I came into Dungeon Meshi with no expectations and no prior knowledge of what it was about or how good it might be. I was looking for a new manga to read and I tend to like stories involving dungeons in general so I clicked on it and tried it out. Overall, I'm very glad that I did.

Dungeon Meshi is not a groundbreaking, exciting manga full of action and twists. Instead it is an extremely solid story with a simple premise. At first I thought that the focus was too much on food and too little on the great fantasy world imagined by this author. However after I got through a few chapters I came to truly enjoy both the realistic food preparation aspects of the story and the fantasy aspects as well.

Although Dungeon Meshi's story is very much rooted in the archetypal idea of a medieval fantasy world, many of the plot points are grounded completely in logic and reality. Food preparation works as it does in real life, the monster's strengths and weaknesses are sometimes magic but more often realistic details based on how they might be if monsters lived on earth as we know it.

The art is somewhat simple. I don't know too much about judging manga's art but I will say that it is certainly not bad art. It may lack the detail and flair that some manga readers are used to but the style overall is solid.

The characters pretty much adhere to the normal characters you'd expect in a medieval fantasy RPG style world which didn't bother me but may be too plain for others.

Overall I give Dungeon Meshi a 9/10 because although it is a simple manga, it is also a charming one and sometimes it is nice to read something without so much drama, fan service, and cliffhangers.

Story - 9
Art - 8
Character - 8
Enjoyment - 9
Overall - 9