Review: Delicious in Dungeon

[I mentioned Netflix’s new anime series Delicious in Dungeon in a recent TV recommendation post. Stalwart LGM commenter Murc now delivers a guest post to sing the show’s praises at greater length, to which all I will add is that I fully agree.]

This blog has never done an anime review before, a bit of a hole in its cultural commentary given that anime has become extremely mainstream in the west, fully integrated into our entertainment landscape. It’s about time we changed that, and what better way to start off than with the phenomenally weird, beautiful success of Delicious in Dungeon.

Delicious in Dungeon (titled Dungeon Meshi in Japan; the translation is more accurately something like “Dungeon Meal” or “Dungeon Food,” but these kind of localizations-for-marketing-effect are common in both manga and anime) is adapted from the manga of the same name by Ryoko Kui, which ran from 2014 to 2023. In an age dominated by excessively-titled light novel adaptations and massive long-running shonen titles like My Hero Academia and One Piece, Delicious in Dungeon managed to find and hang onto quite a respectably sized audience on both sides of the Pacific. It did well enough to attract some of that sweet, sweet Netflix money for co-development of an anime, one of the most highly anticipated titles of Winter 2024. (The anime year is divided into four seasons that correspond roughly to the calendar year, “cours” in the industry parlance, with different releases in each one. Delicious in Dungeon was considered a hot enough property to get a double-length season, two cours, right out of the gate, spanning both the Winter and Spring 2024 release windows.) 

The show has a deceptively simple hook; in a rather generic-seeming fantasy world, a party of professional adventurers has lost one of their own to death-by-dragon deep in the depths of the dungeon they were raiding. This would normally only pose a minor inconvenience; resurrection magic is well-understood, widely available, and completely affordable. They just need to get back down there, kill the dragon, and recover their friend’s corpse from its guts. But the surviving party members are exhausted and completely skint; their failed delve into the dungeon left them flat broke, abandoned by erstwhile friends and allies. They cannot even afford food. 

Until they meet an accommodating and friendly dwarf who introduces them to a new idea: they can simply live off the dungeon itself, which is chock-full of all kinds of delicious things to eat if you only know how to prepare them properly. They don’t need to buy food; the dungeon will provide.

So right off the bat you’ve got a dungeon adventure that’s also a cooking show. Most of the early episodes spend half their time with the party facing down some manner of dungeon obstacle, usually but not always a monster, and the other half with some gorgeously rendered food porn as they transform that obstacle into nourishment. Slimes become sauces; harpy eggs become enormous omelets; ghosts can be rendered down into their ectoplasmic base elements to make a tasty sorbet. Even the physical hazards can be made to provide sustenance: when the party discovers flame traps that are powered by oil reservoirs, the immediate first thought of several of them is “great, we can replenish our supply of cooking oil!”

The dungeoneering itself is extremely old-school, inspired heavily by games like Wizardry and Tower of Druaga, with a lot of monsters straight out of Dragon Quest. Above and beyond “oh, you need to recover your friend’s corpse to resurrect them” there are other ancient conceits of the genre, like discrete floors to the dungeon that must be navigated in order, becoming progressively more dangerous but more lucrative as you descend. There are “safe rooms” that might as well have save points in them, and even shady merchants and taverns. The metronomic ticking between the cooking show and the adventure quest has a delightful regularity against this backdrop. 

If this were all Delicious in Dungeon was, it would still be very funny and worth watching, a nice palate cleanser after more serious fare. But once they’ve set the hook, they reel you in.

The actual plot plot of the fantasy adventure part of the show is about as standard as you can get; a quest by a party of friends to rescue a beautiful, kind girl, who is romantically entangled with one of the leads, from the desperate peril she is in at the hands of a literal dragon that literally needs to be slain and, later, the clutches of an actual mad wizard.

But what it also is is an extended, terrific, at times terrifying metaphor about consumption.

