There’s not much fanservice in Dungeon Meshi. I would say it’s exactly like how you would expect it to turn out if you just played DnD and then hired someone to animate it. Complete with the player stupidity and boss cheesing.

The series does take time to build up - it starts off feeling like a generic gimmick anime, but the story and lore gets deeper the more you watch. And the gimmick (eating monsters) ends up becoming a lot deeper than you would expect. (I’ll talk about it more below.) The storytelling is, in hindsight, extremely efficient, but the writers just never draw attention to the info that you’re supposed to remember. So I think it’s one of those series where you really have to rewatch afterward in order to pick up all the lore tidbits that the characters just toss around.

Speaking of lore, I would say that the worldbuilding is one of the most extremely detailed that I’ve seen in any media, where it touches on really mature topics like implicit (and explicit) racism, tribal tensions, political feuds, cultural differences. And every little thing must have an explanation. And there’s actually different races of humans in this world, each with their own nation and culture. I think it all ties back in to the core theme of the series, which is that eating is so fundamental to life that it influences human culture. And, inversely, that because eating is the one universal constant across all cultures, it is the one thing that can unite people. Over the series, you stop seeing “eating monsters” as a gimmick and it starts becoming more like a thesis. Like, “yeah, of course it would be a show about eating. What else could be so fundamental to discussing the human experience?”

Touching on the typical icks with anime (oversexualization, often with minors, harem, OP main characters, etc.): the series actually avoids all of the typical anime pitfalls. There’s no sexualization. Characters don’t talk or hint about sex at all. No revealing clothing, and all characters dress appropriately for their job/environment. There is one single scene where one character tries teaching another character about sex (giving the “birds and the bees” talk), but it’s not sexual in nature and IMO it is really meant to highlight a common implicit bias in this world (the character receiving the talk is actually a grown adult, but due to his race, gets infantilized frequently). Speaking of grown adults, every character in the show appears, acts, and is a fully grown adult. And as for power scaling, the main characters don’t have any OP skills and never learn any OP skills. They’re just a standard party of adventurers, and it’s made clear that the only reason they’re successful is because of the party’s deep understanding of monster biology and dungeon ecology and their willingness to use creative solutions to difficult problems (aka: cheesing every boss).

As a complete side note, I think it has one of the best and most accurate representations of autism that I’ve seen. I’ll leave it vague, but there are several characters that are strongly autism-coded, and the writers really went above and beyond to show how autism is interpreted differently by others when the person in question is a male or female.

Overall, I’d say I highly recommend the anime. It instantly became one of the best animes that I’ve watched, and it’s an anime that can be enjoyed casually, or analyzed for lore to hell and back, or analyzed for its literary merit. (If it wasn’t clear, I’m part of the 3rd group. I really enjoyed how coherent its thematic messaging is and how skilfully it tells its story)