
In The Legend of Vox Machina’s 25-minute episodes, one minute you’ll be watching Scanlan make a sordid joke and the next a child will be murdered. Whilst the tone of the original Campaign One can veer between stupid and serious, this happened over the course of sometimes five-hour-long sessions. The show still feels like it’s rushing attempting to cram in the same character development and plotlines that took literally hours to tell.īesides the odd fixation on crude humour and violence, it’s also the cause of a serious tone problem throughout all five episodes I watched. At one point there’s a great reference to a running joke made in Campaign Two that just reminded me how actually funny Critical Role can be. It also helped that most jokes were often told in a fourth-wall breaking way where it felt more like your mates were sharing a giggle with you, rather than trying desperately to impress you with how rude they can be. The difference here is that I don’t remember Campaign One reveling in its cruder aspects nearly this much.

#CRITICAL ROLE CAST REACTIONS TO VOX MACHINA MUSICAL SERIES#
I’m certainly not playing the prude here Castlevania is one of my favourite animated series and it’s filled to the brim with nudity and violence. There are burp jokes mixed in with dick jokes mixed in with all the extremely gratuitous violence. There's a nice variety of Character designs in The Legend of Vox Machina. In fact, characters in LoVM say fuck with all the gusto of a 12-year-old who’s just discovered its existence. Cue, in rapid succession, vomiting jokes, explicit nudity and sex, burp jokes, and profusive use of the word ‘fuck’. After a party of unfortunate heroes is violently slain – and I mean REALLY violently – the series quickly jumps to our protagonists getting drunk at a tavern, before a classic bar-fight erupts inside.

Taking place in a world created by Mercer, the animated series begins in an incredibly bizarre fashion that I really wasn’t prepared for. The Legend of Vox Machina focuses on the antics of Vex, Vax, Grog, Scanlan, Pike, Keyleth and Percy, a band of mercenaries for hire who find themselves quickly wrapped up in matters much larger than they were prepared for. I don’t remember Campaign One reveling in its cruder aspects nearly this much. It’s come a long way since Campaign One, hence the animated series on Amazon Prime, but at its core it’s still a show about playing an RPG – which is inevitably lost when it’s translated into a television series. Having just finished watching the first half of the first season, I still believe this.įor the uninitiated, Critical Role is a series in which a group of voice actors – comprised of some pretty big names such as Ashley Johnson (The Last of Us), the Video Game BAFTA-winning Laura Bailey (The Last of Us II) and dungeon master Matthew Mercer (Overwatch) - play D&D together and stream it live on Twitch. I may have cooled on Critical Role in recently, but I still have a deep affection for its very first campaign, which serves as the foundation for The Legend of Vox Machina, and didn’t believe that an animated series would be a good fit. On the contrary, it’s because I loved it.


This isn’t because I didn’t like Critical Role – the Dungeons & Dragons actual play show it’s based on. I didn’t back the Kickstarter campaign for The Legend of Vox Machina, an animated series which makes its debut on Amazon Prime this week.
