Faintly,
As far as gaming related TV shows go I'd rate this as one of the most important new releases of the year, even more so than that upcoming Halo show with the Human-looking Cortana and the basic Season 1 plot outline that every Halo fan knows is going to make the entire first series redundant by the end. ("We need to find the Halo to survive The Covenant- oops nevermind, this was a terrible idea!") And that's because this show here, The Legend of Vox Machina, crosses so many Venn circles of nerd culture that it's failure or success has the chance to help further legitimise at least three underrepresented sectors of fandom at once. For one it's a straight High Fantasy tale, which is actually a subgenre that has been slowly building up since the meteoric rise, then catastrophic fall, of Game of Thrones, (I wonder if that's worth a blog? Game of Thrones? Nah? Okay.) it's also born from the world of Dungeons and Dragons (Insane to think one group's campaign would become so famous that it warrants it's own TV show. Granted, that campaign was hosted by seasoned actors.) and finally it represents adult animation, which is a subgenre that still isn't widely celebrated in the animation world. (People still think animation is only for kids. If I could show those people just a fraction of the things I've seen animators create, >shudder<.) With all that riding on it's sinewy shoulders, I just had to get looking into this show for my blog. Duty demands it!
Firstly, yes this is an adaptation of the Vox Machina campaign from the Matt Mercer DM'ed D&D show, Critical Role. Now I'm only slightly familiar with this actual campaign myself, having watched the first twenty-to-thirty episodes (I know, I need to get back into it), but that doesn't matter so much because this is a show that doesn't appear to be based on any specific moment from that journey and is more a neutral adaptation of those characters in a setting that can be approachable to newcomers. And since I think the 'newcomer' audience is the essential ingredient here, what with this being a show on Amazon Prime, that is the perspective I'm going to try and look at this show from and constantly circle back around to; as if this show can introduce me to characters and a world I don't already know nearly as successfully as Peacemaker does, then we'll have a real chance of this show succeeding numerically where it's already succeeded critically.
One of the first things I've noticed about this show, and it seems very strange picking this up only now after having watched the actual early CR episodes, is the fact that the adventuring party at the heart of this series, our main characters so-to-speak, doesn't have itself a clear-cut leader. Keyleth seems like the most approachable with her fairly recognisable 'I'm on a journey to discover and achieve my purpose' schtick, Pike is the glue that seems to hold everyone together (they may not always like each other but they all respect Pike) but the others... they seem almost disparate to the group mechanic. Vex and Vax are a team by themselves, Grog is a dumb idiot strongman, Percy has the 'sophisticate loner' thing going on and Scanlan is just trying to bang everything. Now of course, for a D&D party this is exactly what you want, with no one player getting too much attention over the others, but for a TV show this is actually fairly atypical.
Most media, even the ensemble ones, tend to have that one character who serves as the audience's looking glass into this world; especially in fantasy settings. Think Starlord in The Guardian's of the Galaxy, the movie is technically about all of them, but Peter Quill is undeniably the main character. Keyleth kinda serves that function in her moral neutrality, but she's not exactly leader material, and I think that already stands out through the first episode. Of course, this could be a point of making it hard for newcomers to relate to the team because they don't have that easy-to-attach character who gently carries them into the wider plot, but I think it also speaks to an authenticity behind the development of this show that might just make it stand-out against the other flotsam in the rivers of entertainment. We'll just have to wait to find out on that one.
Oh, and I already have my first point of contention, and it's an odd one, but I think the bar fight at the beginning might have been a bit too much. (Again, I'm looking at this from new audience's perspective) It was actually really well animated and had solid movement and choreography to it, the physical comedy was decent and it served as a natural and intuitive way to introduce the cast and what they could do in a low stakes environment where their abilities and competence could take center stage. All that was fine. I just wonder if the spectacle of the fight was a little bit too-much-too-fast. Just think about it- they fight every kind of wild D&D creature in that bar brawl from wild Beastmen to a giant eye-patched cat man and a fair few orcs. And there was the bartender who was... something, I don't even know. As someone who is familiar a little bit of D&D from the Baldur's Gate series, I was totally overwhelmed by the onslaught of visuals and races that the show doesn't even focus too much on, and I wonder if that might have been enough to turn a new face around. I'm not certain of this, but I can just sense a presumption of "Woah, I don't understand a lot of this. I'm not welcome here." potentially cropping up, but then maybe I'm just underestimating the general audience.
As someone who watched the original Critical Role show, albeit briefly, it's actually a bit weird to see all of these characters being as witty as they are, without the occasionally awkward downtime or natural delivery of an adlibbed show happening in real time. It's a wholly professional feeling from the quality of the voice cast (and the now-consistency of character accents) to the snappy dialogue, although with that upgrade comes a new metric of measurement. Whilst I'd never have compared the two in the past, now I find myself looking at the curated, pre-written, snappy adult wit of Vox Machina and comparing it to other current shows in a similar humour-focused vein. Try on for size, Peacemaker or on the less mainstream but still adult-animated side of the world, Helluva Boss. Even at it's best, this show's dialogue writing isn't holding a candle to either of them just yet, although this is the introductory episode and the writing did have a lot of ground to cover with introductions, set-ups and playing a long game of "Hey, I remember that!" with veterans of the D&D show.
Now from within the world of the show itself, and spoilers for the first episode, I wonder (as I often do in shows like these) at the competence of the team we're following and how believable it is for the setting. And the reason I bring this up is just for the whole 'hunt' aspect of this story. So we have a mysterious creature that is teased in the beginning, appears to be burning down villages and who seems able to 'fly' over the tree tops, and not once does the team ever even jokingly guess it might be a Dragon. How is that not your first compunction? I thought it was so obvious that the show was setting us up for a bait-and-switch it would end up being a much deeper cut monster from D&D lore, but nope- it's a Dragon. Of course there's a little extra mystery wrapped up there, but if the show is this blatant at tipping it's hand I probably have a decent idea where that's going too, what with the obvious clues laid out in the first thirty minutes alone. It's a small gripe but it just tugs that bit at my immersion of this fantastical magical world that it makes me question basic things such as how common knowledge of monsters should feasibly be for travelled adventures. (Especially given that two of them have a specific history with Dragons). At least it's not bad as Netflix's Dragon's Dogma, wherein every other second Ethan is seeing the most mundane damn monster of all time and going "Forsooth! What manner strange and wild beast be this? Prithee, Olivia, I beseech you, introduce us!"
Yet all of those are just my nitpicks. I think the animation looks gorgeous, the characters have been neatly laid out, the motivations sufficiently set and I'm ready to be swept away by the grand adventure. I only hope that David Tennant gets some solid screentime because, holy crap: this show has David Tennant! For the introduction to a show I think that Legend of Vox Machina did everything it needed to adequately and though the humour was a little obvious at times, honestly when the show looks this good and is animated this smoothly; I don't need it to be a laugh riot. Also, I spotted the little Matt cameo they threw in there and hope he manages to sneak in through the back door in a bunch of episodes like that- be that fun little meta joke for those in-the-know. Overall I'll give this first episode of the Legend of Vox Machina a B Grade for a job well done on introductions, but I know I want to see this show soar going forward, free from the constraints of the necessary meet-and-greets to sell everything that a Vox Machina show could and should be. I can't wait.
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