Attention, Critters! The Critical Role team gifted fans with a veritable dragon’s hoard of new information about The Legend of Vox Machina at a New York Comic Con 2021 virtual panel. The cast confirmed a release date, revealed the series’ opening title sequence, and treated the assembled fans to a live table read of a scene from the show, including an animated preview!
The Legend of Vox Machina is coming to Amazon Prime on February 4, 2022. An animated fantasy-adventure for adults, the series follows a band of seven unlikely heroes known as Vox Machina. They have an unapologetic love of booze and brawls, which leads the haphazard crew to begin searching for a way to quickly pay off their excessive bar tab. Instead, they soon find themselves on a mission to save the world of Exandria from evil forces, testing both their skills and their friendships.
The official opening title sequence shows Vex’ahlia, Vax’ildan, Pike Trickfoot, Percy de Rolo, Keyleth, Scanlan Shorthalt, and Grog Strongjaw in action. Vox Machina show off their combat moves against various foes while a raven weaves threads of fate around them — a very recognizable bird for fans of the web series. The show will tell the tale of the seven from the beginning, requiring no prior knowledge of the campaign. (Critters who are already familiar with the characters, though, will not want to miss pausing the trailer at 0:33 for a glimpse of a familiar shadowy being behind Percy!)
The trailer is by animation studio Titmouse and is scored by brilliant composer Neal Acree. Acree has provided music for major games such as Overwatch and World of Warcraft.
Critical Role is a Dungeons and Dragons web series created in 2015. Fans have been awaiting further news of Vox Machina’s adventures in The Republic of Tal’Dorei since June, when the designs for each of the titular group of heroes were revealed.
The series is voiced by creators and cast members of Critical Role — who are all veteran voice actors — including: game master Matthew Mercer (Resident Evil), and players Laura Bailey (Dragon Ball Z), Taliesin Jaffe (One Piece), Liam O’Brien (Sailor Moon Crystal), Ashley Johnson (The Last of Us Part II), Marisha Ray (Fire Emblem), Sam Riegel (Winx Club), and Travis Willingham (Fullmetal Alchemist).
As well as the opening sequence reveal, the Critical Role crew treated NYCC attendees to a table read of a fully animated scene from the show. In typical Vox Machina style, the tale begins with a foul-mouthed tavern brawl!
The first campaign of Critical Role, which is forming the base of the story for The Legend of Vox Machina, was a runaway success that spawned several more campaigns, other shows, books, and merch. The first episode alone racked up 16.8 million views on YouTube.
The original Vox Machina campaign cast kept a lot of creative control over the project, including executive producing alongside Brandon Auman (Star Wars: Resistance) and Titmouse’s Chris Prynoski (Metalocalypse). During the NYCC panel, the cast reaffirmed that the show is their story, “in every sense of the word.”
The Legend of Vox Machina was originally announced as an animated short, intended to be a single 22-minute release. Critical Role launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the special back in 2019. Within the first hour of the campaign going live, they’d steamrolled through their initial target of $750,000. By the end of the campaign they’d raised $11 million — one of the biggest film projects in Kickstarter’s history! The wild success of the fundraiser enabled the expansion of the premise into a 10-episode series. Amazon Studios signed on to the project later that year and it was announced that The Legend of Vox Machina was being expanded again, this time into a full, two season animated series for Amazon Prime Video.
In addition to all the exciting The Legend of Vox Machina news, Critical Role fans will soon get a new campaign. The team’s third adventure starts on October 21, 2021. The whole cast will return for a new story set in Matt Mercer’s Exandria campaign setting, and for the first time the season premiere livestream will be available to watch at select movie theaters.
If you missed the NYCC virtual panel, it is available to NYCC digital ticket holders and ReedPop Metaverse members for the next month. After that, it will be available worldwide for free via the Prime Video YouTube channel.
