At multiple points in my life, I've heard life being compared to a bad video game. Sure, there are some gorgeous graphics, but not only is the difficulty almost impossibly high, you often don't know what the objective even is or how to get the game's best ending. One could argue that that's because a child needs to be given an objective to work towards by their parents instead of them finding it themselves, but come on, children aren't their parents! Having grown up with such a mindset, I've never really been able to understand why parents would force their kids down specific career paths that don't even line up with the kid's interests. I certainly didn't understand it when I read "Level Up" - a graphic novel written by Gene Luen Yang and illustrated by Thien Pham - for the first time as a teenager, but rereading it as an adult, perhaps I could understand it a little bit better, right?
Level Up begins when twenty-year-old Dennis Ouyang is kicked out of college. For his entire life, he has been pressured by his father to study, go to college, get a good job, all that good stuff; he even gifts him a chemistry set one Christmas instead of the NES he wanted. Eventually, Dennis's father passes away from liver cancer, and between trying to cope with it and his growing addiction to video games, Dennis hasn't been doing well in school, to say the least, hence why he was kicked out of college. Suddenly, four angels straight out of a greeting card descend upon him and reveal his "destiny" to him: to become a gastroenterologist. From there, we follow Dennis on his "quest" to become a gastroenterologist.
Grief is a central theme of this graphic novel, with Dennis needing to come to terms with the loss of his father. How well is this handled? Well, I'd say it was handled decently. Dennis's addiction to video games is mainly him overindulging in something his father prohibited when he was alive, but a case could also be made for it providing a distraction from the reality of his new situation; apart from that, there is also a moment toward the beginning of the story where Dennis sees his father's head on every statue he passes, which is genuinely sad and can happen to someone who is deeply grieving. With that being said, however, it's hard to get behind just how strict Dennis's dad was and how unwilling he was to acknowledge what his son actually wants; even when his motivations for his actions are revealed in the end, it's like, "Okay, but did you really need to push all of this onto your son?" Whatever sadness I'd feel at these parts were less about Dennis's father being that compelling of a character and more about Dennis being a sympathetic character who had lost a central figure in his life.
Another central theme is the whole thing with doing what you want vs. following the path that was laid out before you. Despite all that I've said before, I want to make it clear that I find nothing wrong with doing the latter if it's what you genuinely want to do; for example, one character wants to become a surgeon to uphold her family's traditions, and she's not entirely wrong for feeling the way she does, even though it does lead to an unneeded dispute with another character. However, the story does try to make a stronger case for the former. The way it does so, though, just makes me have mixed feelings for the ending. Without spoiling the ending, it just felt like the story was building up one way, only to change its mind once it got to that point; on the other hand, it is realistic for Dennis to come to the conclusions he comes to.
One thing that Level Up definitely falls flat on was its artwork. I didn't like the artstyle when I read this book as a teenager, but I ended up chalking it up to me just being used to reading manga, which are pretty much all drawn in a significantly different way than this American graphic novel was; however, I was quickly proven wrong. The lines are disconnected way more often than not, the coloring often goes outside of the lines, the drawing just looks clunky overall.... It's hard for me to describe all of the reasons why I dislike Level Up's art. My apologies to Thien Pham; I'm sure you worked hard providing the art for this graphic novel, and for I know, all of this could have been a deliberate stylistic choice. I just really don't like it.
Overall, while Level Up isn't a bad graphic novel, it could have been way better than it turned out to be. If you want a coming-of-age story that barely ties into video games, you could do worse than this. As far as Gene Luen Yang's other works go, I hear "American Born Chinese" is pretty good, so maybe I'll review that in the future, as long as four random angels don't make me give away my video game consoles to do so.
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