Is Tower of God Worth Reading? Webtoon Review

Quick facts
Format	Webtoon, 652 chapters, 18 volumes
Run	2010–present · ongoing
Community score	AniList 8.1 · MAL 8.3 · MangaUpdates 8.6
Where to read	WEBTOON — official

Overview

Tower of God is a fantasy manhwa by SIU, one of the longest-running and most ambitious webtoons around. A boy known as Bam spends his whole life in darkness until the girl who raised him climbs into a mysterious tower and leaves him behind. He follows her in — and finds a vast, deadly structure where each floor is a test, and reaching the top is said to grant anything you could want. This review stays spoiler-free.

What it does well

The scale is the headline. Tower of God builds a genuinely enormous world, with its own politics, factions, history, and a flexible power system, and it keeps expanding for hundreds of chapters without running out of ideas. For readers who love getting lost in a deep, intricate setting, there's an incredible amount here to dig into.

It's also smarter than a typical climb-the-tower story. The tests often aren't just fights; they're about alliances, betrayals, and figuring out the rules of a rigged game, so the series rewards paying attention to who benefits from each rule and who's quietly working an angle. Characters introduced as minor players in one test regularly resurface with real consequence dozens of chapters later, which rewards the kind of close reading the density demands.

The cast is broad in a way that pays off. The best supporting characters bring strange abilities and competing motives rather than just cheering Bam on, and several of them get arcs substantial enough to carry entire stretches of the story on their own.

SIU's art, rough at the start, grows into something striking and distinctive over time, and the early roughness becomes part of the journey rather than a flaw to push past — you can watch the artist's skill develop alongside the story itself. When the big arcs pay off, they pay off: long-seeded plans and characters come together in ways that feel earned, which is the reward for sticking with something this sprawling.

Where it falls short

That sprawl is also the problem. Tower of God is dense and convoluted, with a huge cast and a lot of lore, and it's genuinely easy to lose track of who's who and what's at stake, especially if you read in gaps rather than in long sessions. It demands more from you than most series.

The early chapters are a hard sell on art alone, and the pacing across such a long run is uneven, with slower stretches between the highs. The sheer number of named characters introduced across different floors also means some get dropped for long stretches and are hard to place when they return.

Add that it's still ongoing and enormous, and it's a real commitment rather than a casual read — this isn't a series you finish in a weekend, or even a month, if you're reading it for the first time.

Verdict

Tower of God is one of the most ambitious stories in webtoons, and for readers who love deep worldbuilding and long-game payoffs, it's hugely rewarding. But it asks a lot: patience through a rough start, attention to a dense plot, and tolerance for a long, ongoing climb. If that sounds like your kind of investment, it's worth it. If you want something easy to pick up, this tower is a steep one.