Solo Leveling’s web novel started publishing on KakaoPage on July 25, 2016. Tomb Raider King’s web novel started publishing on KakaoPage on November 1, 2016.
Ninety-nine days apart. Same platform. Overlapping runs that both wrapped in 2018.
That single fact should complicate the argument that has followed Tomb Raider King since its first teaser dropped — the one where it’s a cheap copy riding Solo Leveling’s coattails. Whatever these two series are to each other, one of them did not watch the other succeed and then decide to imitate it. They grew up in the same room at the same time.
But “not a rip-off” isn’t the same as “not similar,” and the people making the accusation aren’t hallucinating. So let’s do this properly: where the comparison is fair, where it falls apart, and whether the show is worth your Wednesday.
Spoiler level: premise and early episodes only. Nothing past the setup.
The Short Answer
No, Tomb Raider King isn’t a Solo Leveling rip-off — but it isn’t an accident that it feels like one either.
The two series share a publishing lineage, a genre lane, and a studio. What they don’t share is a story engine. Solo Leveling is about a weak man becoming strong. Tomb Raider King is about a strong man who already knows how the next fifteen years go. Those sound similar and play out completely differently, and most of the rip-off argument comes from not noticing the difference.
Whether that difference is executed well is a separate question, and a more interesting one. We’ll get there.
Why People Think It’s a Rip-Off, and Why They’re Not Crazy
The surface-level overlap is real, and listing it honestly is the only way to have this conversation:
- A Korean webtoon adaptation about a modern world disrupted by supernatural incursions
- Sealed locations that open worldwide and contain power-granting objects
- A professional class of people who enter those locations for money
- A protagonist who gets a second chance nobody else gets
- A corrupt hierarchy above him that treats expendable people as expendable
- Similar color grading, similar particle-heavy action, similar poster composition
Put a Tomb Raider King key visual next to a Solo Leveling key visual and you’d forgive someone for mixing them up. That’s not a smear. That’s just true.
The accusation also had good timing on its side. Solo Leveling Season 2 ended in March 2025, and there’s still no third season on the calendar — the current window is 2027 to 2028, with a theatrical film landing first. A vacuum that size gets filled, and anything that steps into it gets measured against what people are actually missing. Tomb Raider King premiered into that vacuum in July 2026 and got labeled the replacement before anyone had watched an episode.
The Timeline Doesn’t Support the Theory
Here’s where the accusation runs into trouble.
Tomb Raider King began as a web novel by SAN.G, serialized on KakaoPage from November 2016 to May 2018. Solo Leveling began as a web novel by Chugong, serialized on the same platform from July 2016 to March 2018. These are not sequential events. They are the same event, twice, in parallel.
The webtoons followed the same pattern: Solo Leveling’s started in March 2018, Tomb Raider King’s in June 2019. So by the time Solo Leveling became a global phenomenon — which happened with the anime in January 2024 — Tomb Raider King’s manhwa was already 300-plus chapters deep and heading for its ending. It finished in March 2023, at 412 chapters, before Sung Jinwoo had said a single animated word.
You can accuse the anime adaptation of leaning into a resemblance for marketing. That’s a fair read of the trailers. But the story itself was finished and on the shelf before the thing it supposedly copies became famous.
The Real Reason They Look Alike
This is the part almost nobody brings up, and it explains more than the plagiarism theory does.
Solo Leveling’s webtoon was illustrated by Jang Sung-rak — better known as DUBU — who was the CEO of REDICE Studio. Tomb Raider King’s webtoon was adapted by Yuns, also of REDICE Studio, with art by 3B2S.
Same studio. Both series are house output from the same webtoon shop, working in the same period, in the same genre, for the same platform.
That reframes the whole argument. When two series from one studio share a visual language and a structural rhythm, the word for that isn’t plagiarism — it’s a style. Nobody accuses Ufotable of ripping itself off. REDICE built the look that defined an entire wave of Korean action webtoons, largely through DUBU’s work, and then applied it across its catalog. Tomb Raider King looking like Solo Leveling is roughly as scandalous as two records from the same producer sharing a drum sound.
DUBU died in July 2022, at 37, having never seen the anime his art made possible. The house style he built outlived him, and it’s the thing people are now pointing at as evidence of theft.
Tomb Raider King Is a Regression Story, Not a Leveling Story
This is the actual difference, and it’s structural rather than cosmetic.
Solo Leveling runs on progression. Jinwoo starts as the weakest hunter alive, and the entire pleasure of the series is watching the floor rise under him — each fight slightly beyond what the last version of him could survive. Season 2 works because the gap between episode one and episode thirteen is enormous, and every step of that gap was paid for. When he finally takes the Ant King and turns him into Beru, the shadow soldier fans still argue about, it lands because we watched him fail his way there.
Tomb Raider King runs on foreknowledge. Jooheon Suh is already an experienced raider when the story starts — an adult professional working for a company that treats him as disposable. His employer betrays him, he’s left to die, and he wakes up years in the past, before the tombs ever appeared. Yen Press’s official synopsis for the manhwa puts the jump at fifteen years.
