Holiday Review: DUNGEON TOILET

That being said, we got A LOT of isekai manga this year.  For every year this trend drags on, it seems the stories only get stranger, more specific, and worse than ever before.

DUNGEON TOILET (Isekai no Toilet de Dai wo Suru), by ROOTS.  First published in 2018 and first published in North America in 2021.

PLOT:

Yotaro was previous just another ordinary Japanese high school boy, albeit one with an obsession with toilet trivia and his own bowel movements.  Now he's trapped in a fantasy world with only Gigi the elf and Nurael the mage to help him, but his biggest concern remains finding the best and most comfortable ways to take a crap wherever he goes.

STORY:

The jokes for Dungeon Toilet basically write themselves.  It's shitty.  It's crap that was needlessly dumped onto manga-reading audiences.  It's a stinker.  I could go on and on with the puns, but at some point I have to actually articulate why this might be the dumbest thing I've read all year.

This is technically an isekai story, but it's the laziest attempt at one I've seen yet.  Yotaro's backstory is tossed aside in just a couple of short sentences and there's no effort whatsoever to explain how he got mixed up with Gigi and Nurael.  Who needs things like "motivation" or "personality"?  Just obsess over your butt and the best materials to wipe it with like Yotaro does, to the eternal bafflement and disgust of literally everyone around him.  That's close enough for everyone in this story!

Look, I get the joke here.  Nobody thinks about mundane, crass, everyday things like 'where will I poop?' in the middle of a grand fantasy adventure.  It's the sort of joke that works for maybe a single chapter, but the longer that ROOTS keeps trying to push it out only makes it that much more painful.  Anything resembling humor dies every time that Yotaro pops a squat or praises a potty.  Each chapter was a total waste of my time.

ART:

Quite plainly, this art is butt-ugly.  The characters have such ridiculously simple features that they verge on SD, and yet half of the time they end up off-model.  The linework here is thick, crude, and scribbly, which is a poor match with the amount of detail that ROOTS tries to put in the costumes and backgrounds.  Most of the time it just makes the panels look like a pile of caca.  They can't even get the visual side of comedy right.  The closest they get to a punchline is Yotaro declaring his need for a toilet followed by Gigi and Nurael staring at him blankly, as if he hasn't done this every single chapter.

RATING:

Dungeon Toilet is an apt name because that's precisely where it belongs.  It takes a lot to make something as basic as a poop joke boring to the point of aggravation, but this manga succeeds and then some.  I can't even say that this is the very bottom of the genre (after all, no one's a slave here), but heaven help us all if anyone manages to find an isekai manga that looks worse and fails even harder at humor than this.

But then, what can you expect from the guy who gave us the animated shitpost that is Teekyu?

This series is published by Seven Seas.  This series is complete in Japan with 3 volumes available.  2 volumes have been published and are currently in print.

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