We tend to have bad experiences with anime but this one is not only popular at the moment but was also a recommendation from our cinephile. Honestly the premise of an dungeon diving story that is focused on food sounds both original and fun. Unfortunately the quality of the show on an episode to episode to basis varies by quite a lot. Apart from schtick about food, it’s still a fairly generic fantasy anime with all of the usual faults of the genre. It’s not awful but I don’t think we’ll be back for the second season.
An adventuring party encounters a red dragon deep in a dungeon and is almost wiped out. The spellcaster Falin manages to teleport the rest of the party back to surface before she is swallowed whole. Her brother Laios, a sword-wielding fighter, wants to immediately return to save her, reasoning that she can still be revived due to the magic of the dungeon. However their prospects of success are low as they have no money and most of their supplies were left in the dungeon so two of their members quit. Only the Elvan mage Marcille and the halfling thief Chilchuck stay with the party. As they venture back into the dungeon, Laios suggests that they eat the corpses of the monsters they kill instead of buying food. The other two are horrified but reluctantly agree and the initial result of eating a monstrous scorpion is disgusting. They do attract the attention of Senshi, a dwarven warrior, who has made monster cuisine into his specialty. He joins their party to help rescue Falin while teaching them how to live off the land and enjoy delicious food along the way.
The first two episodes are kind of bad as it opens in media res with almost no exposition and throws a whole bunch of characters at the audience. Why are we supposed to sympathize with this warrior guy in armor who freezes up when facing a dragon? How weird is it that someone can still be saved after being eaten by a dragon? Fortunately it improves once it gets its feet under it and we get to know the characters better. Each episode is named after a dish and it’s a hoot whenever Senshi prepares it from whatever they killed that day and presents it to the party. I can also see why Marcille is a fan favorite with her exaggerated facial reactions to whatever the party gets up to next. The action is decent and I like how there is some consideration of the ecosystem of the dungeon. Between the focus on food, the details of monster physiology and the ecological concerns, this feels almost like a Monster Hunter adaptation to me. The party even has a solid multi-part plan for taking down the red dragon though I do think that too many big monsters are killed just by hitting their one weak point.
Yet when the show is bad, it’s very bad. When it decides exposition is called for, it goes all in, turning a character into a talking head and devoting entire episodes to recounting backstories. It’s terrible storytelling. It doesn’t help either that the wider story of the dungeon is only mediocre. I find that I don’t care about the history of the Golden Kingdom or the lunatic magician at all. I’d be happier if the series really was all about hunting and cooking monsters, going all in on the detail instead of using montages to skip the cooking process. As a big fantasy fan, I want to point out that the worldbuilding is incoherent and I’m not convinced that the writer wasn’t just making things up as she went. It’s hard to care about this dungeon in particular when we don’t know how dungeons in this world work in general. A key plot point is that people are effectively immortal due to the magic of the dungeon, but does this apply to only this particular dungeon or to other places as well? If not, why does resurrection magic even exist? Why keep adding new characters when there is barely enough time to develop the ones that we already have?
To be fair, I can see why this series has so many fans and it’s honestly not bad. But it’s not that good either and it still has all of the characteristic quirks of anime that we find irritating, including a lack of seriousness despite horrifying levels of gore and violence. I suppose anime just isn’t for us and we’ll just have to make our peace with that.