Tower of God is one of the most highly advertised yet narratively rushed shows in recent memory. A
fact we know to be true because Crunchyroll advertised the hell out of it like it was
the next big shounen masterpiece despite the series only getting 13 episodes based
on original material that’s been ongoing for almost a decade now.
Once again I find myself in a precarious position.
One where the fact that I rarely read original material ends up becoming a focal point.
Tower of God was based off a Korean written Manwa
from all the way back in 2010, adapted into english on Webtoon in 2014,
and has enough chapters too it that shows it’s been more or less a weekly release for
much of the last decade, putting it alongside most modern shounen in terms of sheer content volume.
Before this 2020 adaptation came out the excitement
and hype for this series was immense. However, after only 13 episodes the show has, at least
for the moment, come to an end and throughout the entire release of the series,
one thing was made perfectly clear to me online. Manwa readers were not happy.
It’s something I’ve gotten used too over the years with anime. The somewhat high and mighty position
that the manga was always better and if only the anime creators used the original as the storyboard
and did everything frame for panel it would have been fine. Usually this opinion appears depending
on what a person is introduced to. If your first impression of a work is in a particular way,
and you have come to enjoy that way quite heavily then naturally you will just be averse
to changes made to this favourite thing of yours. Very rarely in any medium,
not just anime, have adaptations surpassed their originals. So the backlash,
if you want to call it that, was not unexpected. It always happens.
But here, with Tower of God, I felt
so much more hatred then the usual disgruntled voices about the adaptation. So allow this to be
a disclaimer. This video is not a comparison between the Manwa and the adaptation, I am
not going say what one did better than the other, any of that.
My goal for today is to cover this adaptation for how it stands on its own. I may reference
what I know about the Manwa to possibly try to explain some issues I found with the anime,
but largely I want to look at what these 13 episodes accomplish without anything else
required. Naturally of course if you end up enjoying this series then I can do not much
else but direct you towards the manwa, there will even be a link in the description. But if
this series has positive points or negative points it’ll be because it’s an anime, not an adaptation.
Hopefully that’s enough of a flame shield but we’ll have to see. So today,
Ladies, Gentlemen and others Welcome to Glass Reflection. Today Tower of God.
BUT FIRST A QUICK WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR we at glass reflection would like to give a shout out
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NOW! Back to Tower of God.
The basics of this story are not hard to grasp. There exists what is called the Tower of God,
what happens or exists outside the tower is unimportant, what IS important
is that whatever it is you desire can be found at the top of it. But not just anyone can climb it.
Those who have previously reached the top of the tower, Rankers, administer tests
to determine the worth of individuals that wish to climb, and even then they are only
permitted to take the test when chosen by the Towers guardian. Unless
of course someone is powerful enough to enter the tower from the outside.
The story follows one such person, Bam, who enters the tower following in the footsteps
of his childhood friend Rachel who was determined to reach the top of the tower and see the stars.
Bam is granted admission to the tower by it's guardian however it is noted that as an irregular,
someone from outside of the tower, he will have a harder time than most,
in his journey to climb
but also be hunted down if his origins are made public to those he meets.
What do you need to know about Bam? Well there’s not much to know. He's a guy that had amnesia,
only really remembers his one friend from before the tower who he puts an almost absurd
amount of faith and trust into. So much so that he has devoted his whole life to her.
Yeah that's not gonna backfire.
He’s not particularly strong or skillful, but he has an unofficial luck stat that
helps him get out of tough situations without really trying all that hard.
It’s not that Bam is a bad character, I just found him to be quite uninspired. Especially compared to
nearly all the characters that surround him. A lot of criticism has been laid on the anime adaptation
of this story, with manwa readers complaining about how a lot of the unique storytelling was
removed, to be replaced with more a traditional shounen style of narrative.
While it’s been long enough since I read parts of the Manwa to fully agree with that statement,
in the case of Bam he’s one of the most Shonen protagonists ever protagonist.
Bam does very little in the way of direct actions throughout the series, instead he as
a character has a type of natural charisma that makes people do a lot of the hard work for him.
Bam doesn’t do things that change the story, things happen to Bam that changes the story and
that’s a very significant difference. I think it wouldn't be as noticeable if it were not for the
testing aspect of the series. When you test your characters, most of the time depending
on the test you are looking for them to act a certain way, but Bam doesn’t act, he reacts.