He doesn’t get stronger by struggling. He gets ahead by knowing. He knows which relics matter, which tombs are worth entering, which people become monsters, and which disasters are coming. Episode four is literally titled “The One Who Stole the Future,” and the show means it — a lot of Jooheon’s early moves are about reaching a resource before its future owner does.
That’s a different genre. Regression fantasy is its own established lane in Korean webtoons, with its own rules and its own pleasures, and the pleasure isn’t will he win. It’s watching someone play a game everyone else thinks is fair while holding the answer key.
What Tomb Raider King Does Better
Two things, and they’re connected.
The protagonist is an adult. Jinwoo starts as a young man carrying his family’s medical bills, and part of his arc is growing into competence. Jooheon starts competent, tired, and angry. He’s someone who has already been chewed through by an industry and has no illusions left about it. That’s a rarer starting position in this genre, and it gives the show a harder, more cynical texture than Solo Leveling’s underdog warmth.
Revenge is a sharper motive than ambition. Jinwoo wants to get strong. Jooheon wants specific people to lose specific things. Revenge gives a story natural targets and a natural end point, which is a real structural advantage — you always know what the protagonist is aiming at.
Arguably that’s the most interesting thing Tomb Raider King has, and it’s the thing the anime has been least patient with.
What It Does Worse, and It’s the Same Thing That Makes It Fast
Here’s the honest criticism, and it doesn’t require comparing it to anything.
Once Jooheon gets his second chance, he starts winning almost immediately and keeps winning. The setbacks are thin. The obstacles resolve fast. A twelve-episode season adapting roughly the first sixty to eighty chapters of a 412-chapter manhwa has to move, and it moves — but speed and stakes trade against each other, and the show has spent a lot of the second currency to buy the first.
The irony is sharp. Solo Leveling gets criticized for how quickly Jinwoo becomes untouchable. Tomb Raider King’s premise removes even the illusion of struggle from the start, then compresses what struggle remains into a fast-paced cour. The revenge arc — the strongest thing the series owns — is the exact thing that needed room to breathe, because revenge only pays off if the wait hurts.
Reception has landed roughly where you’d expect from that. Anime News Network’s Summer 2026 preview guide was unimpressed by the first episode, and general audience scores have sat in the mid-6s rather than the high 7s. It’s a competent show with a good idea that is in a hurry.
So Should You Watch It?
If you came to Tomb Raider King expecting Solo Leveling Season 3, you’re going to be disappointed, and that’s a problem with the framing rather than the show. It was never going to be that. The thing you actually miss about Solo Leveling — the slow, earned escalation — is structurally the one thing this series is not built to deliver.
If you come to it as a regression revenge story with strong art and a genuinely interesting protagonist premise, it holds up better. It’s twelve episodes. It has a real ending point in sight rather than an indefinite wait. And the source material it’s pulling from is complete, which means nothing about this story is going to be abandoned.
Our honest read: worth watching, not worth the comparison. It’s a solid B that got graded against an A it was never taking the same test as.
If you’re specifically hunting for something that scratches the Solo Leveling itch more directly, we’ve got ten stronger matches broken down here — and if you haven’t actually finished Solo Leveling itself yet, start there instead.
Where to Watch, and How Many Episodes
Tomb Raider King premiered on July 8, 2026, airing on Fuji TV’s B8station block in Japan and streaming weekly on Wednesdays on Crunchyroll with subtitles and an English dub. The first season runs twelve episodes, which puts the finale on September 23, 2026.
Studio EEK animates, with Seung Wook Woo writing and directing. Yoshimasa Hosoya voices Jooheon Suh. The opening theme is “Show Down” by QWER, who also perform the ending, “To Be Continued.”
The manhwa is available in English from Yen Press under its Ize Press imprint, if twelve episodes leave you wanting the other 330 chapters.
FAQ
Is Tomb Raider King a copy of Solo Leveling? No. Both web novels were serialized on KakaoPage in parallel between 2016 and 2018, roughly three months apart, and Tomb Raider King’s manhwa finished in March 2023 — before the Solo Leveling anime made the franchise a global hit.
Why do Tomb Raider King and Solo Leveling look so similar? Both webtoons were produced at REDICE Studio. Solo Leveling was illustrated by DUBU, the studio’s CEO; Tomb Raider King was adapted by Yuns at the same studio. The shared visual language is house style, not imitation.
Is Tomb Raider King worth watching if I liked Solo Leveling? Yes, with adjusted expectations. It’s a regression revenge story rather than a progression power fantasy, so the appeal is strategic rather than escalating.
How many episodes does Tomb Raider King have? Twelve, airing weekly on Wednesdays from July 8 to September 23, 2026.
Is the Tomb Raider King manhwa finished? Yes. It ran from June 2019 to March 2023 for 412 chapters. The anime’s first season covers only the early arcs.
Is this related to the Tomb Raider video game? No. Despite the English title, there is no connection to the Lara Croft franchise. The Korean title is 도굴왕, closer to “King of Excavation.”
