The Legend of Vox Machina S01E03: The Feast of Realms Review
Medium: Television
Release date: 1/28/2022
Review date: 6/24/2024
Score: 5/10
This episode is better than the last two since it contains some actual character progression, but like the rest of the show it's sloppily applied and almost feels out of place with how tonally comical the rest of the episode is. It's one thing to reveal a character's tragic backstory while the other players hoot and holler during an actual D&D session, but it comes across as unserious and immature when it happens in the TV show version that should theoretically have more time and ability to give that reveal the narrative importance that "hey this guy and his wife murdered my entire family and stole our home" should entail. I really think this show would have benefitted from following a more traditional fantasy adventurer narrative for its first plot line because I feel like the execution of "introduce the party, party gets assigned quest, get to know the party as they travel to the assigned quest, party struggles to complete quest, party come together as a group, party completes quest" would have been a lot easier to pull off than whatever it is the show's trying to do now; I genuinely have no idea where the show is going to go plot wise moving forward because I have no idea what the point of any of the characters being here is or what they want. Who are these people? Where even are we? The vampire and his wife in this episode are said to have come to visit from a neighboring kingdom, but I don't even understand where the characters are in the first place to understand what somebody being from the neighboring country even means! The show seems to be straddling the worst of both worlds in terms of tone and narrative, because the narrative is telling me these characters and events are at least somewhat important and connected, while the show's actually delivery makes all these narrative elements feel like afterthoughts compared to the true purpose of the show, which is apparently waffling about for 20ish minutes and telling C tier jokes. I can't help but get annoyed at what feels like a wasted opportunity of a concept right now - the show has all the elements (decent animation, decent voice cast, decent budget) to make an adult animated D&D inspired adventure show, which I do think would have an audience even in people who don't play RPGs as people just like fun fantasy stories with elves and orcs and whatnot, and instead the showrunners are choosing to apply all those elements towards mediocrity.
It's very frustrating to watch.