa wouldn’t be quite right.

The Big Difference

Other Characters Matter More

While there haven’t been complete disconnections from the story beats fans have seen in the manhwa (or the webnovel), the direction being taken with the Solo Leveling anime is one that has been leading it into becoming a vastly different experience to the original, beyond the simple differences in medium. In the anime, we’re being told the story of an individual grappling with some of the major changes to his life and personality that have been brought forth by the System, which affects only him and thus isolates him from other people. This isolation is further confirmed during the Red Gate arc, when the Ice Elf Barca identifies Jinwoo as something other than human, which he then unwillingly confirms by killing and extracting the Shadow of another human being.

The thing that may have a bigger impact than people realize is how much more screen time the anime is willing to give to characters who aren’t Sung Jinwoo, time that will have to be cut from something else to make space for it in the narrative. It is driven a lot more by the characters and their relationships than the manhwa, and this added focus has also changed how the series interacts with the narrative arcs, leading to altered pacing. Despite these aspects clearly shifting his personality, the Sung Jinwoo of the Solo Leveling anime is one who faces more internal struggle when it comes to his situation, while featuring less “personality” from the series itself, while the manhwa gives us a lot of heart and humor among the violence, but a Jinwoo who is colder, more calculating, and more obsessed with his increasing strength.

Solo Leveling

Release Date

January 7, 2024

Directors

Shunsuke Nakashige

Writers

Noboru Kimura

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  Taito Ban

  Shun Mizushino (voice)

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  Genta Nakamura

  Kenta Morobishi (voice)