Tower of God (Season One)

She entered the tower to see the stars while he entered just to be with her. The Tower of God is an unforgiving place, but make it to the top and your dreams will come true. Is there room for both of them though?

What did you watch?

I love a good dark fantasy and while I haven’t seen any of the source material, I had heard good things about the story. Enough to grab my attention as soon as it was announced for the Spring 2020 season. Other than the second season of Fruits Basket, this was the only other that I instantly decided to cover. It’s adapted from a South Korean manwha and quite clearly pulls on a number of the classic shounen tropes. Obviously, there will be some spoilers for this season and some are pretty big, so don’t go any further if you don’t want to know things…

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What happened?

Bam was a lonely boy living in solitude beneath the Tower of God until one day he met Rachel. They survived together for a while until Rachel decided that she wanted to climb the tower to make her dream of seeing the stars come true. Surprisingly, the tower opened up and let her in. Not wanting to be alone again, Bam wishes to see Rachel once more and the tower invited him in. Inside, he met Headon, the caretaker who told Bam that he would need to complete a number of challenges if he was to climb the tower and see Rachel again.

The first was a seemingly impossible challenge, but the intervention of a Princess of Jahad who leant Bam a powerful weapon allowed him to attack the challenge with a chance of winning, even if it was just a small one. Amazingly, Bam succeeded and progressed to the next level where he was thrust into a battle royal style situation and forced to fight for his life.

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What did you think?

I loved this series and I think part of that is one of the things that seems to have annoyed other viewers the most. The Tower of God doesn’t spoonfeed us the answers. Sometimes, it isn’t obvious with the questions either, but I love that. It’s great to have a series give its audience enough credit to be able to piece together the mysteries of the tower on their own. There are lots of clues and snippets of information that once put together you get to see much more of the picture. There’s still a long way to go, but I am grateful that we’ve not been hit with the usual barrage of exposition.

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What was your favourite moment?

It came near the end of the season when Endorsi and Anaak were fighting against Lo Po Bia, an assassin for the Royal Family of Jahad who had been targeting Anaak. She is the daughter of a Princess of Jahad, but since they are forbidden from having children, her very existence is a crime. Lo Po Bia had expected to convince Endorsi to fight Anaak for him, but she turned on him instead. He was forced to show them both who was boss, but it was only for a moment.

Yuri Jahad, the princess that helped Bam in the first episode appeared and made Lo Po Bia look like a child. She was both terrifying and awesome. If nothing else, we need a second season just so we can see more of Yuri.

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What was your least favourite moment?

We had some brutal and exciting challenges in the Tower of God, but then they appeared to arrive at a school-like facility where they were all assigned roles to work as teams. I think I would have preferred for this to have happened naturally than to have yet another school setting in the middle of a fantasy series. I don’t understand this obsession with putting characters into schools to guide them along.

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Who was your favourite character?

In reality, it was Yuri, but she wasn’t in it nearly enough. Bam is a fairly uninspiring central character at this stage but luckily he had Khun and Rak to keep things interesting. While Rak offered some great comedic moments, Khun was the star of the series in my mind. He had an interesting back story that warrants more attention and he’s definitely not the usual hero. He has a darker edge and clearly has his own motivations for helping Bam. The way he spun and used the Ranker, Quant just proved how clever and devious he can be.

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Who was your least favourite character?

The obvious answer would be Rachel, but I loved the way it showed us the internal workings of her betrayal of Bam. That alone made her pretty interesting. I think the character that actually got my nerves from a fairly early stage and didn’t really do enough to turn me around was Anaak. Maybe, it’s because I liked Endorsi so much and they were like chalk and cheese. That’s a possibility, but I found her to be angry for the sake of it and the way she made a big thing about threatening Bam to get the Black March rubbed me the wrong way.

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Would you like some more?

Without a doubt. I loved the intrigue and world-building fo this series. It raised so many questions and therefore allowed me to make countless wild predictions on where it might go and what might be going on, which is one of my favourite things to do. I have high hopes for the rest of the story and I think it’s pretty much guaranteed to get another season or two, maybe even more. I’ll be watching for sure.

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What have you learnt?

One of the things that really caught my attention was the way this series showed Rachel’s side of the story after she’d betrayed Bam. Before that, there were so many questions flying around about how she could have done that and got to that position in the first place, but with her side of things, it all made sense. It would have been really hard to do that just from Bam’s point of view and while it doesn’t help the characters it did wonders for the audience. It also sets things up for some pretty spectacular comebacks later down the road.

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Other Posts in the Series

• Season One
  • Episode 1 – Ball
  • Episode 2 – Three Four-Hundredths
  • Episode 3 – The Correct Door
  • Episode 4 – The Green April
  • Episode 5 – The Crown’s Fate
  • Episode 6 – Position Selection
  • Episode 7 – Lunch and Tag
  • Episode 8 – Khun’s Strategy
  • Episode 9 – The One-Horned Ogre
  • Episode 10 – Beyond the Sadness
  • Episode 11 – Underwater Hunt (Part One)
  • Episode 12 – Underwater Hunt (Part Two)
  • Episode 13 – Tower of God

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