The knight Laios set out with a skilled party to claim the treasure of a lost kingdom buried deep beneath the graveyard of a small village. Unfortunately, they were bested by the Red Dragon, who ate Laios's little sister Falin. Although the party managed to teleport out of the dungeon, they left their equipment behind and are penniless. Demoralized, the party broke up. Now Laios, accompanied by the elven mage Marcille and the halfling Chilchuck must tackle the dungeon again, and with only one month to save Falin before she's digested.

Ostensibly, Delicious in Dungeon is an adventure comedy about a group of DnD-style adventurers trying to rescue their fallen companion from the belly of a dragon. While that's the driving motivation, the actual meat of this episode is, well, the meat. Specifically monster meat and all the creative, delicious ways you can cook it. There's certainly some comedy to be had from the characters, but the big draw is seeing all the unique ways the show can turn standard fantasy monsters into gorgeously illustrated meals for those characters. I personally love seeing how creative they can get with it. From cutting up a giant scorpion like shellfish to turning slimes into a kind of gelatin preserve or just delineating the different kinds of man-eating plants by how their fruit tastes, this first episode alone is a buffet of deliciously weird cuisine and fake animal facts. That's sustenance for weird nerds like me, but also makes this whole dungeon feel like a real place. Of course people will try eating these weird creatures, that's what real humans have been doing since we first learned to hunt. By building and considering an entire food chain within the dungeon, this whole world feels instantly more grounded than any exposition dump could accomplish. As they quickly discover in the second half of the episode as well, finding something to eat that hasn't already eaten someone is a tall order. Even the plants are carnivorous, and poor Marcille struggles with the idea. On the other hand, Senshi (a dwarf with a passion for cooking who joins the newly reformed party) thinks a little digested human makes it taste better.

The one wrinkle is in the setup. It's hard not to get hung up on the fact that Laios and his party are supposed to be on a mission to rescue his sister and they have a limited time to do so, but most of the time we spend with them is during downtime while much of their progress through the dungeon so far is offscreen. It creates a sense of friction with the audience, where we expect these characters to be moving with urgency but only witness them when they're recuperating and focused on eating. The given justification is that dragons hibernate most of the time, so Falin is "probably" not going to be turned into dragon shit anytime soon, but you still can't shake the feeling that these dummies need to hurry up, make like Tom Petty and free Falin.

Although the creature designs we've seen at this point aren't particularly unique, they do all look good, and I like how the cooking techniques all mimic the real-life foods the monsters sort of resemble--the scorpion functioning like crayfish or lobster is a very nice touch. The food is also where the animation resources were most heavily devoted. While the rest of the episode is solid, carried mainly by the rounded and appealing character designs and overall beautiful environments, the cooking is definitely the star. There are so many sumptuously rendered shots of hands carefully skinning fruit, slicing meat, and stirring pots. There's a concerted effort to make each dish look absolutely mouthwatering. It's more reserved effort than some might expect from a Studio Trigger production, but it's also the right choice for this material.

In fact, know what I love about Trigger more than anything? More than the crew's zany comic sensibilities, impeccable craftsmanship or penchant for very satisfying action spectacle, I just adore the whole vibe that the studio gives each of its productions. Pretty much every time I watch a Trigger anime, it somehow gives me this feeling like I'm back in my younger days, relaxing with some of my old friends and one of my favourite pop brands while we laugh way too hard at our own stupid jokes inbetween watching whatever anime we put on. I'll give you an example of what I mean: There's one specific cut in this premiere that had me laughing unreasonably hard, not because it was the funniest joke of all time, but because I could just see the animator in charge of that sequence grinning like a madman over getting away with it. It's when Laios takes one of his many pauses in the quest to geek out to Marcille about monsters as both fascinating creatures and delicious meal ingredients. Marcille, for her part, has had the unfortunate luck of being a halfway-sane woman who doesn't actually want to think all that much about which way of being killed by a giant plant is preferable. Instead of hamming up her reaction with a comical sound effect or another of the goofy tantrums she had throughout the premiere, however, the camera does a single-frame zoom-in on the incredulous look on her face (yes, not a separate image, literally the same one but closer), and we sit for a single second of perfectly dead silence as the entire show grinds to a halt so we can all contemplate the life choices that Marcille must've made to end up in this conversation.

That's the kind of shit I'D come up with, and that's what made it hilarious. Here's a beautifully animated show featuring an incredibly likeable cast of characters digging into deliciously insane monster meals, all set to music composed by Yasunori friggin' Mitsuda, and the moment that won me over completely was a TerminalMontage-ass visual gag that I legitimately might've missed if I'd sneezed at the wrong time.

That's just what watching a Trigger show is all about though. Every single element of this production has been made with such obvious care and joy that it's easy to let it all wash over you and really savour all of the littlest, stupidest details that were hopefully just as much fun to create as they are to watch. I don't exactly think Delicious in Dungeon is going to stand as Trigger's magnum opus or anything, but it'll certainly be one of the season's premium chill anime.