3 out of 5

Directed by: Yoshihiro Miyajima

covers season 1

Coming in as a pretty diehard fan of the manga, from the character designs, to the voice actors, to choosing Trigger as the studio… I was pretty confident in Delicious in Dungeon as an anime: that it would be a well-intentioned translation of the source material. But I was also pretty confident that, though that translation would make for an enjoyable show, it wouldn’t have the same impact as the text. While it would’ve been interesting to see a more “risky” take on DiD that proved me wrong, I’m still incredibly happy to be proven right: this is a supremely entertaining series, and certainly spiritually (and plot-ily) accurate, it just proves that format can matter, and Delicious’ subtleties work best in the slow-roll, subtly dense comic version.

The general pitch for Delicious in Dungeon is not wholly new within the broad and yet specialized world of anime / manga, mashing up dungeon crawler RPG elements (i.e. warrior classes, magical reserves, character resurrections, slaying monsters and battling level bosses for some type of monetary or ranking advancement) with cooking (i.e. fetishization of process and food porn final results, with ingredient procurement as plot threads), however, just as with any “you’ve heard this before” pitch, it’s all in how you tell it: the oldest tales become new if you present them well. And, again, not only do you have Trigger at the helm (flexing as a studio by showing that restraint can be key, not just flashy stylization), but some truly great voice actors and comedic / dramatic pacing make this show utterly charming even from the initial production card. But even beyond this, what sustains things is the DNA creator Ryoko Kui  added into the mix: a casual awareness of the inherent silliness, somehow intermingled with an acceptance of it all as “real,” and the characters and world functioning with an inherent logic. This allows a reader (and now a viewer) to learn to appreciate the cast and story on their own time and terms, which further makes the paced reveal of deeper storylines and emotions that much more rewarding.

But: perhaps you can see some indications of why an animated take on that may be imperfect as compared to a tactile, turn-the-pages-yourself method: the anime has to conform to more rigid episodic pacing, which slightly undermines the series’ ability to effectively world-build, and makes the cooking come across more as a shtick as opposed to a key way of having the characters bond. This trickles down to the characters themselves, who thus seem more like limited tropes than their fleshed out comic counterparts.

Delicious in Dungeon’s first season sees an odd couple crew of Laios (Kentarō Kumagai), Marcille (Sayaka Senbongi), Chilchuck (Asuna Tomari), and Senshi (Hiroshi Naka) form a party to explore the lower levels of the town dungeon, hopefully finding and resurrecting Falin (Saori Hayami), Laios’ sister, who was lost in the last raid. Dungeoneering takes resources, though, and lacking the funds for those, Laios proposes the team use the monsters they slay along the way as sustenance – a generally frowned upon practice they make palatable by cooking and dressing up the veggies and meat as full meals, displayed to us in explanatory detail. And then beyond this quest, we learn about the predatory nature of dungeons, and the secret past of this dungeon in particular…

Though rather low stakes at first, which Trigger holds true to with restrained, on-point character models, once into the second cour the challenges increase and the studio starts displaying their typical expressiveness, and it is lovely.

But: by remaining so true to the manga, Delicious in Dungeon is inherently limited, taking a bit of patience (and perhaps a binged rewatch) to appreciate its bigger picture, which still can’t quite match the tonal juggling act of the text.