The Martial God Who Regressed Back to Level 2

edit: the 'america racist' part makes more sense when you read til end of season 1 btw. basically

He wasn't racist, racism was an excuse for his inferiority complex. He'd have another excuse if mc was american. And it's not like anyone else supports his 'racism', they just literally can't afford to stand against him when he's their strongest fighter and therefore best hope (more than mc) and also an asshole(edit 2 ok a hundred or so novel chapters later the mc does say he felt the racism was too bad in america to want to move there so idk)

Reviewed @ch 51 (end of season 1)
This is actually quite a fun read.

It suffers from some staples of the genre:

1. The litrpg isn't really explained. The most I can gather is it's all a cruel joke for the entertainment of ridiculously powerful beings, according to ch 1? But then they sent him back because he was promising? So...there's a bigger purpose? Which seems strange when you consider how many billions/trillions of people these gods are killing.
2. He's hiding his regression from everyone. I understand why he'd hide it from some people. For security or to not affect future events so he can predict them. But there's at least a few characters that I'm certain he could comfortably tell (like his niece) and he just doesn't for no reason.
3. He's pretty OP. Which is USUALLY fine in this story because we know he has years of training and grew to be one of the best remaining fighters and has unfair advantage with his Martial Power stat. But then he's ALSO OP at using techniques he never learned before...he picks up Holy/Mana (or rather, Force) techniques incredibly quickly and it just doesn't make sense. He also apparently is a master of hand-to-hand, swordsmanship and spearmanship. It seems too much unless he was fighting decades, which he wasn't. I think it was only three years or so...
   There's a couple other things, like I don't understand how the connector works at all. Are they inside the pod but other people are transported physically? Idk. And Baron just seems a bit too cartoonish of a jerk to make us not like him. And

the daughter gets too upset about the words of her father when she KNOWS he's being brainwashed. Feels like every country in the world should be assassinating that woman, btw. Oh and the daughter overreacted to her Gift when it's description was pretty straightforward...but eh she was mentally unstable I guess.

All that said, it also does a lot right.
The fights are good.
The magic system is interesting, if unbalanced as seen in the case of our protagonist and the case of Baron.
Timeline-wise we're still pretty far from the 'tutorial' ending and yet each arc has been interesting enough.
There are some very likeable characters in the cast.
The rare humour can be pretty great. (the phone number thing most of all)
Also I'm personally hoping for those two besties to be shown to be sapphically non-platonic, as there's been a couple signs. But it's a mainstream korean work, so it probably won't happen.

I'm also hoping to get more into the psyche of our mc, but maybe that's content that was judged hard for the medium and maybe it's in the novel? idk
In the end it's worth reading, I think.

Edit 2:
So I read up to ch63 from scanlation.
Then I switched over to similar part in the novel and binge-read until ch 210-ish. And it suffers from similar points but most ESPECIALLY point no. 3. He's OP and many many fights and challenges come too easy. To the point where even the people watching his stream appear bored a couple of times.
It just seems strange that he's this powerful and no other human can get that powerful that quickly. And a fair bit of that is because of his 'achievement shop' perk that he got for no reason and no one can get.
I'd downgrade the novel rating to a 6. Good enough that I binge-read a bunch but I can see myself dropping it and not coming back for years.
But I'll put the manhwa at a 8, for now. Who knows, maybe it'll take liberties to fix the issues? Probably not.

Extremely generic, but still fun. You do need to ignore the hate for Japan and the US that pops out sometimes.

Finished the first 51 chapters and it's pretty good so far.

This story depends HEAVILY on stereotypes though, since this is a story about a global battle league. It's your typical MC gets stronger by leveling up, collecting items, and doing quests and stuff, but the pacing is okay so far. Not frustrating to read, the episodes aren't too short but not too long that it gets boring either.

If I could complain it's probably just that this story depends so much on stereotyping countries and so real life politics definitely come into play, so I can definitely understand why some people would be upset reading this. It can feel kind of racist sometimes, but what do you expect when real life politics play a huge hand in this story?

The number one rule for writing reviews is to be as unbiased as possible. Reviews that can't keep personal feelings out are pointless and not worth the time it takes to read them.

Korea good.

Let me get this straight. So the premise of the story is that humanity was destroyed because the racist Americans refused to allow their strongest player to fight in the final battle of humanity vs orcs because he's ethnically Korean, so of course the Americans lost the fight and as a result humanity was destroyed.

This is...so fucking stupid that it boggles the mind.

This story is generic and stereotypical as fuck. Of course the people of America (the land of immigrants) have to be portrayed as generic racist cardboard cutouts led by some generic racist asshole.

Fuck this story and everything it stands for.

premise about his regression is kinda cliche

but well most manhwa nowadays use regression/reincarnation plots.

except that mc is a bit realistic in dealing with problems and isn't like bratty mcs from most manhwas that are annoyingly stupid and just throw tantrums when faced with problems

story is very well executed
pacing is good