It’s omnipresent, although slow-pedaled at first, but by the time you’re seven or eight episodes in they aren’t even being subtle about it anymore. It’s the basis of the entire show. Delicious in Dungeon is, at its heart, about what it means to eat and be eaten. It’s about how the world consumes us, and how we consume the world, and also each other, and also ourselves, and also we’re consumed by ourselves. Food is a privilege of living. 

But also food is delicious and you should enjoy it with friends! Eat a full meal and get a good night’s sleep, kids!

This dichotomy is what drives everything about the series forward. The party might be living off the dungeon… but the dungeon is, in many ways, living off them. There are entire ecosystems down there adapted to prey on adventurers, and while, yes, the actual explanation for their presence is “a wizard did it”, once loosed upon the dungeon, these ecosystems immediately asserted their own independence. Some of the most entertaining sequences involve the party trying to cultivate the dungeon to better serve their own needs, only for the dungeon to adapt to this attempt in some way they find inconvenient, and continue to feed on them, just a little bit.

Jurassic Park-style, life finds a way regardless of what those who would master it prefer.

And this is before you even get into the adventuring party themselves. Dungeon nonsense is all well and good, but this series lives and dies on the strength of its entire menu of colorful weirdos.

Laios Touden, the series male lead (a human; in the parlance of the show a “Tall-man,”)  is the epitome of a heroic leader of adventurers. He is good-hearted, noble, and courageous. He is blonde, muscular, and armor-clad. Clean of limb and fair of face, he wields a sword with a name and special powers, because of course he does. He will stop at nothing to rescue his dragon-eaten sister or support his friends, and has an intense passion for dungeoneering and exploring and monsters.

He’s also deeply, at times almost nonfunctionally, autistic, to the point where he couldn’t tell that a man he thought was one of his closest friends in fact despised him because he couldn’t read the social cues indicating this.His special interest in monsters, which seems perfectly normal to him (they’re fascinating!) comes off as weird, possibly even dangerous and demented, to others. The reason his sword has a name and special powers is because, instead of killing a kind of dangerous monster, he placed it inside of his sword, named it, and helped nurture and grow it. He conceals this fact from the rest of the party with the same rigor and affect that one might conceal a zombie bite.

Marcille Donato, the female lead, is an uptight elf mage. She has bad luck, is not terribly physically coordinated, and is the subject of a lot of physical humor involving falling down or freaking out. She complains a lot about having to eat monsters and is your typical stuffy academic type who is constantly being Green Eggs and Ham’d; she turns up her nose at eating a meal made out of something that has tentacles, an ovipositor, an absurd number of eyes, and which was trying to eat her five minutes ago. She then tries a bite, out of hunger if nothing else, and eats the whole thing because it’s delicious. Rinse and repeat in the next episode. 

She can also incinerate entire packs of deadly creatures and call the dead back to life by thinking about it hard. She is an expert in deeply forbidden black magic and has dedicated herself to studying lore so dangerous that her quasi-fascist elven overlords maintain an entire hit squad dedicated to finding people who do so and ending them. When it proves impossible to recover a proper body with which to resurrect her dragon-eaten girlfriend, she builds a new body for said girlfriend out of dragon meat and dragon blood and her own essential fluids, and then calls forth her soul from the dungeon to inhabit that new body. 

This goes perfectly well and has no unforeseen consequences.

The helpful dwarf who initially gets the rest of the party into eating dungeon food is a fellow named Senshi. A dwarf’s dwarf, whose character design is basically “a huge beard, two big eyes, and a helmet,” Senshi is dedicated to ensuring that everyone around him gets a full, hot meal every day, rests properly, and does not overexert themselves. He is the absolute and undisputed star of the cooking show segments, expositing on how to turn monsters into meals with the same command of his talents and tools as Gordon Ramsay instructing you in how to make the perfect Beef Wellington.

Senshi is like this because a decade ago he watched a party of his elders slowly die around him after becoming lost in the dungeon, because they saw it as their duty to make sure the youngest among them, him, was fed and protected. He hasn’t left the dungeon since. He might literally not be capable of functioning on the surface world anymore.

