So, I’ve talked about Dungeon People before, when I got a chance to preview it at Anime Expo. It seemed… fair enough then, like it might have a cute concept and a decent execution, so I decided to come back in short order and see how it held up.
The premise, as gets out in the first couple episodes is that an adventurer, Clay, ends up stumbling into the back end of the dungeon she’s running, due to a little accident.
Once there, she gets hired by a cute girl named Belle, who is the dungeon administrator, in order to help keep the dungeon running. Because that sort of thing is a day job in this universe. They refill treasure chests, reset traps, and manage the fact that most of the monsters are also simply on payroll, using a magic gem system to not die when they get axed by adventurers like Clay.
Thus, Clay begins to help out with the restocking, maintenance, and even patrolling of the dungeon. Keeping her going are her daddy issues (he’s missing presumed dead in the dungeon) and general non-comprehension of things both human and dungeon-related.
And… I wish there were more to this show, I really do.
I get that the idea is to show off a sort of cheeky little punch clock back end for your standard D&D-esque fantasy dungeon, but there are a couple reasons why that doesn’t work.
For one, I feel like D&D (which does get to for better or worse claim the root of the “dungeon” dynamic, though early JRPGs certainly helped hammer it into form) doesn’t get enough credit for making these things bloody interesting and giving them a story. Yeah, in official modules and the general vibe of the game there are a lot of constructed underground labyrinths with floors of roughly increasing hostility, but having this “dungeon for the sake of dungeon” that exists solely because somebody said “eeh, we need one”? Not really.
Of the classical dungeons people actually remember, the closest would be the notorious Tomb of Horrors, but even that had an in-lore reason for being: it’s the tomb (home) of a mad lich who seems to really enjoy trolling people to death (possibly in a nefarious ploy to harvest souls) or else White Plume Mountain (also a case of “a wizard did it” but much more varied in scenery). Other famous dungeons like the one in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (actually a crashed space-ship. Really.) or the eponymous Temple of Elemental Evil (perhaps the quintessential mega-dungeon) have even more unique clear themes and consistent lore. And while I certainly haven’t played every old JRPG, the ones I have are about as good at giving their monster-infested instance maps reasons for being and unique character.
This is something that Made in Abyss and Dungeon Meshi (which I haven’t reviewed for the blog) got right. Both feature dungeons – one very much in the spirit, the other about as explicitly as Dungeon People. But they have stories, personality, environments – things that make them unique and interesting. We understand why these dungeons came into being, and they present more interesting and varied areas for our characters to visit than just mazes of twisty little passages, all the same. This helps keep the works that are largely focused on interacting with these dungeons interesting and on-theme.
Dungeon People, on the other hand, seems to go and take its principles straight from Nethack’s Dungeons of Doom. And even then it still doesn’t hold up: sure the show has the look and feel of Nethack’s Dungeons of Doom maps down (except Nethack is working with ASCII or primitive tilesets. What’s the show’s excuse?)… but Nethack has branches with their own characters like the Gnomish Mines, Sokoban, or Vlad’s Tower, landmarks, features! It’s pretty bad when a game that provides something like five paragraphs of story in its entire run has a show with actual characters and plot beat on finding points of interest.
I do get that this is something that needed to be done for the core idea of Dungeon People. Belle is adorable looking enough that it’s got this “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” vibe with theoretical comedy from how this either plays off Clay being needlessly intense or the reality of Belle being quite savage and willing to delete what living things would dare be her opponents.
But in a sense, that also starts to pitch gutterballs. There have been a lot of works that deal with this kind of “ha ha, manager’s side of an RPG dungeon” and the ones that work are dark comedy. Not generic comedy, dark comedy. As is often acknowledged even in this show, people die down in the dungeon. If we got gallows humor about it, really indulged in the whole “adventurers with one life versus monsters that can respawn endlessly so this is just a day job for them” angle and laughed at somebody, it would be easier to accept. Dark, but potentially still fun.
And what is it for? Is it just a joke to Belle and her predecessor who founded this thing? Why does she provide a smooth difficulty curve and fitting rewards? There’s no indication that this is supposed to be an operation that lures people to their deaths like good ol’ Acererak liked to run, especially since Belle and company seem kind of uninterested in confirming kills on adventurers rather than letting them tap out when they’ve had enough. But we’re not given any satisfying mythos for this other than that the old predecessor was a weirdo.
I’ve waxed long, haven’t I? Well, Clay’s face of incomprehension aside, I have to wax long on the premise because of how little other than the premise there is. Clay sees this, that, and the other facet of running the dungeon, seldom doing much work other than standing around so Belle can explain things to somebody. Meet the other staff, Refill treasure chests, patrol hallways, make loot, hire monsters, update the map with a new layout. Blah blah blah.
And the explanations almost never shut up. You learn to love that “Clay doesn’t get it” face because that’s often the cue for Belle to finally cut to the point. For a show and a dungeon that has no raison d’etre it sure has a lot of complicated rules that have to be spewed out in detail. Here’s an entire scene on how we get slimes to sweep the floors in excruciating detail. Or an even longer scene bombing a wordplay joke about what the monsters call the human world, right on the heels of a massive spiel on the magic economy that doesn’t actually teach us much.
I’m normally all for telling me the rules of a setting. I like to see that, but it has to be in service of something. Normally when you learn how something is the way it is you also learn some of the why, and it makes a setting feel more alive and wonderful. Not here. This whole show feels like the tutorial to a game I’m never going to actually play. Well, I suppose the Dungeon Keeper series exists, but guess which property actually got the dark humor potential and fanciful intricacy of building a Rube Goldberg Meat Grinder. Not Dungeon People.
