Solo Leveling Arise Needs to Be Better About Not Wasting the Player’s Time

Solo Leveling Arise is a genuinely fun action game, which is why it feels like a crappy situation all-around when the game seems hellbent on making the player experience as tedious as possible.

As a gacha game that’s meant to keep you hooked in the long run and even potentially to get you to spend some real world bucks, Solo Leveling Arise comes with daily and weekly activities for players to engage in. Every gacha game does this. You log in, do your dailies, get a small amount of premium currency, then log out. Maybe you try to push ahead in the story mode a little bit, but you’ll eventually reach a point where you’re mostly just logging in for dailies while waiting for the next update.

Your typical gacha game usually only requires you to spend about 15 minutes on dailies, or less (shoutout to AFK Journey, even if that game comes with its own issues). Not so with Solo Leveling Arise. No, with Arise, you can expect to spend about 45 minutes to an hour just doing dailies, which is pretty ridiculous even by gacha game standards.

When I’d first gotten into the game, Arise‘s pushy attempts to get me to purchase its premium pass and monthly subscription were not lost on me. But because this isn’t my first rodeo and I know hitting a progression wall and having to wait it out is inevitable, I resisted. As I’ve spent more time with Arise, however, it’s become clear that it isn’t just pushing its microtransactions and premium passes on you for the sake of progression; it’s also pushing them on you for the sake of convenience and quality-of-life features that should’ve been included from the very start.

The most notorious example of this is the game’s Gates mode. This is your main way of gaining experience and leveling up so that you can get stronger and progress. As you clear your Gates each day, you get little experience boosts. And you can even min-max this process by only clearing special colored Gates that give better rewards and Artifacts.

Solo Leveling Arise makes the min-maxing process tedious in two ways: by time-gating the Rescan feature that lets you refresh your Gates list, and by locking the sweep feature behind a paywall.

As a free-to-player, you’re naturally incentivized to min-max as much as possible. After all, you don’t have the luxury of just paying your way through the game. To do this, you’ll want to refresh your Gates daily to make sure you’re only hitting the colored ones to get the most out of your time. The issue is that you need to wait five minutes in-between each Rescan, which feels like a colossal waste of time.

Not only that, the game won’t let you sweep A-rank or higher Gates unless you pay for the premium subscription. This means that you not only need to sit around waiting five minutes for your next Rescan (which are also limited per day, by the way), you also need to manually play through the Gate levels even if your level is high enough that you should be able to sweep it with no issues. All of this compounds to make Gates the most tedious and time-consuming mode in the game, and trying to min-max this can easily take up half an hour or more.

There are other little ways in which Solo Leveling Arise tries to make things inconvenient for the F2P player, such as preventing you from stacking your Encore and Instance Dungeon keys past a two-stack to increase the rewards you get from clearing those in fewer runs. Guess what? Gotta pay for a premium subscription for that too.

As someone who genuinely enjoys the gameplay of Arise and being immersed in this fun universe, even I can tell the tedium is going to get to me at some point. The game has the benefit of being in its honeymoon phase right now, which means that I’m going to put up with its time-consuming dailies for a little while longer. But when that wears off, you can bet that Arise is going to get uninstalled so quickly, simply because it doesn’t feel like it respects my time.

It’s especially frustrating because these are features that are present in so many other games of this ilk. Dailies are meant to be quick activities that you can clear stress-free. Even games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, which have deep open-world exploration systems, let you clear their dailies in a matter of minutes. Solo Leveling Arise absolutely needs to work on making its daily activities more palatable, or it could very well run the risk of dying off quickly.