Is Raid Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manhwa, 142 chapters
Run	2017–2019 · completed
Community score	AniList 5.9 · MangaUpdates 6.7

Overview

Fifty years after Demon World Gates started tearing open across the planet, humanity survives on the backs of "Masters," awakened fighters ranked by how much power they can bring to a fight. Gang Kyu Sung is not one of the good ones, at least not on paper: a passed-over office worker who awakens as a lowly Rank 5, easy to dismiss next to the elite. Jong Hyuk Choi's manhwa spends its two parts, over 140 chapters total, watching him claw his way up that ranking from the bottom, one dungeon raid at a time.

What it does well

The power system is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and it does it well. Ranks give every fight a clear scale, so a reader always knows roughly what a given battle should cost Kyu Sung, which makes his wins land as actual progress instead of arbitrary power-ups. Choi's art keeps pace with that structure: demon fights read clearly even when the page gets crowded, and the escalation from street-level skirmishes to genuinely dangerous raids feels earned panel by panel.

The underdog hook works, too, at least early on. Watching someone written off by everyone around him start actually mattering in a fight gives the first stretch of chapters real pull, and the series leans into that satisfaction consistently enough to carry a long runtime. If you're here for dungeon-gate action specifically, Raid gives you a lot of it, methodically staged and clearly drawn.

Where it falls short

Outside of combat, Kyu Sung doesn't have much going on. He's convincing as a fighter and much less convincing as a person, and the chapters that slow down to focus on his life outside the Gates tend to sag because there isn't a lot of character there to lean on. The larger plot has a similar problem: past "demons keep appearing and Masters keep fighting them," the story doesn't build toward a mystery or a goal that pays off by the end, so the momentum comes almost entirely from the next fight rather than from where the story as a whole is headed. A few recurring female characters get written into jealousy-driven conflict that feels thinner and more dated than the combat writing around them.

Verdict

It's a long, competently drawn dungeon-action manhwa that's better at staging fights than at giving you a reason to care about anything between them. Worth reading if demon-hunting power progression is what you're actually here for. Skip it if you need your lead to be interesting when he's not fighting.