Review of Delicious in Dungeon (2024)
Seen in 2024.
This review refers to the first season.
A rare success among high-concept genre hybrids. Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma (2015) was awkward enough combining a cooking show with softcore pornography and tournaments, but Delicious in Dungeon is a cooking show about fictional foods you can never cook or even taste, because it’s also a fantasy adventure. The fantasy is clearly game-based, featuring many of the monsters from early editions of Dungeons & Dragons, resurrection spells at little material or personal cost, and dungeon-crawling as a recognized profession. That’s a pitch for disaster, and yet, the show succeeds.
It succeeds because, despite its gaming heritage, the show’s worldbuilding does not belong to the thin and narcissistic isekai wave of the preceding decade. It’s not the hoarding-first style of a typical roguelike or the spectacle-first style of an MMO. It has some of the character-based formula for relaxation from Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid (2017), including occasional dress-up, but that’s not really the selling point. Delicious in Dungeon puts cogitation first, in the style of a private TRPG campaign. Each absurd species, though ripped from the monster manuals of the author’s childhood, is neatly slotted into an artifice which, I admit, also makes no sense as a whole. The joy of the series is in seeing its well-designed oddball characters trying to make sense of it all, sucking the juicy marrow of internal logic out of the bones of 1970s game design. Studio Trigger did a good job on the production values, too.
The original title, ダンジョン飯 (danjon meshi), just means “dungeon food”, which would have been a perfectly good English title. I think the awkward “delicious in dungeon” is Engrish straight from Japan.
References here: Draken mot nybörjarna.