So, why are we doing a first impressions of the new season of Yuru Camp, a series i’ve covered extensively on here and one of my favourites of ever?
As in, i usually have the review when the season is over, but i was so pleased by the movie and so busy i forgot Season 3 was scheduled to come out, but as i remembered it being planned for a “winter release”…. i was surprised when a friend of mine told me the first episodes were out.
Then i remembered why i wasn’t as hyped as i would usually be, the fact the third season was not gonna be animated by C-Station, which is a yellow flag, and that it was gonna have a different director, Shin Tosaka, whom previously directed some episodes of many anime series (from Busou Shinki to some Beyblade series, and more recently The Slime Diaries, the spin-off of That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime) and some OVAs and ONAs.
Even before i made some research, it still was not a good sign, but i did watch the first 3 episodes (it’s streaming on Crunchyroll), after hearing of fans lamenting some issues, so here it goes.
The first and blatant change is the character design, which is a lot more “cutesy” than before, a hard thing to explain since the character designs were already super cute, i guess they weren’t aggressively cute to a certain market preference, so they cranked up the “moe” factor to be safe.
The new director said this change is to make this season more akin to the designs in the manga…. and it’s not wrong, i’ve actually red the manga, and yes, it’s a bit more akin to that, but aside from being different, they just feel simplified and lower effort than the previous ones.
“Feel” is the word, as in they don’t look bad or unrecognizable, but the previous designs were simply better in my opinion, aside from being used to those over time, though the slightly different new ones are far from ugly, let’s make things clear.
The second and one that might go unnoticed by regular viewers is the compositing, which IS important in a series that builds its appeal on the mountain locales, woods and lakeside vistas of the Yamanashi prefecture and his many little towns.
Some instances really had the feel of someone using a photo of a real life location and editing anime characters on top on them, with the level of finesse that would be ok IF it was a gimmick joke/humour account like AnimeInHistory, which had stuff like Winston Churchill doing the “V” hand sign with a character from Gatchaman Crowds, or Saitama edited into a old timey newspaper advertisment for a “baldness prevention system”.
Or so i was lead to expect from some opinions online, but that is not the case, honestly it’s plain wrong to infer it’s that bad, it’s just that fans will inevitably feel the downgrade that did happen compared to the previous seasons, because C-Station just got everything right in balancing the specific needs of such an adaption, and here i’m not really pausing to take a look at some of the cinematography, as the enviroment feels less like a protagonist on par with the humans characters.
Which is also marred by a different direction that pivots more to gags and a slightly faster pace, making it harder to immerse oneself in the various locales the series does want you to.
That said, Eight Bit is far from an inexperienced studio, as they already had a lot of shows under their belt, mostly isekais, but also Aquarion Evol, the Grisaia series, Infinite Stratos, and – more relevant in this case – all seasons of Encouragement Of Climb, another slice of life manga-to-anime adaptation about cute girls doing outdoors activities in the mountains, in this case climbing, more specifically mountain climbing (mountain climbing, Joel!)/alpinism.
So they aren’t a random choice, at all, quite the opposite, even though i still wonder why they didn’t commission C-Station again, the Laid Back Camp movie did come out in 2022, though, and currently they aren’t working on anything, so most likely the committee wanted the new season out faster than the studio could/wanted to churn it out, so they hired Eight Bit instead.
That said, i do like that we get to see more of Nadeshiko’s friend, Aya, as she comes back and begins camping a bit on her own before trying a group excursion, and this isn’t bad, this IS Yuru Camp, the series composer and the various VAs are still the same, it’s just not as good as before so far, with some benign differences but also some notable downgrades.
Also, the new opening is very cute, can’t say i’m woved by the ho-hum ending, though.
Still glad to be back into the cozy groove, but this seems like a downgrade that – i suppose – could have been avoided if the committee didn’t ask already overworked animators to churn our things faster than before or for less budget. Again, just guessing, but fear not i will have a review out for this when the season is right again.
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