Recently re-read the entire series after years of not catching up, and honestly, it really wasn't as good as I remembered it the first time around.

The main character Baam's obsession with antagonist Rachel is not romantic but cringe-worthy.
Every character harps on how special Baam is but ... I am not seeing it this time around. He just appears muted, quiet, non-hostile, and somewhat naive.
The weird subtle harem forming around Baam is a bad attempt at comic relief.
Too many mysteries hundreds of chapters later continue to affect the plot without further attempts at an explanation, which just morphs from being a source of excitement/curiosity to annoyance.

Season 1 had fairly mediocre art, but I enjoyed the scheming. Honestly, despite the bad art, Season 1 was the strongest and tightest story-wise. I loved Kuhn's plotting schemes. I also enjoyed the drama of betrayals. The mysteries still felt fresh and relevant.

Season 2 started off really interesting. We had another cast of compelling characters. But I noticed the plot losing steam a few arcs into the season. I was bored enough to just skip multiple chapters during the last game of the workshop battle arc. I think the story suffered from a rushed, busy reunion arc with no pause to celebrate characters coming back together as a team. There was no emotional fulfillment. It was instead just action after action after action. By the time we got to Hell train arc the story was meandering along and bogged down by uninteresting side characters. Rachel's scheming was the centerpiece of the last major arc of this season, and it just wasn't very compelling. She is a boring antagonist, and her continued survival in a so-called cut throat environment makes no sense. This woman should be dead already.

Season 3 just seems like a lot less plotting and a lot more flashy explosions. Which was not what originally drew me in. Too many new characters and none dealt with well.

Now years after I initially started the series, I'm finally fully dropping this series. Will not ever be re-reading or checking this series again. The pacing is irredeemable, storytelling has been tossed out the window, compelling characters are forgotten and squandered.

... Last updated on December 2nd, 2023, 7:18pm

1st season: 10/10
2nd season: 6/10
3rd season: 3/10
I'm not going to bother reading after the hell train arc lol... but apparently from some readers, it goes lower and LOWER.

Oh sweet prince, how low have you fell.

Matchup qualities went from "I can read your moves in this 4D Chess game and do some BIG BRAIN PLAY" to "BAM BAM BAM I CAN SPAM HYPER BEAM WITHOUT COOLDOWN I CAN DYNAMAX 100 TIMES WOOO HOOOOOOO xDDDD"

... Last updated on July 3rd, 2023, 4:13pm

I feel this manhwa can only be appreciated by kids who won't be bothered by its shallow nature.
I'm writing this comment after actually revisiting this series and rereading it for the second time after being tired of it the first time and discontinuing it after 300+ chapters. I thought that the rating can't be for nothing so I thought that if I read it while now knowing the premise from my first run through, I wouldn't have any expectations and would be able to appreciate it for what it is. I was wrong. I have given up on hoping to find any redeeming qualities about this series and decided to stop torturing myself by reading after pushing up to 450+ chapters. I'm sick of this manhwa. There is so much to hate about this series.
Starting with the art. If you take away the bright, shiny and flashy colours and glossy look of the people that have been drawn, the drawings are of very low quality. The "artist" has a love for drawing disproportionately wide eyes so almost every character comes off having a dead stare with the MC having the most wide-eyed look in all situations regardless of his emotions. And these dead looks in the eyes look even more disturbing when the characters are drawn with smiles because the rest of the face doesn't match the smile. And then I frequently have to wonder about if a character is male or female because it's not clear from how they have been drawn. What a joke! This rubbish art with a bright and glossy finish brings to mind the phrase, "You can't polish a turd."
Another thing I can't stand is the repetitiveness of this series. Every single mini arc has to be punctuated with a game of some sort. Fine, there has to be a test passed for every floor, I accept that. But then every time there is a confrontation with an enemy, someone is always proposing a bet of some sort where the two sides compete in a game with a prize at the end. I couldn't believe that the author even managed to find a way to squeeze this go-to technique of his into a full scale war around 480 chapters in. That was my breaking point in reading this the second time but I still respected the author's determination to persist in using that already overused gimmick. I think this author must be in the wrong job and his talents would be better suited to coming up with board games or something similar because is clearly what he loves doing rather than storytelling.
Another nasty thing is the dialogue here. Why does every confrontation have to be stuffed with random characters shallow backstories that every one of these adversaries feel they need to share with a stranger they just met and that they are fighting as an enemy? There is so much unnecessary dialogue here. Either it is expounding on something that had already been explained earlier or saying the same thing that had been said earlier in a different way, this series has a enough of that to make you sick.
And then there is the rubbish world building and rubbish character development. It starts off with a naive MC who looks to be around 10-12 years old. And then he goes through varied experiences for years-the space of almost a decade-but in essence, the MC has not changed at all in terms of emotional growth. He still is almost as naive as he was in the beginning despite the story showing that he has gone through various experiences that would have to change the person in any normal scenario. This is a confused story with characters who have supposedly lived for centuries interacting with other characters who have lived for around two decades and it's hard to tell the difference between the two groups. You even have the around 20 year old MC leading these centuries old characters and them deferring to the kid on decisions. It makes zero sense.
I wonder what criteria has been used to give this book such a high rating, but I have read many average series' before that are far better than this rubbish. Don't let the rating fool you, this belongs in the trash.

