Review: The Legend of Vox Machina “Rise of the Chroma Conclave”, “The Trials of Vasselheim”, “The Sunken Tomb”

Overview:

The intrepid heroes, Vox Machina, find themselves facing the unexpected consequences of their defeat of the ancient blue dragon, Brimscythe; they are challenged to gather the tools and allies they need to meet this new threat.

Vox Machina travels to the mysterious ancient city of Vasselheim to search for allies. They’re soon forced to turn to a group of seedy bounty hunters, called the Slayer’s Take. There they encounter an ancient creature who holds critical information that could help them in their fight against the dragons of the Chroma Conclave.

Vox Machina explores an ancient temple to search for their first Vestige of Divergence, a legendary weapon they hope will aid them against the dragons of the Chroma Conclave. As they overcome a series of dangerous encounters to reach the sunken tomb, one of the team makes a terrible mistake.

Our Take:

I was fairly late to the Critical Role hype and didn’t watch the first season of Vox Machina until like summertime. Dungeons & Dragons are one of my favorite hobbies, I play twice a week and run a game some weeks. So when I found out that Critical Role was essentially anime voice actors playing Dungeons & Dragons I was sold. Not only that but The Legend of Vox Machina is an animated version of one of their campaigns. If could get one of mine animated that would be awesome.

All of this lining up like that doesn’t mean the show is going to be any good though. The first season was fantastic but in my opinion, focused too much on one singular character. Only three episodes in it seem like this trend is remaining but now we are focusing on the twin half-elves Vex and Vax. However, if this show continues to remain popular maybe we can focus on each of the members of Vox.

One of the best things about this show is how if you are familiar with D&D you can see that it’s recreating things. When they do something crazy awesome, you can assume they “rolled” a nat 20. Likewise, if they royally mess up guess who “rolled” a nat 1? I love this show because it can bring in a lot of different fans. I just so happen to love both anime and D&D so the overlap is a no-brainer for me.

The only thing is this animation is definitely not for kids, I mean I imagine most people know that but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Scanlan likes to curse more than I do which is saying something and not to mention he definitely leans into the “horny bard” trope.

I’m really excited to see where this story is going and at first I wasn’t a fan of the release schedule. Three episodes every week seems odd but it seems kind of perfect. Just enough to get us excited for upcoming episodes and not too little to make us drop it after one bad episode. Can’t wait to see where this goes from here.