And so continues my love affair with this impeccable series. Seriously, I'm swooning! There are other manga series that I have adored and are overall 5-star series for me, like "Death Note" and "Horimiya", but this one takes the cake (food pun intended). I think it's a personal thing because "Delicious in Dungeon" is the alignment of so many of my favorite things: adventures, magic worlds, cooking, monsters, cool battles, and a hella cool dwarf.
Ryoko Kui continues to balance moving the overall plot forwards at beautiful pace, while taking time to explore the intricacies of the dungeon and all its inhabitants. I deeply appreciate the fact that readers don't just get blasted with names of creatures but also information about their ecosystems and what's unique about them; this really fleshes out the world so well!
The characters are as wonderful as ever, and each person gets a nice balance of focal time. The additional group that the main bunch met up with in this volume was nicely done: it added texture to the volume while again progressing the plots of everyone involved in a natural way.
5/5, would definitely recommend this series if you're looking for a funny, heartfelt, and really unique fantasy manga! ( )

Another great volume in the series, with wonderful art, a good story, and a great cast. ( )

Adventures continue. ( )

Dragged a bit, but still fun. ( )

This one took me a bit to get my bearings on since I hadn't realized that these guys would appear again and therefore hadn't really mentioned them in my past posts. I believe this volume starts with the same party that the series regulars came across back when they found the treasure insects. They're revived and continue on, only to be killed yet again by fish-men. The series regulars see them, are attacked by a kraken, and make a meal out of kraken parasite meat - kraken, as it turns out, isn't tasty like real squid. They also make a porridge using grain and waterweed collected from fish-men. Then Marcille uses up all her mana battling an angry Undine. The party comes across an old party member, a female dwarf named Namari. With her help, they eventually defeat and eat the Undine, which restores Marcille's mana. After that, the party wears Giant Frog skins to survive a tentacle choked area.

This is still a creative and fascinating series, even if Laios' and Senshi's insistence on figuring out how to eat literally everything they come across in the dungeon is a bit ick. The kraken parasite meal made my skin crawl. (And Laios deserved what he got for eating one of those things raw.)

In this volume, readers learn that Marcille and Falin met in school - Falin was skipping class to read in a real dungeon, which she'd observed enough to learn a lot about (back to the whole "dungeon ecosystem" thing). Marcille, meanwhile, wanted to learn how to create a safe dungeon, a place with all the benefits of a real dungeon (access to goods that can only be grown or found in a dungeon) but without the danger.

As usual, the story got a bit ridiculous, but in ways that made sense. I laughed at the "okay then, I'll just drink the Undine to fix my problems" part (only these characters would propose drinking or eating the thing that nearly killed them in order to continue on). And the frog suit was silly and gross, but otherwise a believable solution to their paralytic tentacle problem.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )