The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

Dungeon Friends Forever

What's It About? 

Van the warrior and Ryuka the dragon have been friends since childhood. As adults, Van is now a dashing adventurer, and Ryuka has become the big boss of a dangerous dungeon! Every time Van wants to hang out with his old friend, he must navigate a dungeon and clobber a coterie of Ryuka's monster underlings. Will their friendship grow into something more?

Dungeon Friends Forever has a story and art by Yasuhisa Kuma. The English translation is by Kevin Yuan with lettering and touch-up by Ochie Caraan. Published by Seven Seas Entertainment (October 17, 2023).

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

One of my favorite things about this work is that I often get to read books I might have yet to pick up on my own. Dungeon Friends Forever is one of them – on the surface, it's just another dungeon fantasy ripped from Ye Olde RPG, this time with Van the Adventurer and Ryuka the Dragon being childhood pals despite ostensibly being on opposite sides of the hero/villain divide. And yes, those things are still true. But the book is also a delightful parody of the childhood friend romance trope and fantasy in general, and it's not afraid to skewer as many genres as possible.

Easily my favorite gag is when Van and Ryuka are playing a board game called “The Game of Another Life.” It's an isekai parody of that old standby “The Game of Life,” and Yasuhisa Kuma expertly uses it to poke fun at what the isekai genre has become – you get “vengeance points” when things go wrong, power trips and harems, rebirth as something weird that ultimately ends up with you living a peaceful farming life…if you've seen it in an isekai series recently, it's a square on the game board. Yes, it's only one chapter long, but it's amazingly spot-on.

That's true of the book as a whole. Ryuka, who has inherited the job of dungeon boss from her dad, is surrounded by monster cronies who are incredibly invested in her relationship with Van, and they make no bones about how keen they are on the childhood friend story. (Page one of the book flat-out says that the childhood friend romance is just as much a fantasy as magic dungeons.) Happie the Harpy is particularly into the idea that they ought to notice how sexy they find each other any second now. At the same time, Woll the kobold and Mino the minotaur are much more interested in watching wholesome antics play out. (Occ the orc may have some specialized tastes.) While the running commentary can be a bit much at times, it's so clear that the book is having fun with its tropes and characters that it doesn't matter…and Happie might be on to something, at least as far as Ryuka's concerned. That would still work with the humor, though, because it would class Van as the clueless male lead, another venerable standby of the rom-com landscape.

I'm unsure how long Dungeon Friends Forever can maintain its gag(s), but it's hard to argue with this first volume. It's funny, goofy, and just a good time – and someone needs to make that “Game of Another Life” for real because I would play it.