I was going to review “Echo” today, but we just had to put my cat of 15 years to sleep, hopefully capping a two-month run that’s seen my mom break her leg and my bird of 20+ years die to a stroke. I could use a shift, and as much as I’d like to tell you what I think of “Echo”, turning over an unflinchingly violent series in my head doesn’t feel like what I need to do right now. I looked for something therapeutic instead, and “Delicious in Dungeon” fits the bill.
The anime opens on a skilled party of adventurers getting a reality check against a red dragon. They’re capable enough of taking the dragon down, but they’re malnourished and keep making mistakes. They lose, the hero Laios’s sister Falin eaten. Falin uses the last of her strength to teleport everyone else back to the overworld. That doesn’t sound therapeutic at all, but let it ride a minute.
Resurrection is a spell in this world. As long as the remaining party can make it back to the dragon and defeat it before Falin is fully digested, they should be able to bring her back to life. Other party members have already been resurrected in the past, and a dragon more interested in hibernation should digest someone over the course of weeks or months.
The major problem is that they lack supplies. They were teleported with only the gear they were wearing, most of their treasure still sitting deep in the dungeon. They can’t afford food. Laios has always wanted to try eating the monsters they kill, to the disgust of other party members, but there really isn’t any other choice. They have no clue how to prepare or cook those monsters, so it’s lucky they meet a dwarf whose passion in life is making dungeon denizens into food.
The result often feels like a really good Dungeons & Dragons session, with each character not only possessing a specialized skillset, but also embodying a unique, strong personality. Laios is a booksmart human warrior, Chilchuck is a halfling rogue skilled at trap-finding, Marcille is an overly cautious but powerful elf mage, and Senshi is our headstrong dwarf chef.
The adventures are perfectly fine. It’s delving into a dungeon, which you’ve almost certainly seen many times if you watch anime, but the adventures aren’t the point. The cooking is. There are some action scenes, but the setpieces are the cooking segments themselves. Senshi breaks down how to safely prepare, combine, and cook meats, (possibly conscious?) vegetables, and fungi that you will never have a chance to eat yourself, since they’re all part of this fantasy world. That would seem silly…if it didn’t come across as so delectable.
This is a bit of a mini-genre in anime, with one of the better examples being last year’s utterly charming “Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill”. Yet while that show was essentially about a protagonist acclimating to a new world and keeping some very unique pets fed, “Delicious in Dungeon” isn’t an isekai. Its characters were born and grew up in this world, and so are very familiar with how it works. They’re high-level, but have no particularly unique powers compared to the next set of adventurers – save for Senshi’s learned experience in cooking up monsters.
“Campfire Cooking” and other shows like it tend to use the cooking as a way of progressing the adventure itself. Lessons about the world that the cooking brings are pretty straightforward and simple. With “Delicious in Dungeon”, the cooking is used to delve into the world-building. It opens into ecology lessons of how the world around them works, of what the food chains look like, and of what this world even understands about the massive, cursed, underground castle the party has to fight their way down.
The animation is a good blend of old-fashioned and modern. It’s squarely modern anime in terms of framing and editing, but there’s a strong undercurrent of 70s and 80s design when it comes to facial features and the way they pop color here and there to accentuate the visual depth of a scene. It seems familiar and comforting.
There’s some incredible work when it comes to how shadows color a space and the people in it. Even when it’s bright, our clothes are still shaded where we’re turned away, or our skin shaded where our noses block direct light. Even the slight recesses of our eyes mean they can catch a hint of shadow, as they do here. Animated series often choose very particular elements to sell character and the reality of a space. Here, that attention to the little changes in shading adds a rich sense of depth. Those classically cartoonish hints in the character design lend well to the choices of shading and pops of color used to create that visual depth. That level of detail makes these fantasy places feel more real as characters move around in them.
“Delicious in Dungeon” is funny – how could it not be, given its focus? That’s mostly due to a mix of incidental and situational physical comedy, along with some hilariously timed reaction shots. It doesn’t have the breakneck pace of a dedicated comedy. You’re not going to compare it to “Love is War” or “Spy x Family” in full chaos gremlin mode. It’s not uproarious, but it does keep me smiling and smooths the pace of the show. The comedy is more of a complementary ingredient that adds to the overall flavor of the series.
I opened by addressing how I needed to write about something more therapeutic right now. It’s wild to me that “Delicious in Dungeon” is Studio Trigger’s follow-up to “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners”. The two shows couldn’t feel more different. “Edgerunners” was one of the saddest, most poignant descents into hopelessness I’ll ever want to see. That show leaves you with a bitter, heartbroken longing for the loved ones we lose, and a sense of finality that losing means they’ll never come back.
By comparison, “Delicious in Dungeon” is wacky, dysfunctional RPG party fun combined with fantasy cooking segments. It’s delightful. The mission is to erase a loss, because this world allows that. It’s not a surprise that Studio Trigger can do this – they’ve long bounced between the sweet, the violent, the affirming, and the depressing, sometimes within the same show. It’s just impressive for what is essentially a smaller, less prolific studio to stand out as reliably as they do. Their talent for adaptability and variation covers more ground than some studios that put out three times the titles.
It’s a bit too early to really decide whether “Delicious in Dungeon” is good or great, insofar as that delineation even matters. What I do know is that loss and stress can sometimes get crammed into tight windows in our lives, and in the midst of one such window, this show is therapeutic and freeing. I needed it. I needed to write about it. I need to nestle under a blanket and see more of it.
And I’m never skipping this opening:
“Delicious in Dungeon” is on Netflix.
If you enjoy what you read on this site, subscribe to my Patreon! It helps with the time and resources to write more articles like this.
Gabriel Diego Valdez 