(Keep in mind that the MC was portrayed to be clever in the first eight chapters.)

The MC wakes up, in a hospital, after pretty much dying in a super powerful dungeon. Right away he notices that there is a "message unopened" screen in his vision. He doesn't know how to open it, weird but whatever, so says a bunch of random stuff and, with some help, opens the message and sees that he is now a 'Player' and has a daily mission, with a warning of penalty for failure. The mission is to do 100 pushups, situps, squats, and run 10km, with a counter " (0/100) " next to them.

So what does he do? Assumes it is a hallucination and lies down to go to sleep. But wait! Soon after he thinks, "What if it isn't a hallucination? Might as well test it." So how does he test it? Does 100 half-assed pushups against the bed, meaning he stood up, put his hands on the bed, and pushed against it. Wtf? He then checks his message box, not even his mission box, and nothing is there so goes to sleep. He didn't even do 1 proper exercise and assumes it is all not real!

BUT WAIT! Maybe he just hasn't ever played, or seen, a video game before??? Please be the case!

No. He gets his penalty quest, which is to suvive for a bit, and completes it. The system asks if he wants to accept the reward for completing it, guess what he says? f*ck it, I'm going to sleep, and ignores it. Come on Author!

He wakes up, gets the same daily missions, completes it (he got a, "Completed 1 pushup.", notification after doing every pushup so yeah...), gets his reward (and opens it...), his status screen opens, then says, "He recalled the online RPGs he had played in the past..."

So yeah..., definitely doesn't meet the requirement of, "an MC that isn't a complete idiot" or the basic rule of "be consistent", so I am out.

Rant over.

Curing his mother's illness. After her illness gets cured, she basically becomes background noise. She's just there now. Yay mom is here but so what? The cure is kept secret and doesn't bring anything else. She doesn't bring new info nor does she bring any major change to the characters surrounding her either.

Second is the guild. He creates a guild but he doesn't do anything with it nor does anything change. Ahjin guild? Who cares honestly. It's all about him in the end and the problem is, he really didn't need the guild to claim the gates because at the point all this happen almost every character and government figure bows to his will anyway. He shouldn't have made a guild in the first place, again another useless subplot that serves to beef the word count.

After the Jeju island/Ant arc, a giant S-rank gate appears in the heart of Japan. Japan is low on manpower because of the Jeju island incident they asked the other countries for help. What did these countries do? Ignored Japan. If it was before Jeju Island it's understandable if they ignore Japan, but due to the Jeju island gate incident, they know full well by now that S-rank monsters that come from the gate can migrate to other countries and wreck havoc there as well. It doesn't make sense that they don't want to help. This is proven to be true later on when a giant from Japan's S-rank gate travelled to China. If the MC didn't destroy the other giants and clear the gate, those giants would be destroying the neighbouring countries too.

The heroine fell in love with the MC because he smells different compared to everyone else (i wish this is a joke). That's some Edward Cullen-Bella Swan rip off right there. The romance is super forced and popped out of the blue. There's no real bond or chemistry between the MC and the heroine because they never had any substantial moments or interaction. He's the hottest dude, she's the hottest chick. That's it.

They have their first date at around ch 200-ish and the heroine asks the MC why he is taking her to an amusement park and his reply is that because she is his only friend. Which is not true at all and was said for the sake of a fake deep moment. The whole date was cringey it felt like something written by a teenager. Also they had s*x outdoors after this idk it was really vague but pretty sure they did it.

The MC's friend's father ends up with the same illness as MC's mother, but despite having the cure for it at hand, he dances on the subject of healing him until he succumbed to it. 'Oh I know my friend but I don't know his dad so well I cant just cure him' later on, he does cure him anyway because we gotta have filler. He just couldn't go ahead and cure the dad so we can get over this dumb subplot quicker. Not like it matters that he saved his bestfriend's dad cus 1. no one finds out he saved him 2. his bestfriend is already his number 1 fan so even if he finds out nothing will change and it's not like the bestfriend's family has animosity against him so yea it's a really s*upid subplot that only serves to beef up the word count but has no effect on the story

He isn't willing to go out of his way to help others, but when the side character Yu Jin-Ho's father is sick, Jin-Woo takes out a priceless medicine to heal him. Like what the hell! He doesn't take the blank cheque offered to him, or a favor from the Chairman of the strongest company in Korea. Instead, all he wants is gratitude. Furthermore, Jin-Woo ignores all human interaction unless its with pretty woman or Yu Jin-Ho, which is used as a plot device to casually introduce the plot or introduce another (surprise surprise!) pretty woman.

is criminally underwhelming with time travel once again making everything pointless.

