Jerry M: Return of the Frozen Player
I’m such a sucker for solo OP adventure manhua. I was looking for a good replacement to Solo Leveling after having read it through three times. I love that thing. So, you know how it goes – I went looking for something that looked like Solo Leveling, quacked like Solo Leveling, and just about produced the same golden egg of dopamine as Solo Leveling. And Return of the Frozen Player is doing that for me.
Released in 2021 by Jerry M, Return of the Frozen Player follows the life of a prior “Player” who took down monsters around Korea as a masked man. After having been frozen in an incident with a monster for 20+ years, he wakes up to a world that still needs his help. But, he lost a lot of the powers that had given him the prowess of his Alias. Ending up with a bit of an identity crisis, he decides to rebuild himself and learn about the new Frost powers he gained from the monster he’d beaten.
I appreciate that they make it look like he has to struggle with each level up he goes through. Though it does feel like he never really fails at any point in time. That’s how OP characters work most of the time in stories. It’s not deviating in a subplot of romance or mediocre rivalries either, which is something I do appreciate with manhua. I think American writing is so dependent on subplots to keep a story limping along that we forget that we can legit just write a one note story and it be good.
On that note, the world build does feel a little lack luster. Or maybe it’s just the computer references that the character makes for describing some of his skills that feels a bit jarring. Primarily Overclocking. That one…is a bit much, but to each their own. The other computer nerds in the room will probably not blink at that term being used, but the rest of us who don’t make building gaming machines a life long hobby will probably raise on eyebrow. Those who really don’t understand the reference won’t thing anything of it, so it’s just those of use in the middle that it feels weird to probably.
I would have loved it if it had a sumastion of skills at the end of some of the chapters like Solo Leveling did. I would actually read those every once in a while to understand exactly how the character is randomly doing this badass thing all of a sudden, as is want to happen with these types of stories. It’s alright thought that it doesn’t. The story can live without being an exact Solo Leveling copy, I’m just needing a bit of something laid out to explore what the characters set of powers are and what they do. That’s also what fan wikis are for.
Anyway, if you can find a good translation, it’s fantastic. I stumbled into a really rough transaltion between chapters 80 and 100 and had to grit my teeth to figure out what was being said. Then I hopped into a different chapter supplier and reread it because the translation was better. That’s about what I’d suggest you do if you’re enjoying reading and run into a bad transation.
Is this a manhua I’d suggest. Sure. If you like Omniscient Reader, Revenge of the Iron-Blooded Sword Hound, or Solo Leveling, this one can fit right up there. I’m not entire sure off hand if I would buy the books for my shelf like I’ve been doing for Solo Leveling, but it’s made for a good read so far, and for the suppliers I’ve found, it’s still ongoing. Now if I can just convince my internet to load the dang images so I can finish this last chapter I have access to today.
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