I was honestly fooled, watching the first couple episodes at AX, because the problem with this show is not strictly its core concept – again, it’s been done before in other media – but the execution, and specifically how this thing goes nowhere worth going. Towards the end I think they might start to run short of basic mundane tasks to tutorial us on, so we do see a few other scenarios, like Belle sparring with the new young king’s champions to maintain the status quo. That has some tragic fighting and… well, it gets Clay into a maid dress so I guess it can’t be all bad.
After that, more randomness! We establish that Belle is a workaholic (we could guess) and Clay is a workaholic with daddy issues (We knew. Apparently she’s adopted. Changes nothing.). We see how little goblins are made – grown like vegetables, though apparently that system was put into place by the former dungeon master when they couldn’t maintain their numbers the “normal” way – not-so-obliquely implied to be subduing and erm… making use of unwilling females of other species, particularly captured adventurers. Not any other reason, just it was too much of a hassle.
I swear, this show does not know how pitch black some of its ideas are. It addresses matters off-hand and just keeps up its overall happy and harmless sort of tone. Pay that no mind, this is just your tutorial on goblin farming. I mean, excuse me? Am I just supposed to ignore that bit? You put it in there, you must have known someone would notice it. So what gives?
It’s telling when the same idea (greenskins as plant-ish) through the lens of the Grim Darkness of Warhammer 40,000 (where Orks are basically fungi) has fewer disturbing implications than this pastel fluff.
And I know the explanation for goblins said to be “normal” here (not the plant one) is something of a known trope. I’m not sure where it originated and to be honest I probably don’t want to know, but I know it proliferated even outside of the Hentai sphere where you might expect that sort of thing. But all the same it’s far from universal and only really belongs in something excessively grim. It’s the kind of fact you drop in an insane world or outright exploitation piece. The surprise that they’re vegetables didn’t need that background, it’s just thrown in like it’s the most natural thing in the world and it isn’t.
The dissonance in values and tone is all over this show, like how Belle is absolutely schizophrenic in terms of what value (if any) she puts on human life. She happily runs a dungeon that seems to exist for no other reason than drawing adventurers in to eventually convert to corpses once they get in over their heads, but when adventurers kill other adventurers she evidently breaks with her predecessor’s tradition and mercilessly wipes out teamkilling jerks and zombifies them because mere death is insufficient, specifically over the teamkilling. It gets her intensely worked up and we burn an entire episode on this fly-swatting operation without any concept of why this would matter to Belle (who arranges human deaths on the regular) or even Clay (who seems to treat inter-adventurer conflict as a matter of course).
At this point, we’re on the final episode. What does this show do for its finale? More puttering. We learn how monsters eat and how the big crystal that Belle does magic body swap things with is just a big battery she has to change now and again. Once more, more tutorial. And then with one scene where we randomly get the sappy music, the show ends.
Belle’s reason for being dungeon master? Questioned in Clay’s head, never addressed. Clay’s daddy issues? Unresolved and largely not addressed. Clay’s interest in delving the dungeon? Similarly. The subplot with the king? Eeh, unimportant.
I get what the show was going for. It wanted to be an interesting “How It’s Made” sort of idea for the dungeon-delving fantasy, but the problem is that the pieces it has don’t actually fit together.
It’s totally possible to do Slice of Life, even Cute Girls Doing Cute Things, with an overtly dark premise. But it takes skill, and an even hand to smooth over the cracks and make sure that your show feels good and consistent. This is something that another show I reviewed recently, Girls’ Last Tour did really well. Let it also not be said that the genre couldn’t mesh with the style. Made in Abyss has some very squishy, adorable character designs and then they go through… that show. Dungeon Meshi can be warm, inviting, and cozy but never forgets that its core idea is that it’s an Eat or Be Eaten world out there. Dungeon People doesn’t even try. It’s just putting a novelty photo filter on all the pictures of horror involved in its premise. They’re still there, but you’re meant to forget. And it’s not as easy as the show thinks it is.
For all of that, though, I think what Dungeon People is most loudly missing is the answer to a simple question: “Why?”
Towards the end they try to raise it, but acknowledging and doing nothing about it doesn’t count for much of anything, and while Belle’s “Why?” might be the most important, there are also some other, more general cases that come to mind and might be better answered. If we knew “Why dungeon at all?” then asking “What does this mean to Belle in specific?” might be a better question.
When we watch content about how something is done with regards to a real life something, we already know what the point of the end result is for. But in Dungeon People we don’t know what the point of a dungeon is, and that means it’s hard (and harder the longer we go on with it) to get invested in the little details about how it runs. If it were a more living ecosystem, like either of the other shows I keep mentioning in this review, that would be something of a different story, but part of the point of Dungeon People is that it’s all artificial, a carefully manicured and curated playground of horrible death (but only in the ways Belle says are okay).
As a result, the final takeaway from Dungeon People is that it’s boring. I keep coming back to the Tutorial comparison. Tutorials in gaming serve an important purpose – the player has to learn the ropes somehow – but the best games keep them short and sweet as well as trying to make them immersive when able. If I told you that there were going to be five straight hours of tutorial in a game, accomplishing nothing, I think you’d ask me where the skip button was.
For Dungeon People, the best skip button is not watching it. I’ll give the show a D-. Some scenes work in micro but it’s plot is missing, its characters are relatively boring, its visuals are uninspired… everything is substandard, deficient, and/or lacking but I’ll let it get away on the razor edge compared to other shows I’ve failed.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play Dungeon Keeper.