Studio Trigger‘s anime adaptation of Delicious in Dungeon was a gift that kept on giving, and knowing that we’re on the waiting list for a second season is yet another reason to stay alive until we’re served yet another bountiful harvest of fluffy slice-of-life anime food meets eldritch horrors in an increasingly perturbing dungeon. While many manga readers and anime-only fans have been compelled to either rewatch the first season or read ahead in the manga (for the nth time) in the lull, there’s another dungeon manga more than worth your time—one that gets messed up far earlier than Ryōko Kui‘s manga does. That series is Tower Dungeon.
Like Delicious in Dungeon, Tower Dungeon starts with a succinct, video-gamey premise. But, instead of diving deeper into a dungeon, this dark fantasy follows a party of knights battling their way up one. After a king is murdered and his daughter is kidnapped by the last surviving necromancer, who is puppeteering the regent’s body, adventurers from across the land swarm the Dragon Tower, a 100-floor cylindrical monolith whose climb promises the one who kills the necromancer dungeon master the princess’s hand in marriage and, basically, being richer than god.
The tower itself has only been charted up to a point, with half-mapped floors, secret passageways, and video game-style shortcuts that virtually let parties Super Mario 64 slide their way up the first levels, bypassing the resource-draining and monster-feeding slog of early encounters. On paper, it would take an adventurer around four hours to scale the 50,000-meter tower if they didn’t take any breaks, but once those early climb cheats run out around level 20, the difficulty level becomes impossible.
Creatures like bisected dragons, eyesight-freezing basilisks, and floors that shift into increasingly grotesque death traps claim even the most competent explorers. It’s just as common to find skeletons of felled adventurers as it is to see living ones descending back down the tower in defeat, telling those that come after that their run was a total wash. And with the reward so obscenely high for the one to conquer the tower, those attracted to the dungeon are not just heroes but the scum of the earth, adding a nasty PvP edge to an already lethal player-versus-environment gauntlet.
At the heart of its story is its himbo protagonist, Yuva. Yuva is, for all intents and purposes, a brunette Laois whose hyperfixations are less about monster gourmet and more about perpetual chivalry. He’s a country bumpkin with a heart of gold, a brain made of rocks, and the raw strength to put you through a wall with ease for threatening to harm his friends. Basically, he’s got the same scrappy, awkward moxie as Dunk from A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which makes his evolution from butt-of-the-joke legendary salt thrower—someone killing a slime monster that was sliming out earlier adventurers into oblivion—into a genuine hero heartening with each chapter. Plus, watching him bounce off a party of a degree more serious and goofy adventures is a bottomless well of comedic warmth that only makes the tower’s escalating horrors, over the possibility that someone could die at any moment, all the richer.
What’s immediately captivating about Tower Dungeon is how it emphasizes space and the sheer, overwhelming scale of its titular tower. The manga is filled with massive spreads that make even the most imposing knight look like an ant carving a path through a mountain. Likewise, its creatures are so ethereal that even at their most terrifying, you can’t help but admire how gorgeously grotesque their beasts are before they make short work of tearing through another batch of foolhardy adventurers.
Despite the stark dark fantasy brutality that only intensifies as Yuva and crew climb higher through the Dragon Tower’s shifting, roguelike floors, the series also shares Delicious in Dungeon‘s knack for levity. Its ensemble of mages, knights, archers, and anthropomorphic cat and mouse folk makes for a party you can’t help but get attached to as you white-knuckle your way through every chapter, praying their lives aren’t forfeit.
My surprise-Pikachu moment at realizing why Tower Dungeon has the sauce should’ve never been a surprise at all—it’s by the creator of Blame! and Knights of Sidonia, Tsutomu Nihei. In fact, it’s his first foray into fantasy, and he takes to it like Frieren to a mimic. With that in mind, it feels a bit silly to recommend Tower Dungeon in the same way one would tell a Studio Ghibli fan to check out Moebius because the lineage of excellence pretty much speaks for itself for fans in the know.
Still, for those who’re getting put on to the game now, Nihei is a goated sci-fi mangaka with a talent for inverting the way manga looks with heavily black-inked pages that verge on staining your fingertips flipping through its pages. So seeing him turn that sensibility loose on a fantasy dungeon crawl where jump scares of creatures skittering underfoot, hordes of undead cloaked in shadow around the corner, or hulking basilisks looming overhead out of sight feel like a fantasy dark fantasy match made in heaven.
So if you’re craving a manga that gets weird, dark, and inventive without losing the RPG charm of a band of heroes with a lot of baggage to sort through, Tower Dungeon is absolutely worth the read on K Manga or wherever manga are sold.
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