In fact, throughout all 13 episodes of the series I would say Bam made exactly three
actions that affected the story. In episode One he chased Rachel into the tower,
thereby starting the narrative as we know it, in episode 5 he saves Rachel
from being attacked at the cost of the crown game and potentially his own life,
and lastly in episode 13 he saved Rachel once again from certain death. Noticing a pattern here?
With those exceptions, things happen to Bam that he reacts too, rather than him acting
on his own impulse. Once inside the tower, he gets told not only to fight the eel in the cage,
but the caretaker even convinces the newly introduced Princess Yuri to give him
the Black March, a powerful sword. Which she only agrees to do seemingly because he
is handsome and she's interested in him for some reason. If Bam acts at all it’s
because someone told him to do something, rather than him deciding that it’s something
he needs to do. It’s almost as if he’s a puppet for someone else's own ends, which
honestly wouldn't surprise me given the nature and attitude of a lot of the players in the narrative.
The problem with that though is that it makes it hard for me to like him as a character.
Tower of God is filled with interesting characters, all with what feels like tomes of
backstory barely scratched at throughout the show. But Bam is our protagonist despite being honestly
the least interesting one of the bunch. All of the mystique about Bam doesn’t come from what he does,
but just rather the mystery behind where he came from and why he was allowed to be here
in the first place. He’s like a mystery box of a main character, one that the narrative
keeps teasing but doesn’t seem to have any intention of opening anytime soon.
There are just too many questions about him, we aren't shown where he really came from,
Rachel just found him, his only real goal is to follow Rachel like a Simp
all the way to the top of the tower because that’s where SHE wants to go.
The narrative doesn’t really challenge him enough to make his own decisions. Like if Bam
had to choose between Rachel and his new found friends of the Tower, what would his choice be?
Would he be conflicted at all? What would be the result of his mental state because of all that?
We don’t get those questions because that’s not how the story is laid out. That is not the Plan.
This narrative really likes plans. Specifically those of it’s characters, both shown and implied.
Some of this is obvious, like how Khun ends up Lelouching his way through the majority
of the show's obstacles dragging his new friends, including Bam, along. How various antagonists move
players in the tests around like chess pieces to achieve their ends. But the intriguing thing
about most of these plans is that we don’t, at this introductory stage, get a reason for why.
For some the Why is easy, hell many of the cast's motivations are plainly explained at
the start of episode 01 before we even know who they are. Reaching the top of the tower is like
receiving a wish granting mcguffin and everyone has a reason why they want their wish granted,
but it’s the characters that we don’t know the answers for that are the
most interesting. What was Yuri doing on the ground floor of the tower and
why did she really take an interest in Bam? Was it because he was irregular?
Simple curiosity? Did she see a new piece of the game that she could take influence?
The Towers head administrator of testing, he clearly has motivations behind how the
tests are laid out and aligned, but while he says his actions are for the good of the tower
we don’t really know if that’s because there are things that are clearly good and
not good for the tower, or it’s because he believes himself to be good for the tower
and anything that benefits him personally is in benefit of the Tower.
Rachel wishes to see the stars, to shine brighter than any of them, despite the world telling her
constantly that she can’t. But why? Is she simply frustrated by a lack of positive circumstances in
her life? Jealous at the inequality presented to some but not others? Or something else entirely?
There is so much here to these characters that’s worth exploring,
enough that it would be foolhardy for me to attempt to compare
most of them to your typical shounen cast because they have so much more depth than that.
My issue with the story of Tower of God is not that any aspect of it is bad, but that it seems to
take great pride in just how complicated it really is. When talking with Manwa readers one of the
major complaints I heard from them regarding the show was the pacing. That the show blitzed it’s
way through entire chapters leaving much behind in its wake, and I can totally see that from watching
the series without additional context. While all of the pertinent information does exist in
the show, it’s not always presented in an easily digestible way. Instead it presents it’s world
like how back in school the teacher would want us to copy entire paragraphs of information from the
board or an overhead projector. But because there was just SO MUCH information we as students just
had to blitz copy all of it down so we wouldn't miss anything as they moved to the next board or
slide. We saw all the information as we quickly scrawled it down, but we couldn't process it
because we didn’t have the time. Essentially forcing us to take the time to re-read through
all the info later. In this case, Tower of God is a series that heavily benefits from a re-watch.
