Tower of God 's review

TheBishList12
Mar 26, 2021
This is by no means a perfect Manwha.
It is however my favorite one by a long shot, and has been for the past five or so years. If you're looking for a shounen with great world building and a multilayered plot I definitely think this is a read for you. However, if you want a deep well thought out story that will make you contemplate life this might not be your thing.

I will mostly be pointing out flaws and things that annoyed me while reading so the score I gave might come off as conflicting in regards to the review itself, but I really do enjoy reading this on a weekly basis despite all its flaws and I think a majority of people would too which is why I'm scoring it a 10/10.

So my favorite aspect of this Manwha and the reason I do enjoy it so much is the world building. SIU has managed to create a world that has so much going on it truly feels alive. There is so much information and little details about it (both in the manwha itself and a lot of information you can gather outside of it) that it really does feel like we could follow any other characters in the world and it'd still be a very engaging story. The world does revolve around our main cast the same way it usually does in a lot of shounen work, however if the main cast were to be taken out of the story it still feels like the world would keep spinning and there would still be stories to be told.
As far as the story itself goes it is too complex to briefly explain. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand there are a lot of intricacies in the story, and when you notice them it certainly feels like every little thing lead to this conclusion for a reason. However, it also makes the story hard to follow sometimes.
It tends to jump all over the place and the pacing is very inconsistent. Certain arcs feel like they drag on for way too long when the conclusion is already obvious, while other arcs (or perhaps certain fights, more specifically) go by in a blur and it feels like you missed out when there are a lot of loose ends left by the end of it.
Despite all this, the story has certainly been engaging and up to a certain point it felt like there was always something at stake. This Manwha however has the typical power-creep problem a lot of shounen has. This leads us into the magic system.

So the magic system in Tower of God is set up with different roles being presented. Every role has something they specify in which is their strength, and to be able to climb the tower efficiently you'd need a full team of all the different roles to complete and compensate for each other's flaws. This system clearly had a lot of thought put into it and a lot of the early chapters put in a great deal of information explaining it all. Unfortunately this is all thrown out the window after a certain point and it is once more about who can shoot the bigger explosions at each other. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it feels wasteful when so much time was put into a very interesting magic system.

This has however had a great impact on the art, which has been improving chapter by chapter. Comparing some of the early chapters to the recent ones are night and day and all the big blasts and explosions compliment the great art very well. The character drawings are definitely not anything to scuff at either so overall the art is good.

Speaking about the characters, there are a lot of them. I mean a LOT of them. And again, this is both a good thing and a bad thing. It adds to the world building that there is so much going on at any one point. But because a lot of them do not get a lot of exposure it makes them feel unmemorable. Another issue with it is that due to the length of the Manwha and that the arcs aren't laid out in a traditional sense you often tend to forget characters that later return. What I mean by this is unlike other works where the story might move from one place to another leaving characters behind and finding new ones as they move along Tower of God is set up so everyone is working towards the same goal. All the characters move forward albeit at their own pace but towards a common goal so characters tend to reappear perhaps years later in real time. If five or ten characters suddenly reappear two years later and they never got that much exposure in the first place it feels very understandable the reader would not be able to remember them. At least not remember their personal plot lines which often times would just pick up and continue as if you read about the in the previous chapter. The main cast however feels very well developed. They get enough time put into them that you are able to understand their personal motivations/reasons for moving forward and so on. None of them are super special or anything, but cool and memorable enough to make for a good cast of characters.

Overall I think Tower of God suffers from a lot of problems that most webtoons tend to suffer from. Why this is the case I think is really hard to answer, but it is by far the most polish work out there. The story will keep you on the edge of your seat the whole time and if nothing else it is a beautiful battle Manwha that I think will be worth your time.
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Tower of God
Tower of God
Auteur SIU
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