Anime: Kami no Tou

PREAIRING HYPE
Tower of God was heavily marketed as the first Korean webcomic adaptation, as well as the beginning of a new era for anime. It wasn’t, but we were constantly told it was, regardless, as well as how we HAD to support it, so that the industry can churn out even more Korean webcomic adaptations. Consume product and be excited for next products! Since this is the future, let me share the outcome with you.
- Aside from being from Korea there was nothing remarkable about it.
- As an adaptation it was below average.
- Aside from the three Korean adaptations they shoved out close to each other no other webcomic was adapted for years to come.

Basically, it was all a scam of Crunchyroll, a badly adapted infomercial that promoted the webcomic, as well as a ploy to get subscriptions from easily impressionable buffoons who would love to be part of a supposed new era of anime… that never came. It was also just another case of the rather large fanbase of the webcomic readers hyping it up as the best shit ever. Somehow that was justifying the quality of an animated adaptation they hadn’t even watched yet. This overblown anticipation is what made Tower of God the most popular show of the season it aired in, and was made to come off like a modern classic in the making.

In reality, there wasn’t much competition during that season, thanks to all the far more famous competitors like Sword Art Online, Oregairu, and ReZero getting postponed due to the pandemic and leaving only Kaguya Sama as the only legitimate contender. Basically, had COVID-19 not sabotaged the competition Tower of God would not have made such an initial splash. It would have been largely ignored right away. And to be frank it was eventually ignored, regardless, given how little the audience cared by the time the second season came out. Despite the marketing and the praising, the facts couldn’t be ignored. Not many care about Korean webcomics, and the tv airings in both Japan and Korea were fairly low.

And now that the peasantries of worthless hype are out of the way, let’s delve into the issues that reveal the crap it was all along.

1) The production values were mostly mediocre
This alone was enough to drive away 90% of viewers within the first few episodes. The fanboys would insist it looked fine, but they were fanboys so they obviously liked anything related to the series. For a show that was supposed to be marking the beginning of a new era in anime, it was helmed by a subpar director, featured clucky animation, had an unappealing artstyle, and looked in general way worse than run of the mill shonen like Demon Slayer, which did not reinvent the wheel yet looked amazingly.

With that said, it was still making it stand out in the crowd. The second season attempted to fix this problem by making the animation as typical as possible and stripped away its visual identity, becoming too bland to stare for long.

2) The protagonist was piece of white toast
Easily the character with the weakest characterization. The narrative tried to paint him as a victimized underdog in an unfair world that took away the love of his life. Unfortunately, he exuded the personality of a boy scout, making him uninteresting from the outset. To make matters worse, he had amnesia, leaving his backstory a blank slate for anyone to self-insert easier. This lack of depth is what rendered him boring and forgettable. The second season attempted to fix this problem by making him an edgelord, and still failed to make him interesting. His foundations as a personality were doomed from the very start.

3) The training was meaningless
While the premise suggested a typical ‘starting from the bottom and gradually improving until reaching the top’ scenario, in practice, all the training and incremental power-ups quickly became meaningless. All you needed to win was to either be born with broken powers or to constantly betray everyone. Physical power meant nothing. The protagonist, for example, was constantly treated as a super special chosen one. Because he’s a self-insert, get it? He got more powerful a million times faster than everyone else, everyone around him loved him right away, he was constantly being plot armored, and he was given hax powers he did not earn just because he was cute. Essentially you never felt like this guy deserved his victories, since he didn’t do anything to earn them. As for the others who were not born as special chosen ones like him, they just passed the tests by betraying everyone.

4) The support cast was underwhelming
Though the protagonist was surrounded by dozens of peers who appeared to contribute to the world and the plot, their relevance quickly faded. Within a few episodes, they became obsolete, offering no real challenge to the protagonist, who effortlessly overpowered them all. His ability to instantly mimic their unique attacks eliminated whatever vital role they may have had if he couldn’t do that. For this reason, there was no sense of rivalry or sportsmanship. He advanced through the tests without needing anyone’s help, and there were no mentors imparting vital life lessons. Instead, the supporting characters merely served to provide him with additional abilities.

5) The explanations only managed to further confuse you
The entire series revolved around a tournament arc with rules that not only constantly changed but were also frequently ignored or broken. The show bombarded viewers with lengthy, convoluted explanations of the power system, only to render them pointless by disregarding them. Oh, and not to forget the needless mentioning and renaming of things. A few examples:
- You are told there will be wild boars. You never see them.
- You see a seal. It’s called a dolphin.
- You see a tentacle monster. It’s called a bull.
- You see a sword. It’s called a needle.

They also used different terms for familiar video game concepts to further add to the confusion. As if calling them positions instead of character classes, and light bearers instead of mages makes that much difference. Moreover, many elements did not behave as what they were shown.
- A character used healing magic without first establishing that she had such an ability.
- A guy who was chewed alive by a monster, appeared in the next episode completely fine, like it had never happened.
- Someone claimed he will become an administrator, and ended up only getting the administrator’s approval.