It’s only frustrating that for some people a re-watch is required in order to understand
things, rather than just taking the time to make it easier to comprehend from the get go.
Like I get it, there’s a lot of information. At the time of writing this video there are
484 chapters of the manwa written. That’s over 9 years of weekly content, and attempting to
condense all of that into just 13 episodes is pretty foolhardy. I don’t know what the
decision behind that was, I don’t know if it was a production issue, a lack of financial backing,
perhaps a lack of confidence in the material's popularity with a more global audience. There are
so many explanations for why anime have the amount of episodes that they do. Even My Hero Academia,
the massive juggernaut that it has become in the Shounen world, started off with just a single
cour season! That's it! It ended up getting the majority of it's seaosns AFTER that.
So now it just becomes a question of if there was value seen in this adaptation enough
to not only justify a sequel, but one with enough episodes to actually continue at a proper pace.
And I really hope that’s the case! Like, I think I’ve been very clear so far in laying
out a bunch of my problems with the series, some of the more foundational issues, but
I’ve seen stories that have come back from this with just more content.
Ask yourself how many long running shounen series in the history of the genre
would still have gotten as popular as they were with only 13 episodes? Would Academia
have the same notoriety to it with only 13? Would Full Metal Alchemist? Would One Piece?
Sure all of these properties had the advantage of a massively popular manga series in Japan
but from a anime standpoint none of those shows would have been anywhere near as good
with only 13 episodes. So obviously Tower of God, with it’s meesely one season, can't compare.
But I can watch Tower of God and I can see the depth of it. I can see the gears turning in the
background, the setup for further stories with these amazing characters, and I desperately want
to experience them. I know the Manwa is available, I know that if I really want to know JUST the
story then it’s easily available to me, but I want to see that story in motion. I want to feel
these characters through the performances of their actors, to hear this world through it’s phenomenal
soundtrack and sound design. I want anime to be treated with as much care and attention that their
original material receives because I personally find this to be the much more enjoyable medium.
I started this video by saying that I would not be comparing this adaptation with its
source material, and that’s largely because I wish we didn’t have too. I’m not the biggest
fan of anime with this much potential behind them, left to sit after only a cour. I hope that we get
more of it, I hope that the producers of this show not only decide to continue the series but
give it the time it needs to tell the story that exists. But I fear that such a thing is
impossible. That even if we do get another season, eventually it’ll stop being profitable. That we
might get a season two but that’s it. Which will leave me in the same position that I’m in now.
I enjoyed watching Tower of God, quite heavily. I enjoyed watching it more than
other shows that I have recommended people to watch this year. But regardless of that, it’s a
show I can’t recommend at the moment because it doesn’t end. It’s a peak at what we could have
from by all accounts is a very well developed world and story, but it is not that. Not yet.
Of course what I can recommend is for you to go listen to the Soundtrack,
it’s available on Spotify and is one of the better ones from the year so far, topped only
by the soundtrack for Dawn of the Deep soul which Surprise, was also done by Kevin Penkin.
He’s a stand up bloke and he writes the good shit, so I can’t help but support his work.
But yeah, that’s a downer ending to this video. If it’s not obvious already I can only present
Tower Of God with the recommendation to stream it. Not good enough to buy,
too much missing to place it among the best of the best. But Not so completely without entertainment
that it’s worth skipping entirely. It just really needs a continuation, one that is well paced that
allows the world to breathe a bit. Otherwise well, the Manwa will always be available.
For alternate anime recommendations, I really only have one. For all the flaws in execution for Tower
of God there is still a depth to the world that’s unseen in many other similar shows. The closest
I can recommend fully is of course the popular shounen adaptation of Hunter Hunter from 2011.
A series I couldn't get out of my head as I watched Tower of God with it’s
tests and challenges. But Hunter Hunter has over 100 episodes to show you just how great it is,
which is a depressing comparison. But if you do check it out hopefully it’ll be to your liking.
Lastly, a very special thank you to my patrons, who not only support my work in general,
but allow me to continue to do what I do.
and for that I am immensely thankful! I do love and
appreciate you all. Specifically though, as I like to do, I want to give particular shout-outs
to patrons Siri Yamiko, Wago 221, Calhoonboy, Hector Montemayor, Rune
Jakobsen, and Ryefan Boneapart for being especially awesome. You guys are great!
And until next time – ladies, gentlemen, and others – watch more anime…and stay frosty.