Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, A Picnic?”: Power Leveling Made Easy [Review]

Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, a Picnic?” is a pretty straightforward episode. No complex plotline here today. It’s basically just Jin-woo power leveling, with Jin-ho raking in some easy cash on top of that. Well, there is a bit with Joo-hee at the beginning, but apparently, that’s unimportant to the plot.

Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, a Picnic?”: Details

Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, a Picnic?” is the 10th true episode (you can read reviews for Ep. 1, Ep. 2, Ep. 3, Ep. 4, Ep. 5, Ep. 6, Ep. 7, Ep. 7.5, Ep. 8, and Ep. 9 here) of the first season of this kinda sorta urban fantasy action anime, minus the sole recap episode so far. Said anime is the anime adaptation of the South Korean web novel and webtoon series of the same name by Chugong. A-1 Pictures (Black Butler, Blue Exorcist, Sword Art Online) is the animation studio behind this anime.

Yūya Horiuchi and Takashi Sakuma both co-directed Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, a Picnic?”, with Yoshikazu Tominaga writing, Kōki Onoue doing the storyboard, and Hirotaka Tokuda as the chief animation director. Shunsuke Nakashige is the director of Solo Leveling overall, with Noboru Kimura also being the writer for the same. Hiroyuki Sawano is the composer of the music you hear in the anime.

Speaking of music, the opening theme music for Solo Leveling as a whole is “Level” by Sawano and Tomorrow X Together. Meanwhile, “Request” by Krage is the ending theme music.

Voice Cast

Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, a Picnic?” features the voices of Taito Ban (Aleks Le in English dub) as Sung Jin-woo and Genta Nakamura (Justin Briner in English dub) as Yoo Jin-ho. The other notable voice in this episode is Rina Hon’izumi (Dani Chambers in English dub) as Lee Joo-hee.

When and Where to Watch

Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, a Picnic?” made its airing and streaming debut on March 16, 2024. You can watch this episode only on Crunchyroll at the moment. In fact, you can watch this entire anime only on Crunchyroll for the moment, due to this anime being a Crunchyroll exclusive at the time of this writing.

Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, a Picnic?”: Synopsis

As you might be able to tell, Solo Leveling is an ongoing anime series. In fact, Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, a Picnic?” only just premiered two days ago at the time of this writing. Thus, you will all get the official synopsis for Crunchyroll instead of a spoiler-filled plot summary. You can check that out below:

Jinwoo survives tragedy once again, but Woo Jinchul warns him that Hwang Dongsoo, an S-Rank hunter, may be after his life. Determined to grow stronger, Jinwoo teams up with Jinho to raid a succession of C-Rank dungeons, but they attract attention…

Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, a Picnic?”: The Good

Strangely enough, the best part of Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, a Picnic?” is the lack of action. Yes, I know. It doesn’t make sense for an anime as action-focused as this one, but bear with me for a moment. This lack of action allows us the closest thing this anime has to slice of life, which allows us some degree of character development and character interactions between Jin-woo and, well, anyone else. It’s not much, but at least it’s something. We even get some comedy with this slice of life, so it’s rather enjoyable.

And as usual, this anime enjoys a very high animation quality throughout this episode. Yes, even in spite of the lack of action. The animators seem to be working overtime for each scene, resulting in the entire episode having an overall quality nearing feature-length anime films in quality.

Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, a Picnic?”: The Bad

Alas, I do have some qualms with the story of Solo Leveling Ep. 10 “What Is This, a Picnic?”. My main complaint: the way the story handled Lee Joo-hee.

Throughout the anime, you get the feeling that either she never got any psychological therapy for her trauma, or she got insufficient amounts of it, or even that the therapist was completely useless. The implication you get is that both Joo-hee’s therapist kept pushing for her to basically quit her job and go back home as a way to resolve her trauma, which basically seems to me that said therapist is essentially pushing for Joo-hee to just get married instead. Even leaving all the iffy stuff aside, how is that going to resolve her PTSD in the slightest? Answer: it won’t. It just feels like the story is doing her dirty there, and why this aspect of the story is getting my goat so much.