I’ve watched the first two episodes of the anime version of Delicious in Dungeon, which is based on Ryoko Kui’s manga, and been well-pleased with how it’s been adapted. The core is the same—a party of down-and-out adventurers have to survive by cooking monsters they find in a dungeon—and it’s great seeing the meals they prepare from basilisk and carnivorous plants represented as lusciously as a Miyazaki meal.
It’s also extremely game-y. Delicious in Dungeon is the closest thing to a Wizardry anime since, well, the Wizardry anime from 1991, and feels a lot like someone’s D&D campaign. The adventurers are all fairly relaxed about death because they know they can be magically revived, and the dungeon has an ecosystem as thought-through as you’d get in those old Dragon magazine articles about the ecology of the lamia or whatever.
Which makes sense, because Ryoko Kui is a fan of CRPGs. On her blog she’s drawn fan art of Planescape: Torment, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, as well as portraits of the characters from the first two Baldur’s Gate games, which really capture Imoen’s journey from happy-go-lucky scamp to hardened adventurer.
The portraits have even been packaged up as a mod called Baldur’s Gate 2: Anime Edition, should you want your next replay of the classic CRPG to be a little more fabulous. Just download the Portraits folder, then copy it into Baldur’s Gate II – Enhanced Edition in your Documents. I can’t wait to see the cast off Baldur’s Gate 3 in this style.
