Delicious in Dungeon author surprises fans with immaculate gaming taste, mentions Disco Elysium and Papers, Please
In this week’s edition of Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, manga artist Ryoko Kui discussed her love of a wide range of Western games, especially RPGs. The revelation that the Delicious in Dungeon creator is an avid gamer sparked joy and surprise on social media in Japan and overseas.
What has impressed fans the most is the sheer range of games Kui has played. Her extensive list contains both old and new games, and she mentions many story-driven, indie titles and tactical CRPGs. One commenter summed up her impressive range of beloved cult hits, stating that she is a “cultured gamer.”
In addition to the extensive list of titles that she gave to Famitsu, Kui also talked about her experiences with other games. Kui’s manga Delicious in Dungeon is set in a high fantasy world and centers on dungeon exploration. The strong influence of western style fantasy can be felt in the plot, characters and art-style, and she mentions fantasy novels like The Lord of the Rings and The Neverending Story as her influences. It wasn’t until the manga serialization started that she got into video games and studying D&D rulebooks for inspiration. As might be expected, she looked at RPGs and dungeon crawlers with traditional western fantasy settings. She mentions the classic CRPG series Wizardry, dungeon crawler Legend of Grimlock as well as the fantasy RPGs Dragon Age and Baldur’s Gate 3.
She expresses a fondness for games with a top-down perspective, intriguing story and player choices that have an impact. Games that have these qualities coupled with mechanics based on D&D dice rolls such as Planetscape Torment, Divinity Original Sin and Disco Elysium were mentioned by her. Apparently, Kui’s first taste of indie games was the immigration control sim Papers, Please and since then, it seems she has enjoyed many indie puzzle games like Gorogoa and Superliminal.
Ryoko Kui also gave a shout-out to game localizers for enabling her to enjoy story and dialogue-heavy games in Japanese- mentioning The Witcher 3 and Disco Elysium in this regard. She praised the costume designs for elven characters from western fantasy RPGs like Dragon Age, Divinity: Original Sin, Pathfinder and Baldur’s Gate 3. She even did an illustration of her favorite elves from these games, which has been fan translated on Reddit.
Her love of games even impacted her choice of composer for the Delicious in Dungeon anime, which is currently being broadcast on Netflix. She decided upon Yasunori Mitsuda because she liked his soundtrack for the Japanese RPG Chrono Cross. As can be seen on Reddit and X, Ryoko Kui’s avid and varied love of gaming has certainly impressed her fans both in Japan and overseas.
Delicious in Dungeon’s anime adaptation is currently streaming on Netflix. Episode 7 dropped on February 15, and new episodes are due to be released each week.
Verity Townsend
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