Last year, a lot of good anime series made it big into the industry, but the two that were at the top of the podium were Chugong and A-1 Pictures Solo Leveling, and Naoya Matsumoto and Production I.G.’s Kaiju No. 8. Both of them got a lot of love and support from anime fans but only one of them retained the first spot and it was obviously Solo Leveling.
There is no doubt that Kaiju No. 8 is indeed an intriguing narrative with enticing characters and thrilling plot development, but it couldn’t create hype as big as Solo Leveling. Solo Leveling had a lot of different things to offer that contributed to its success, but one thing that fans believe helped Solo Leveling was its multinational appeal.
According to many anime fans, Solo Leveling was overhyped and thus, it attracted a lot of eyes, which eventually led to its success. However, this is not at all justified as Kaiju No. 8 also got a similar exposition and the series was released in the same window as Solo Leveling. In fact, it had a little bit more advantage than Solo Leveling but it still couldn’t reach the same recognition.
Solo Leveling’s global recognition helped the anime’s success
The Solo Leveling anime series was first announced back in September 2023, and as it is one of the biggest manhwa series of all time, it instantly became the most anticipated anime series of 2024. Fans were excited about it because it offered a unique storyline that was never seen before and once the anime adaptation was released, it certainly lived up to its expectations.
While there were a few complaints, they didn’t really affect the global success of the first season of the series and it got compared to industry giants like One Piece and Jujutsu Kaisen.
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However, the reason behind the anime adaptation’s success was considered to be the multinational appeal of the Solo Leveling manhwa which felt quite unfair.
This was because the anime tried to faithfully adapt the original storyline, but also embedded its own modifications to make it feel different from the manhwa and the novel series. This way the franchise could have grown with the equal success of all three adaptations, but a majority of fans denied the fact that Solo Leveling anime could have been a success if the manhwa had not created the hype.
Kaiju No. 8 had every chance to make it as big as Solo Leveling
When the success of Solo Leveling and Kaiju No. 8 is compared, Solo Leveling comes up on top and for a majority of fans, the reason behind this was considered to be the global engagement of the manhwa. However, it does not feel fair as Kaiju No. 8 had a similar hype as a manga and in fact, it had some other factors contributing to the anime’s anticipation.
The first one was the many inspirations that led to the creation of the series in the first place. Fans might not know this but Kaiju No. 8 is inspired by the wildly popular Godzilla franchise and also by the famous Ultraman. Secondly, the anime was adapted from a manga which was more traditional and had fewer complications compared to a manhwa adaptation like Solo Leveling.
Thus, Kaiju No. 8 had no reason to stay behind Solo Leveling and could have easily taken over it. Nonetheless, this led to a healthy competition and fans got two great adaptations that are going to guide the future of the anime industry and make it an even bigger success.
Kaiju No. 8 and Solo Leveling are available to watch on Crunchyroll.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
