Manga 148729 Rooftop Swordmaster Reviews Filter Check 3

As a whole, this series is genuinely horrible.

If you turn your brain off you can maybe get through the first few dozen chapters with some mild enjoyment. It's a revenge fantasy with a semi-interesting opening, and one that doesn't pull back from the violence or killing. It does have some questionable theming in the way that it unironically advocates for what is essentially a school shooter's fantasy and twists the world to make the MC seem justified while committing horrific acts of violence that result in millions of dollars of property damage and the deaths of several innocents, but if you turn your brain-off ... and aren't sensitive to that stuff you can somewhat ignore it.

It becomes a lot harder to ignore, however, when it goes on for 70 more chapters with absolutely no depth, challenge, or interesting characters added. It's quite literally revenge porn—no substance, no themes, and absolutely no thought given to a wider narrative.

It's bad. And, while I do admit the first few chapters and everything up to the first big bout of revenge can be brainlessly enjoyable, as a whole the series is so offensively bad and has such horrific themes that I don't feel generous enough to even give it a 2.

Modern manhwa has two settings – power fantasy, and smut. This is one of the more ridiculous power fantasies, and not in a good way.

To summarize the story outline, the protagonist gets bullied hard, wakes up, finds out parents dead, finds a sword that just randomly landed on his rooftop, becomes absurdly powerful and goes on a revenge killing spree.

Now there are some problems. The milder on is that the antagonists are poorly written one-dimensional cartoon villains that borderline on parody. It just isn’t fun to see all of them getting defeated when all of them are pretty much the same character but reskinned. Well, ... I say “defeated” as if there was any struggle, none of them never had any chance and are killed off unceremoniously.

The problem that really ruins this is that the real villain is the protagonist, but the author seem to have never noticed that. The MC who is supposed to be against bullying quickly turns into a bully against the whole humanity. The original bullies are portrayed as in the wrong because they’ve used their power to hurt innocent people, but when the protagonist does it, it’s suddenly okay. The whole storyline propagates the idea of might makes right, yet the antagonists are chastised for following this idea.

The protagonist is hate-filled piece of shit who just happened to become the Korean Hulk. He’s not badass or manly or anything like that – for that you need to be more than simply a mountain of muscles. Readers with at least a bit of empathy will soon stop cheering for the proposed “good guy” and will side with rest of the humanity instead. It’s not really much of a hyperbole to call this story a “school shooter-core”.

The only saving grace this has is art, which is good – for a webtoon. Sur, all the backgrounds are still low poly 3D models haphazardly put there, sometimes even with improper rendering, but the characters and action is drawn well. This is in the minority of manhwa which actually use the scrolling tall page format properly for the illustrations. I also like that the protagonist isn’t your usual twink but actually is properly strong. Too bad everything else about this sucks.

Oh yeah, as a final information, for practical purposes this manhwa is already finished, and the chapters that are currently being published are a prequel/side story with like no relevance to the main story. Also supposedly the whole manhwa is supposed to be a prequel to a multi-series franchise akin to Marvel Avengers or something? I think the author is quite over-confident.