Delicious in Dungeon aired its finale this past week, so I wanted to summarize some thoughts on it. I went back over the episode discussion threads and the comments I made for each episode. There are a couple generalizations I can make based on my impressions (in a spoiler-free way):

• Animation: Studio Trigger really delivers some fantastic animation. I mentioned the animation in almost every discussion thread. They seamlessly change up style to emphasize what is happening at any given point. Sometimes they lean into the silly/absurd, and other times it gets very serious and dark. Looking forward to seeing how the second season turns out.
• Characters: The other thing that I talked about almost every week is what I will broadly classify as the characters. When the show started it really felt like a group of misfits that each are exceptionally weird in their own ways. However, as the series goes, we find out that these characters actually have a lot of depth to them. They also have a lot of chemistry with one another (how else could you have so many different ships going on simultaneously).
• Creative Fantasy: It is clear that the author has put in a lot of work to try to figure out how a fantasy world with magic and dungeons might actually function. Where things can be explained without just hand-waving it away with magic, they do so. In the process, they arrive at some very creative takes on normally magical monsters. As somebody that consumes a lot of fantasy, this was very much appreciated. Some episodes feature this more than others.
• Tone: Episode 1 started off as a tale of two types of story. On the one hand, we have a super serious, life or death, rescue mission. On the other hand, this is a silly, laid-back cooking adventure. As the show progressed, the tone would shift back and forth on a spectrum between these two extremes. The way that the show would adjust everything from the animation, OST, voice acting to match the tone of a given scene was super well done and a sign of fantastic directing. I wanted to especially highlight how much I appreciated episode 11 in this regard.

You might notice that I haven’t really talked about the story much at all. Beyond not wanting to spoil people that haven’t watched it yet, I also feel like the season ended right in the middle of the story, so I am hesitant to make conclusions about it yet. I can say that I have very much enjoyed it so far, and that the wait for season 2 will feel really long.