Netflix (2024)

Trailer available here

I am so sad that season one of Delicious In Dungeon (also known as Dungeon Meshi), adapted from Ryōko Kui’s work, has come to the end after several months of getting to watch an episode via Netflix once a week.

It ends with saying “dungeon food. To eat or be eaten” and on a cliffhanger of will the groups idea to save their friend through the power of cooking really work. The place it ended is an erg moment because I don’t want to have to wait to see how their continued adventures and meals pan out to achieve the multiple step plan involved but, like waiting for a good meal, sometimes you need to let it slow cook and take its time to fully develop.

Truly though, this series has been a really wonderful watch for me. As a lover of both simplistic fantasy, growing up on various dungeon crawler type games and things like D&D (especially doing the random dungeon creator), this sort of art style and food/cooking it pretty much combines all my basic more normal interests into one. It was captivating enough that for each episode I was actually stopping doing everything else to just watch it an that is a pretty rare occurrence for me.

Whilst yes there is of course a huge level of fantasy involved here, the party is made up of a human, dwarf, elf and half-foot after all, each of the characters and their encounters along the way have a sort of believable and relatable set of personality traits and backgrounds that remind us all of the core of desires and emotions being the same for us all just how we present them or reach them can sometimes vary.

I think so many people could get enjoyment from this show on one level or another and would highly suggest it. With it now having the full season out though I can see there being a risk of binge watching it and I am not too sure how well that would work because it sort of has that very traditional ‘monster a week’ thing going on. It isn’t that binge watching it would be bad but it is sort of a nice thing to keep as a chill show to watch in smaller chunks; You need even a short rest between fights in things like D&D/Pathfinder etc after all!

Oh and the music? And opening theme some and animations that come with it through the season? I absolutely adore it. It’s actually delightful and really got me even more into the it’s time! mood.