Written by Tomb Raider King (IMDb rating as of Aug 14, 2026: 6.6/10) is being pushed as the anime to fill the Solo Leveling-shaped hole in everyone’s watchlist, and honestly, that makes sense. Same power fantasy setup, same underdog-becomes-unstoppable energy, same hunter-meets-dungeons vibe. At the same time, this anime is also making the same mistakes as Solo Leveling: the power-ups are coming way too fast.
Instead of learning from what fans complained about, this anime is speedrunning straight into it, and it’s happening even quicker than it did the first time around. Here’s what’s actually going on, and why fixing boring MC with instant overpowered MC was never really a fix at all.
Tomb Raider King Is Already Speedrunning Its Power Fantasy
Seo Joo-heon from Tomb Raider King | Credit: Studio Eek
As of 14th August, we’re only at episode 6, and the protagonist is already casually taking down a whole horde of zombies without breaking a sweat. That alone would be a solid power-up moment for most anime around the midpoint of a season. But then he goes and shrugs off Anubis’s Ankh Cross too, which happens to be one of the strongest relics in the story.
For context, this is still early. We’re not talking about a season finale flex or a payoff after a dozen episodes of struggle. This is episode 6 doing what a lot of shows save for way later, if they even get there at all. The anime hasn’t really given us time to sit with Ju-heon being weak, outmatched, or scared. In fact, unlike Jinwoo, he started feeling unstoppable from the very first episode. At least Solo Leveling showed us what weak Jinwoo was like.
Solo Leveling‘s Biggest Flaw Was Always The Pacing
People love to say Solo Leveling‘s problem was Sung Jin-Woo being “too OP,” but that’s not really it. Plenty of shonen leads get busted eventually, and it still works. For example, by the end of the story, shonen protagonists such as Ichigo from Bleach are basically god-level beings themselves. The actual issue was how fast he got there, and how little the story made him work for it once the power-ups started rolling in. Fights stopped feeling tense because you already knew the outcome before it started.
That’s the part Tomb Raider King seems to be copying, just faster. Solo Leveling at least paced its early power creep out over a stretch of episodes before things got silly. Tomb Raider King is doing everything that it can do to make sure we know Joo-heon is badass.
The biggest problem is what this means for tension going forward. Fans are already calling it a cheap copy of Solo Leveling. Once a character can low-diff a god-tier opponent, every fight after has to escalate even harder just to feel like a threat. That’s a tough spiral to climb out of, and it’s exactly the trap Solo Leveling fell into.
What are your thoughts on this anime? Do you think it will get better? Let us know in the comments.
Tomb Raider King is streaming on Crunchyroll
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
