Delicious in Dungeon by Ryoko Kui
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Delicious in Dungeon finally answers the question that has plagued fantasy genre lovers for so many years. Can you eat the monsters? Delicious in Dungeon answers yes, you can. Delicious in Dungeon (shortened after this point to D in D) is a fantasy Manga series illustrated and written by Ryoko Kui. In it, a group of adventurers has to make their way through a massive dungeon that takes days to finish to save one of their teammates. Because they don’t have any food, they must kill and cook the monsters that attack them to survive.
This review will be specifically only for the first volume, which is the first three chapters plus some bonus content. I have not read the other volumes, so I can’t comment on the manga as a whole, just this volume. This is also not a review of the anime adaptation. Warning: There will be some very minor spoilers beyond this point.
The main hook of D in D is the main character, Liaos, and his group of adventurers fighting a dragon. During the fight, Liaos’ sister is eaten by the dragon, and the rest of the group is teleported out of the dungeon by a spell. Weirdly, the group seems to care little about actually saving Liaos’ sister. They get sidetracked often, even though they are on a time-sensitive mission. Even Liaos himself seems more invested in trying to kill monsters to eat than trying to save his sister. But despite that, the group doesn’t come across as uncaring or unlikable. Liaos is wonderfully weird. His first thought when fighting a monster is “Can I eat this?”?. He uses his encyclopedic knowledge of monsters’ anatomy to strike at their weak spots and exploit their behaviors, but despite all of his weirdness, he has a heart of gold. He is supportive of his teammates and is empathetic enough to know when they need help. Even though his obsession with monsters is borderline deranged, he is a good team leader. Senshi, the dwarf, also brings a lot to the team. He is skilled in cooking dead monsters, and through the manga, he cooks a variety of delicious meals using monster parts. Dwarfs in fantasy often can trend into stereotypes, but Senshi cooking makes him distinct from your average dwarf character.
By contrast, Chilchuck the rogue and Marcille the wizard don’t have much to do; Liaos and Senshi’s knowledge of killing and eating monsters is much more useful than Marcille’s magic or Chilchuck’s lockpicking skills. Even when it feels like Marcille’s magic should be useful, it backfires on her. On top of Marcille’s magic, there are multiple jokes about how her trying to do something only for it not to work, to the point it feels kind of mean. Chilcuck is good at disarming traps, but that happens only once. Overpowered characters aren’t fun, but underpowered characters aren’t fun either. My favorite teams in stories are ones where every character brings something to the team, but Chilcuck and Marcille are mostly useless.
Overall, the jokes in D in D are decent but not great. Mostly, it’s jokes about Liaos’ weird obsessions with monsters and how cooking monsters is a funny idea. While the jokes do get a bit repetitive, the delivery is good enough for me to laugh out loud a few times. But the real highlight of D in D is the cooking. It delivers on its monster-eating concept wonderfully with dishes that look both tasty and gross. The monster cooking is enhanced by weirdly in-depth drawings of the anatomy of the monsters. There was a lot of thought put into how to make different monsters’ scientifically plausible biology. For example, instead of being magic, living armor in D in D is animated by a hive of hermit crab-like slugs that use armor as shelter. The thought put into the monsters’ biology sets the monsters in D in D apart from monsters in other stories and breathes new life into tired tropes.
Overall, I liked D in D. It was funny and is different from anything else I have read so far. It’s worth a read if you’re into comedy or if you’re looking for a story that brings a few new twists to the fantasy genre. The first book is available at the Belmont Public Library. The television adaption is also available on Netflix at time of writing.
Reviewed by Teen Volunteer, 5/4/2025.