Then there’s the comic relief, in the form of the rambunctious, bad-tempered catgirl, Izutsumi, who doesn’t want to eat her vegetables and is always causing a ruckus all the time with her cat-like behavior.

The reason she’s a catgirl is she was built into a chimera with terrible magic. She’s also a slave who wasn’t even allowed to keep her own name by her owners.

(Also there is Chilchuck, the world’s most divorced halfling single dad. He’s the well-adjusted one, for certain values of that term.)

Just about every single cast member, including the minor players, is like this, with a gooey messed-up center underneath their thin candy shell. 

This makes it sound like Delicious in Dungeon is sort of your typical “oh, this starts off lighthearted, but everyone has a Dark Past and it turns Grim and Serious” modern subversion of traditional stories.

But that’s the secret ingredient. None of these things subvert the other. They feed off and support each other. Delicious in Dungeon isn’t “actually” dark and fucked up or “actually” wholesome. It’s a wholesome, wacky comedy and cooking show that is also and simultaneously a show about fucked-up body horror and racism and madness and terror and eat or be eaten. 

This show isn’t afraid to do a whole episode about how an immortal mage with a screw loose has transformed an entire kingdom of people into wraiths caught in a twisted state between life and death, unable to die but not properly living. Then while the protagonists are grappling with that it hits you with a joke about how with nothing better to do, the wraith-people have domesticated monsters for the purposes of farming, and would you like to see that, and, well…

They sure did, Laios.

It’s very hard to maintain this sort of unity of theme while playing games with tone in the way Kui does. It would have been easy for the show to come off as either fundamentally unserious (“I cannot take this subplot about survival cannibalism seriously when they keep stopping to have a comical interlude involving Laios saying clueless things”) or fundamentally unhinged. The real glory of Delicious in Dungeon is that after all these weird, strange ingredients go into the pot, it isn’t just sludge; you’ve got yourself a stew. 

The show is not without flaw. There are some very real pacing and setting issues. The old-school setting conceits it uses, while charming and instantly intuitable to me, a mid-forties nerd who is conversant with the design language of classic Japanese Role-Playing Games, may also seem jarring and overly “gamified” to a lot of people, especially the highly mechanistic way matters of life and death are treated before they really explain to you how all that works structurally. 

That structure is not quite as transparent as it perhaps ought to be; the original manga did a lot of worldbuilding through background gags, parenthetical asides, and “extra” chapters expounding on the setting. It used a light touch in this regard, doling out the information in dribs and drabs rather than a full Tolkien-style concordance. This sort of storytelling worked great on the written page (Kui’s mastery of her unique art style is part of what made the manga a hit) but it doesn’t translate well to animation, and that’s a bit of a problem because this setting is incredibly materialist and is deeply concerned with the functional interconnectedness of its world. Many of the interactions with the supporting cast come off as a bit “Huh? What?” because the show didn’t have the time, or didn’t execute on, the small background touches that explain things like “the big girls with the horns are part of a species that has a weird quasi-slave relationship with the humans from the far east” or “the elves are actually super fucked up and kind of fascist AND racist.” You usually can get there eventually, but it has a lot of trouble congealing at times.

It also ends quite abruptly. There’s a second season coming; the first season adapts the first half of the manga, and the second will adapt the back half, but it doesn’t come to a natural endpoint; things just stop, without even a cliffhanger or a clear break between sub-plots, and that’s a bit frustrating.

Still, this was one of the high points of 2024 for me, and if you’re interested at all in fantasy, this is one of the most unique things to come out of Japan in the past decade. And you’re more or less guaranteed a resolution without either an abrupt Netflix-style cancellation or the wearisome spinning out of a successful franchise beyond all hope or reason. There’s this first season, the second season will adapt the rest of the manga, and then you’ll be done and have a complete story. 

That’s not nothing, these days.

Delicious in Dungeon S1 completed airing June 13th, and is available for you to binge (please don’t binge things) on Netflix at your leisure.