Although Japan does have some unpleasant imperial history to put it mildly, and Japan-Korea grudges can run deep, the novel ridiculously has all the top Japanese Hunters complicit in a greedy scheme to steal Korea's island and get the Korean Hunters massacred by ant monsters. The Japanese carry this out poorly and arrogantly, they die in droves, and all for a plan that seems like it would have been a political/PR disaster for Japan on the world stage even if it had been successful.

As far as what I've read of the comic (Season 1), it's unclear if it intends to fix these problems or just gloss over them, but it does spend a little bit more time developing the Japanese characters, with names and interesting character designs, instead of just leaving them as faceless guys who get owned. It feels like a bit of filler, but it creates more of an impact when they start dying, as it seems like a real loss of life and not just a tasteless "Yeah! F*ck those Japs!" moment, as originally intended. I think the comic has had a better approach thus far, but I was disappointed that the comic adaptation stuck to the novel's plan for the South Korean hunters to die at all. The Japanese Hunters didn't all die at Jeju, so it isn't quite as ridiculous yet, but it will really depend on whether the story diverges later.

The novel does acknowledge, of course, that the average Japanese citizen has done nothing wrong in this situation, and that they should not all be blamed for the greed of their politicians and Hunters. But even in doing this, it is to give Korea the moral high ground. When the Japanese are desperate and needy, it is the Korean hero who is their savior. I can't help but roll my eyes.

It isn't just Japan to look foolish, and Canada in particular later gets the short end of the stick by rallying behind one arrogant fool Hunter. I could make a joke about how the author has a deep grudge against Canada, but the real issue here is that the worldbuilding is too shallow to portray foreign nations several times larger than South Korea as anything other than monolithic. Frankly, the same problem affects the monster and demon civilizations as well.

The premise which comes later is that the "Rulers" are using Gates to prepare Earth to protect itself, by sending in mind-controlled monster subjects of the "Sovereigns", in manageable numbers. But Seong Jin-Woo is not a part of this plan of theirs; rather, his power has been given to him by the "Shadow Sovereign". His level-ups were merely an intuitive means to unlock this power gradually. I have some issues with how this plays out:

1) Going by the later explanation, it was always the plan that Seong Jin-Woo would become the next Shadow Sovereign. I think this cheapens the earlier parts, where he actually obtains this "secret class" by sheer luck. If he got any other class, like Assassin or Necromancer or whatever, the whole plan would have failed. And I liked the idea of him outperforming expectations, rather than just borrowing his powers from a specific person, with a "level cap" once the full potential has been unlocked.

2) There was an earlier plot thread where the System seemed intent on turning Seong Jin-Woo into a cold-hearted killer. After he kills the architect of the System, he becomes free to spare his enemies whenever he wishes, instead. This thread kind of vanishes -- and for the architect, it would not have mattered anyway once the Shadow Sovereign replaced Seong Jin-Woo's ego -- and I preferred it when I thought he was going against the plans that were made for him by others, rather than walking right into the destiny that had been prepared for him.

3) For the novel going out of its way to invent the character of a "previous Shadow Sovereign", the man himself doesn't really have much of an agenda or motivation beyond passing on his power. In fact, his origin story is that he was the archangel who didn't care that he was trapped in a game of endless brutality for the amusement of God. He was the one unwavering s*ave who didn't rise up with the others. Are we supposed to take that as outstanding or noble? In my subjective view, he's the one Emissary who s**ked, and it's just another reason I'd have preferred to skip his entire association with Seong Jin-Woo.

4) As mentioned, Seong Jin-Woo is not part of the Rulers' plan to safeguard Earth, but he's the only one doing a decent job of it. It's questionable if all the "Special Authority"-rank Hunters working together could have even stopped the Giant Gate opened by the Rulers at Tokyo. Why have a Sovereign invasion at all, if the "protection" of the Rulers is deadly enough as it is? Or to put it another way: with friends like these, who needs enemies? It's unnecessarily convoluted, when you can just say that some evil demon is opening Gates to terraform Earth to its liking, and Seong Jin-Woo was overachieving enough to stop it. There aren't even any named "Ruler" characters in the novel. Why bother having them?

5) What exactly are the Sovereigns supposed to do after they "destroy everything"? Just go back to the featureless gap between dimensions, where they apparently hated being? Why do they even want to do any of this? Why aren't they the ones rebelling against their purpose? It's like their whole existence was an afterthought.