The story about what's going on within the tower is decent. I won't say I found the eventual explanation fully satisfying. But the journey was alright—and the stories for certain floors are good.

For a while, there's a nice feeling of progression and powering up. I want that from these stories, it's delivered adequately. He gets OP and I love a good OP character.

While I can't go so far as to say the characters were complicated and nuanced, I could often feel their strong motivations, which made them come alive in a satisfying way. (For example, when Park Jung-Ah is introduced.) There's a type of character that can be an effective archetype for comment on reality without being very realistic—that's about where this is.

The MC Lee Ho Jae hooked me with his psychology. It feels like he profoundly and truly loses his mind. His constant self-harm cannot go unnoticed. Among innumerable ultra-determined MCs, he feels genuinely obsessive and compulsive in a way that made him intriguing.

Hell difficultly felt genuinely chilling a few times. I think it's because the author didn't go with gore to show it. Ho Jae is just... potentially stuck alone forever between the excruciatingly fatal floors.

There are major pacing issues. It's really the only issue worth mentioning IMO, but it causes several kinds of trouble.

There's a step by step arc in the early floors that starts to get a little slow.

Then it starts switching back and forth between the lower floors and a future on higher floors. The switching wasn't well done.

Then when present and future meet, the higher floor plotline has a lot of issues because it ultimately skipped over a lot of major events when catching up.

New and very important characters in the future get introduced... without ever really being introduced? I was confused by them for a while.

Things get very rushed and shoddily explained through the ending.

The original ending itself was an awful letdown. Thank goodness for the side stories.

He even becomes a god who is able to leave the tower at will regardless of whether he finished the tutorial or not. Basically by the time the girl who entered hell difficulty reaches the 60th floor, Ho-jae doesn't actually need her help to go past that floor.

He does eventually leave... (he becomes a god in the tutorial, something that no god had expected and protects earth) but I don't think there will be a lot of chapters about what happens after he leaves the tower. The side stories are about his life after the tutorial.

Like inflicting self pain of different types to get that type of resistance like pain and burn

At around chapter 250, you get some dozen chapters where the story's focused on the viewpoint of side characters, with the MC occasionally chiming in through a magic communication ring. Every now and then is fine to get another viewpoint but why on earth would I want to follow the story from the viewpoint of the MC's clone? I literally spent 200 chapters getting to know a character and now I'm supposed to pretend that some other character that looks like him but doesn't act anything like him is interesting? No! Finish the damn tutorial for f*cks sake!

soul-imbued weapons

it's how much you can help those on lower floors. Many trials the MC pass become meaningless if a higher rank send you items and soluce. The girl he helped didn't won the right to ascend by herself.

No help of the system outside the turorial, so you have to get everything you could from it before returning to the real world. That don't mean you can't learn new moves, new ways to use your mana, or training outside but much people are too dependant of the system.

The MC is cunning, rational, and strong even without skills, hope he will get outside and we will not have an ending like where everyone lose his memories, and time rewind...