... Last updated on June 29th, 2023, 6:32pm

Been following this for over a decade now. Looking back now, I admit some arcs weren't that good. But the quality does improve over time, and as a whole TOG stands at the peak of it's genre. The worldbuilding and character development are unmatched, aside from One Piece.

Truly a piece of art, one of the best storyline, art, characters, character development, pacing, power system and truly exceptional world building, tower of god is the platinum standard for ongoing shounen manwhas out there, however it is not without flaws, complicated games, prolonged storylines, but overall, well thought of, and superbly executed

It's your typical overpowered MC that is stupid and has a naive personality, worse than Naruto, and even worse than Neverland MC.
Every arc consist of the female lead screwing over MC and his teammates over and over again, and he just do nothing about her just because of his feeling, and all she get is just a warning lol. The author probably saves her for the last just like Naruto, for the sake of stupid plot.

... Last updated on May 7th, 2022, 4:26am

There are good side caracthers, but the main story is so bad that I can't read this anymore.

Ignore the usual mob of 15yos and their juvenile, pseudo-intellectual essays on why this "really isn't that good" and "was good then got bad". This is the evolution of shounen, both defining and deconstructing the genre. There's no real way to describe how surreal of a dream Tower of God is. It's One Piece on ketamine. I could go on about at extreme length about its elements and themes but that's not why you're here, you're either here to have someone tell you what to think or to tell you that this is something really big and really beautiful. Tower of God is extremely big, extremely beautiful and extremely fucking exciting. Dive in.

This was just amazing at first. Really top notch. The art was not so polished, but the character design was brilliant. The plot was clever and gripping. But lately - it’s just sort of flabby and directionless. New character after new character after new character introduced, and while they are drawn better, a lot of them look (sorry) unbelievably stupid. The characters you cared about get no screen time. They just bring in new ones and do nothing with them.

It’s like listening to a five year old tell a story: “and then the princess met a unicorn. And then she met another unicorn that was pink. And a mermaid. The mermaid had blue hair. And then they went to the castle. And they met a dragon. A red dragon. And a robot….”

And the world of the story also used to be defined by rules - that was the whole point. It didn’t follow the physics of our world, but it had space and time and hard and fast rules about what characters could and could not do. So it mattered if those rules were broken. Now it’s a world where magic can do anything and everything all of the time or maybe sometimes - so who cares? People can float. They can teleport. There are parallel worlds and pocket universes - it’s all just whatever it is today. So there are no stakes.

Update: H56 actually nailed it. This IS One Piece on ketamine. In a bad way. I used to love One Piece, and in the latest arcs, I have not had a CLUE what’s happening. There are literally 100s of new characters. Unless you are an obsessed fan with ten hours a week to spare editing the wiki and making flash cards to study, you only care about a few main character arcs. But with both One Piece and ToG lately, it’s like you need a goddamn PhD in whatever webtoon to keep up. You know what that says to me? The author doesn’t know what to do with his main character anymore. He doesn’t know how to finish the story. He’s run dry on the endless cycle of MC power ups. So he’s just adding new characters and new characters and new characters and new characters. It’s the problem with so much manga. When the story is over, flush and wipe and be on your way. Don’t spam fifteen dozen new side characters and hope one of them is interesting. You know why I loved Shin Angyō Onshi so much? The author had the balls to do an amazing ending. As opposed to so many others where it just gets stupider for decades until you give up.

... Last updated on November 23rd, 2021, 7:07am