It was impossible to follow the plot with the way everything was cryptic and eventually not followed through since everyone either lied or cheated or the translators had no idea what they were doing.

6) Character interactions were all over the place
- One moment the characters were killing each other, the immediate next they acted all friendly to each other, and then they were shocked to be betrayed when they were killing each other not long ago.
- At one point, they attended the funeral of a supposed friend they barely knew, a man who had gone mad and tried to kill them all.
- A character who ruthlessly murdered everyone she grew up with just to secure better meals inexplicably risked her life to save a girl who despised her throughout the series.

As you see, friendship and teamwork made little sense, because none of the characters actively choose to make friends or allies. It was always something imposed by the tests they faced. One moment they were instructed to kill each other, and the next they were told to become friends, which they did without hesitation, as if they lacked free will and acted solely to advance the plot. In one scene the protagonist befriended someone by jumping onto him and claiming they were now friends, even if the other guy didn’t want to be his friend. Essentially, the characters were mere plot devices, their actions felt forced and unnatural. No one was truly a friend or ally; they were brainwashed into playing these roles.

And that was also why there was no actual betraying going on in later episodes. In order to betray someone you first need to be a friend or a teammate. And the characters were neither; they simply labeled each other as friends because a test dictated it. And even if they were actual friends, how could they be blamed for betraying each other when a subsequent test required it? This was particularly relevant to Rachel, the protagonist’s primary love interest, who is universally despised for betraying him. Yet, she was merely doing what everyone else had been doing. Hers was the fourth betrayal in three episodes, but the audience only took issue with hers, just because she was the main waifu, and the only one who harmed the empty husk of the self-insert that was the main character. It shattered the power fantasy that the audience had been indulging in up until that point, but it was otherwise not something only she was doing.

7) The world building is dull
Despite the vast potential for adventure and discovery within the setting, the world-building fell short. The characters never ventured out to explore or interacted with their surroundings, as they were preoccupied with passing a series of tests inside a single building. Whenever a new element or concept was introduced, it served merely as a temporary fixture for the next test, vanishing from relevance the moment the test concluded. This resulted in a world that felt static and underutilized, with no sense of depth or continuity.

8) The pacing was super fast
- The plot sped through every event without allowing you to like anyone or anything before it was over.
- The director of the anime removed a lot of the talking, because it would make the anime very boring to watch.
- The webcomic is not better because it has that extra talking. 70% of its duration is people explaining what is going on in a confusing way instead of showing it. And you need to add to this ridiculous amount the long blog posts that SIU, the creator of the webcomic, wrote outside of the webcomic for adding details he couldn’t fit somewhere in the actual plot. You are mostly reading about the characters and the rules instead of actually seeing a damn thing, because SIU was completely incompetent at delivering exposition by showing things instead of having a character saying it, or even worse, by writing blogs that you read outside of the webcomic. Do you believe that this guy is hailed as a genius writer when he hardly shows anything? There is a part where he turns a huge alligator into a tiny chibi comic relief, because he got bored of drawing him and wanted more space in the pages to fill them with huge speech bubbles that infodump the story instead of showing a damn thing. Anyways, by removing all the terribly handled infodumps, the plot moved very fast and it was mostly action about stuff you were never given much context to give a damn about.

9) The cliffhangers were fake tension
A lot of episodes ended in a way that made it seem like something crazy was going to happen in the beginning of the next episode. Nothing happened. It was just lazy hooks to make you click on the next episode and to disappoint you with character X never dying when the episode implied he did, or there was never an amazing battle right around the corner.

10) Fake complexity
The tests were pathetically simple and nowhere near as sophisticated as they made them seem to be. They had a shitload of rules, they were explained very poorly, and they required no brain cells. All the players had to do was pass through a water barrier, or open a door. The show in general was constantly trying to sound smart in order to fool the audience into thinking they were watching something smart, but down to it, it was a run of the mill fighting shonen with a lot of needless complications.
- There was no point in creating a fake crown to fool other contestants, when they got instantly defeated by a generic attack a few seconds later.
- There was no point in stalking goblins and running around like idiots when all it took was sabotaging the underwater canals.
- There was no point in fighting a monster that was holding back the whole time and which could easily defeat them whenever it felt like it.

The protagonist passed half the tests by standing still and doing absolutely nothing. As for the other half of the tests, he just used a new superpowers that he either pulled out of his ass, or copied it in a second by looking at someone else using it. This is also why every test was ultimately a waste of time. The organizers could have a typical battle royale on the first level and nothing would have changed. The strongest and most ruthless would be the last remaining ones, and that would be the end of the show.

For all these reasons and even more if I was willing to nitpick further, The Tower of God was yet another show that did not live up to its hype, looked bad, was very hard to follow, had no tension, no logic, and nothing to look forward to.