This webtoon is one of the most overrated series that I have ever read. Since people kept praising it decades ago I decided to give it a go, and turned out to be a big disappointment.
Premise seemed good at the beginning, you are just nobody whose background was shrouded in mystery and get plunged into the world of darkness without anything, you met someone who taught you about life, then said person had gone to climb a tower, and you proceed to follow that person.
When I was reading it the first time, I thought this series is one of those survival horror series where you were taken to this random place and you have to survive, else you will die and the plot will revolve around investigating the mystery of the place, and deep dive into the system you were forced to partake in. However, none of that happened at all. What I actually get, is a generic subpar shounen series that was initially masked as a more darker survival genre. The author used the mystery of the tower initially as a box of mystery/carrot dangling around in front of you as a reader to keep reading, however since the ascendancy of "rachel" character, the carrot turned from mystery of the tower, to confronting her instead. There's a lot of stuff we don't know, and about 200+ chapters in, the author doesn't even explain anything about the tower and kept putting new stuff and billion new characters I don't give a damn about, to add more confusions.
The lore doesn't seem believable to me as a reader, what is this place? a country? mega structure? is this the whole planet that shaped like tower? or just big building out of nowhere? how can it take YEARS to go from different floors? don't they have an elevator? why do they devise random games like rugby games for example? if the premise is to sus out the irregular, or strong players whose existence will bring about chaos to the status quo of the tower, wouldn't it make sense to have a plain fighting tournament instead of complicated nonsensical games like hide and seek for example. It really breaks the immersion once you as a reader, have to concentrate about how the rules being set up and how these characters have to follow/break the rules, instead of just focusing on the actual storyline.
Every tournament/games seemed to follow the same pattern: you have your set characters, and the author throwing in bunch of new characters out of nowhere, and there's always a "set up" to where your character trying to follow the rules, then finding out they are already being set up by the administrator / whoever set up the game in the first place. It is amusing to me, that almost every characters are still alive, despite the fact that literally the people in power want you and your party member dead and it reeks of plot armor to me. The same thing like the fact that this Rachel character that has been kept dangling around in front of me, still alive after all that ordeal. When you think the tournament is over, there's always a new "set up" / trap waiting to be unfold and it is really comical at this point. You can't have a simple tournament/game without any of that crap, it feels like the author is putting new trap in every games to the point that it devoid mystery anymore. There's a lot of conversation that have nothing to do with plot progression and rather talking about the rule of the games to the point that I got bored reading it and just want the plot to move on.
The main character is also unbelievably naive, and lack of character development even after all that backstabbing he went through. His attitude of trying to save everyone while putting everyone else in jeopardy is just repulsive to me. On top of that, he did manage to save everyone (so far as I read) because of plot armor. Too much side characters. Instead of focusing on his initial groups, the author kept adding a lot of characters even more than one piece for example Luffy has like 8-10 crews tops. In here you have more than that and they don't have any substantial background and just more body to be put in the story to overly complicate the plot without adding more subtance.
In summary, the first arc was decent, it follows the survival mystery genre, then it devolved into generic shounen trash. Not that I hate shounen, I do like shounen, but this series doesn't know how to make a good shounen series. It tries to be survival genre and shounen at the same time and it falls flat. I am dropping this series and so should you.