[TV] Legend of Vox Machina

[Malaphax]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11247158/

Quote

In a desperate attempt to pay off a mounting bar tab, a band of misfits end up on a quest to save the realm of Exandria from dark, magical forces.

I have mixed feelings about this show.  I backed this on kickstarter because I'm a fan of the critical role livestreams that this is based on (although this show is based on campaign 1, I personally only got into this midway through campaign 2).  However, the first 2 episodes in particular are absolutely overboard.  The show is clearly an adult animated show, similar to invincible, with about equal amounts of gore, but substantially raunchier jokes (there is a song about anal beads) and more swearing.  I think most of the comedy has fallen flat, partly because it has to be "in game / in character" rather than some of comedy from the group happening "out of game" at the table when they played.  Also, you obviously get some pacing problems trying to turn 30 episodes of 3.5 hour streams into 12 episodes of 20 minutes each.
The animation is decent, the voice acting is solid (go figure) and the plot from episode 3 onward is good. 

[Malaphax]

To follow this up.  I'll change my mixed feelings to a cautious recommendation.  The first 2 episodes are still incredibly weak, and are nearly standalone, if you can power past those two episodes the show gets much better - there's unfortunately just enough important content and context you need, otherwise I'd recommend skipping them.  The adaptation was solid, the climax in particular was well done, and it definitely hits a high fantasy setting better than most shows.  The pacing really speeds up in the second half of the show, the last 3 episodes in particular almost go too fast.  Studio Titmouse does good animation work, and absolutely brought their best for a few action sequences. 

Sidenote: I still think this won't land for everyone, but it might fit in with some of the adult animation that amazon studios has been putting out (invincible and the boys spinoff series).  I'm not sure where this is sitting in terms of popularity/cost compared to other series put out by Amazon (the rotten tomatoes and imdb scores seem exceedingly high), I know they've at least greenlit a second season.  I hope there's enough of a push to get them to keep going.  They have a strong backlog of content they can adapt, and they also have direct access to the creatives to help flesh it out (and voice it), I could easily see ~4-5 seasons of campaign 1 and another ~4+ seasons for campaign 2 (and by that time even some stuff from campaign 3).  I'm also fairly certain that since the first kickstarter raised $11.3M from nearly 90k people, that if they needed to do another round of crowdfunding, they could certainly do that and shop the show to another platform/studio.