THE MIGHTY NEIN Delivers CRITICAL ROLE’s Darkest Fantasy Yet (Review)

Don’t bother rolling for initiative; just clear your schedule on Wednesday, November 19, because The Mighty Nein is a must-watch for fans of dark fantasy. The new animated series from Critical Role and Prime Video is well worth your time, whether you’re a longtime member of the Critter fandom or you’ve been living under a twenty-sided rock. To give you an inside look at what you can expect, here’s our review of Prime Video’s newest Critical Role series, The Mighty Nein.

The eight-episode adaptation of Critical Role’s second actual play D&D campaign is like rolling a dirty 20: nearly perfect, but still immensely satisfying. The result is a show that is alternately heartwarming, heart-wrenching, and “holy shit” inducing, thanks in no small part to Titmouse’s excellent animation of The Mighty Nein and composer Neal Acree’s “Tron meets fantasy” score.

Set approximately 20 years after the events of Critical Role’s first animated series, The Legend of Vox Machina, The Mighty Nein TV series delivers a deeper, darker, and more daring story than its predecessor. Compared to Vox Machina, The Mighty Nein feels less like a traditional fantasy saga of powerful heroes meeting in a tavern to go on adventures together and more like a band of miscreants, misfits, and malcontents being swept away by the tides of history, desperately clinging to a bit of flotsam.

When the brazen theft of a sacred artifact known as the Luxon Beacon pushes two powerful empires to the brink of war, it’s up to a ragtag group of misfits to save the day. Sort of. When it comes to Prime Video’s The Mighty Nein, the eponymous “heroes” are often anything but heroic. And that’s what makes the show so damn good. Well, that and the animators going absolutely sicko mode at least once an episode.

As in any good D&D campaign worth its salt, these questionable heroes all come equipped with appropriately traumatic histories and deep-seated insecurities that come to the forefront. There’s perpetually filthy and depressed wizard Caleb Widogast (Liam O’Brien); alcoholic and kleptomaniacal goblin Nott the Brave (Sam Riegel); hotheaded but deeply perceptive warrior monk Beauregard Lionett (Marisha Ray); mischievous evangelist for an absent trickster god Jester Lavorre (Laura Bailey); shipwrecked and guilt-wracked sailor Fjord Stone (Travis Willingham); and charming circus ringmaster harboring big secrets under the big top, Mollymauk Tealeaf (Taliesin Jaffe).

For fans of the original source material, this can be a Rashomon-like experience. Backstories have been expanded and refined, important events reordered, and there isn’t a single 15-minute ad for D&D Beyond. The Mighty Nein‘s TV series form is familiar to the Critical Role campaign but distinctly different, and the show’s willingness to be fluid with its adaptation works wonders.

With its combination of alcoholic goblins, arcane assassins, absent gods, half-orc erotica, and artifacts capable of rewriting the fabric of reality, The Mighty Nein feels like an impossible needle to thread. On paper, oscillating between dick jokes and deadly seriousness should create a sense of tonal whiplash. But in practice, The Mighty Nein TV series not only exceeds all expectations; it rends them asunder like a vorpal sword.

With nearly double the runtime of each episode that The Legend of Vox Machina, the series spends more meaningful time with its characters, expanding on and reimagining fan-favorite backstories and storylines to create something that feels tense, urgent, and complex. It allows showrunner Tasha Huo and the creative team to meaningfully explore pivotal “session zero” moments that played out either off-camera in the original Critical Role series or in the pages of Dark Horse’s Critical Role comics.

The extended episode length for The Mighty Nein doesn’t wear out its welcome either. While the Vox Machina gang are delightful in their own way, the show could sometimes veer into the sophomoric in a way that undercut the story being told. While there are still dick jokes aplenty in The Mighty Nein, they feel narratively appropriate and, at times, essential, which is a weird thing to say.

Take Jester Lavorre, for example. The bubbly blue tiefling cleric stuck in a state of arrested development. She leaves a near-constant stream of mischief and chaos in her wake wherever she goes, usually in the form of crude graffiti and mostly harmless pranks. Her patron deity, The Traveler, is more invisible friend than known theological quantity.

His apparent charge to his disciples? To draw wiener portraits on anything and everything she come across. (Because calling them dick pics feels sacrilegious.) This weaponized immaturity isn’t just played for laughs; it is armor, shielding Jester from a deep well of loneliness and a sheltered existence inside the walls of her courtesan mother’s pleasure house. When you realize Jester’s conception of romance is based on smutty in-universe novels like Tusk Love, it’s played for laughs in The Mighty Nein, but there’s an undercurrent of sadness, too.

And speaking of sadness, while nearly every character gets their due in The Mighty Nein’s first season, certified sadboi Caleb Widogast’s story takes a particular place of prominence. His troubled past comes back to haunt him, his newfound friends, and the world at large, thanks to the tangled webs woven by obsessive archmage Trent Ikithon (played in a standout performance by Mark Strong). Without spoiling anything, this leads to one of the most brutal and intense moments I’ve seen in animated form by the time we reach The Mighty Nein episode five.

Other characters like troubled elven arcanist Essek Thelyss (Matthew Mercer) and Mollymauk have aspects of their stories reimagined and reordered in a way that makes them much more impactful. Given the least screen time is Yasha Nydoorin (Ashley Johnson), a hulking barbarian marching towards her unknown destination like a T-1000 with a greatsword. She may be a bit of a blindspot for viewers unfamiliar with the source material, but given Johnson and Travis Willingham’s comments to Entertainment Weekly about taking a “new route” with the character, we can expect a deeper exploration as the series continues.

With that said, The Mighty Nein show also rewards longtime Critical Role fans with plenty of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Easter eggs. From Beau declaring “sleeves are bullshit” to animated cameos by Travis Willingham and Laura Bailey themselves, there is a lot to love for diehard fans. In an interview with Nerdist, showrunner Tasha Huo confirmed that The Mighty Nein continues The Legend of Vox Machina‘s tradition of hiding Matt Mercer lookalikes in the background, so keep your eyes peeled.

Ultimately, my biggest complaint about The Mighty Nein is that there are only eight episodes. The show feels like it’s truly hitting escape velocity by the time the credits roll on episode eight, which is a double-edged sword. It left me wanting more, but now I have to stare wistfully out the window until presumably 2027.

If nothing else, it made me want to revisit Critical Role’s Campaign Two, which is one of the best compliments an adaptation can pay to its source material. Thankfully, for everyone else, you can ask yourself a variation of Matt Mercer’s iconic question for the next two months: Is it Wednesday yet?

The Mighty Nein premieres on Prime Video on November 19 with three episodes and new episodes airing weekly every Wednesday.

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