Sometimes I play games. Not maniac or cultish ones, just common games others play. What is the goal of gaming? For stronger me unlike the reality? To drive out stress? In fact, I don’t have such a thing. You know it, don’t you? We play games because it’s fun. The control, the growth, and the collecting are fun, so we play for the fun. Fun, not grandiose, but amusing. That’s the necessary condition of a game.

The same goes for the comics. As long as the comics came into the territory of popular arts, though some comics may pursue artistic purity, the artistic purity is not a necessary condition of the comics. Hardcore Leveling Warrior, by Sehoon Kim, is a work loyal to the comics as the entertainment. Hardcore Leveling Warrior, which adopts the play of RPG games into the work as it is, and describes it livelier with the comic expression, is professional in every side: the material, the story, the drawing, the directing, and anything else.

The outline of the story is consisted of the two axes, the reality and the game. ‘Lucid Adventure’, a game developed at a certain point of time in the near future, can be connected while the player is sleeping. The real me and me in the game is not separated, and the experience and the sense in the game is experienced in the real life. Moreover, the setting, the quest, and the story in the game change as the gamer acts. The protagonist, Hardcore Leveling Warrior, is the ranking no.1 user in the game, but in reality, he was a young adult, Ethan, who works in a workplace (or a gold farm) to repay his debt. His real life got better for his success in the game, but with the death of his in-game character, all stats of his character is reduced to 1. Ethan get to be confined to the workplace, and the situation requires of him to start over from the bottom. It’s a story of adventure for leveling with Sora, the character he saved long before, and Dark, grandson of the president of Giga, the company which developed the game.

The readers get to follow the story, like they’re carrying out quests as the player of a game. As the webtoon and the game are the entertainment shared by the most of the young adult, the development of the story, which depends on the common experience of the most of the readers, is well received without a problem. Particularly, the setting that a high leveler and a low leveler form a party and clear a quest is different from conventional comics with game material, and it was possible only with the notion of carrying (which means the high leveler helps the low leveler’s rapid growth).

As I mentioned above, Hardcore Leveling Warrior is a work of professionalism. In other words, it’s a work achieves its goal as a pure entertainment. It achieves fun, the goal of the entertainment, by neither excessive nor insufficient drawing, the lively directing, the development of the story with consistency, the level of violence and profanity, and so on. If you’re looking for comics with fun, this Hardcore Leveling Warrior is just for you.