Great, but with one big gap
DanMachi — in full, Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? — is a hugely popular animated series produced by J.C.Staff and on air since April 2015, based on the light novels by Fujino Ōmori and illustrated by Suzuhito Yasuda. It is set in Orario, a city built on top of an enormous dungeon, where adventurers join the deities who have come down among mortals: the main character, Bell Cranel, is the only member of the goddess Hestia's small familia. In this review I will also talk about the spin-off Sword Oratoria, released in Italy under the same name, because by now it is blended into the main series.
The boy has an enormous capacity for growth. He has to face the monsters of the dungeon and challenges that keep getting harder. The anime combines a few isekai elements, such as numerical stats and skills, with battle shōnen sections, where the hero fights gruelling battles against monsters and above all against humans, who behave even worse.
This series brings a vast world into view. You can already sense it in the first season, where the writing tries to leave out anything that would be a spoiler: the authors know they are telling the story of an interconnected world, and adding things could cause damage that would come back on the later seasons.
Before I get to my conclusions, let us go back to the beginning. Many reviews criticize DanMachi above all for its unrequested harem comedy side. That is partly true: this kind of writing weighs the show down and can make it cheap. It is a problem that comes from the structure of the light novel itself. Luckily those clichés are less repetitive than they seem and they never take up a whole episode, unlike what happens in DanDaDan.
The more serious problem, and one the book series does not have, is the way the story is told. We already know this is a huge world and that it needs a great deal of telling. The world of DanMachi is closely tied to the world of Sword Oratoria, its spin-off: watching the later seasons, you realize that the anime is merging with a series of which only the first season has aired.
Sword Oratoria has the flaw of relying on a lead, Lefiya Viridis, who has practically the same personality as Bell Cranel, only shriller and less likeable than the main hero. However less appealing the series may be, it is necessary in order to understand the world around it and, in my opinion, it will be necessary for the future seventh or eighth season.
Despite these two shortcomings (I consider the second one the more serious), the series still manages to entertain me. Unfortunately it is very hard to adapt a story of that kind, because the world is simply too vast.