The Legend of Vox Machina is a decent fantasy series, which is quite rare. The animations look pretty good and the original DnD characters are very recognizable. The writers also managed to get rid of most DnD names and terminology. Overall the series is enjoyable to watch and there is not a lot of competition in this segment which makes Vox Machina special
Sadly, the series has two big issues:
1) The humor.
The crude humor and the amount of it almost ruined the series for me. It is especially bad in the early episodes which are mostly made up of crude humor while the characters are reduced to one or two traits that might be funny to 5year-olds. It is especially egregious with Grog and Scanlan and while Scanland turns into a more complex character, at least every second Grog line is pure stupidity - at no, it is nor appropriate for the character just because he is a low INT barbarian. Low INT does not turn a character into a bumbling idiot.
Both the amount and the crudeness of the humor really takes away from the serious and gritty atmosphere and scenes.
Most of the humor is just F- & S-bombs and stupid one-liners that neither fit the characters nor the situation. I played a game at the beginning of every episode - "how long will it take for a character to drop the F-word?" - answer: never more than a few minutes. So yeah, the humor is very basic and repetitive.
In the original DnD campaign, the humor was much more natural and even sophisticated from time to time. The makers didn't manage to adpot this kind of humor for the series and decided to almost ruin the series with it.
Speaking of the original, the series added a few scenes that reference a scene or a plotline from the original campaign but only with a single line of dialogue or a very short scene which in unsatisfying for fans of the original since the reference usually lacks what made the original good and new watchers wont understand the reference and only get a weird scene shoehorned into another scene.
Sadly the attempts at humor take a lot of the runtime away from more interesting things - like the plot.
2) The rushed and simple plots & scenes.
The original campaign is hundreds of hours long, so it makes sense that the showmakers hat to pick a few plots and scenes to use for the series. Sadly even with this small subset of them, all the plots and scenes feel rushed, especially in season 3. There is no time to generate suspense or dread because we have to resolve the situation in the same episode or the next (or make time for stupid lines in between).
The series was still enjoyable, but very difficult to watch in the first half of season 1, improved with season 2 and got gradually worse over the course of season 3. I am already dreading season 4.
