I wish the show was about Anaak and Endorsi rather than Bam an | Saretta Doppini

I wish the show was about Anaak and Endorsi rather than Bam and Rachel. There’s so much more to them. In future seasons, I hope to see more focus on them.

All the other side characters are cardboard cutouts. Their personalities can be summarized with one word each. Annoying, confrontational, tired, loud, hungry, etcetera. Way too many of the fight scenes are from the perspective of these forgettable characters. There is no reason to care about any of them if you haven’t read the manhwa. Some of the character designs fit the enigmatic fantasy setting they’re going for, but others just make no sense. Some people wear typical 2000s fashion like tracksuits, sneakers, and cargo shorts but others are in ninja outfits. And that’s not even to mention the dozens of different fantastical races. Just the character designs imply so much about the world, I wish he fleshed out the world or its inhabitants. But he didn’t. It’s a mess of disjointed tropes stuck together with Gorilla Glue.

If all you want is action and eye candy, you’ll probably be disappointed. Most of the combat revolves around strategic games, but rules are never clear, or where the contestants are in relation to each other. Despite the skilled animators they hired for certain fights, it all feels completely weightless. The director can compose a shot fine enough, but he otherwise seems bored to be here. Each scene lazily collides into the next; transitions are rushed and ugly. To make this trainwreck worse, the art quality is inconsistent as hell. The animation is stiff and the background art is unimaginative.

It's as if the director didn't know how to even script a TV series because every episode ends abruptly. In the middle of dialogue, it cuts to the credits. The next episode picks up right where it left off. They rarely ever tried to surprise us with a cliffhanger. It feels like they wrote the screenplay for a four-hour movie rather than a thirteen-episode TV show. Traditionally episodes conclude a chapter and setup to the next one, not just suddenly cut to black. The only buffer we get is the OP and ED, which are both average pop songs. For a high budget series, they put so little effort into designing the visuals for the credits. Within the series, the music is much better. The piano and the orchestral soundtrack is beautiful, as expected of Kevin Penkin, but it's not suited to this series. Admittedly, it's difficult to tell what tone Tower of God is going for. I doubt even the director always knew what emotion he was trying to evoke. In the rare action scenes when the music and artwork sync up well, it's pretty entertaining. All of a sudden, someone will interject with an unfunny joke and the pace comes to a screeching halt. The art style will suddenly swap to chibi and comedic reaction faces are thrown in at random too. Even out of combat, the comedy is just cringy as hell. I was expecting it to go away as the plot progressed, but it only got worse.

Everything in Tower of God is a mystery. It is predicated on mythology, the setting is very vague, the protagonist is an amnesiac, and the rules of the Tower are unclear. For a show that’s at least 80% exposition, impressively it didn’t explain much this season. While watching ToG, questions like these will fill your mind: Who or what created the Tower? How does it grant people power? What is the outside world like? When the final episode ends, you still won't have answers. The Tower is a mystery to everyone, even the author. Like an unplanned fanfiction, the direction is unclear. There is some vague foreshadowing. New characters are endlessly added in favor of developing current ones.

Tower of God suffers from inherent problems that are deeply structural, not just superficial, and they run right down to its core. If you build a tower on a weak foundation, it is bound to collapse. You cannot write a fantasy epic with no bones, and that's why this season was a trainwreck. It has been a long and tedious climb, and apparently this is only the prologue. There’s nowhere to go from here but up, so as the fans say,