The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Solo Camping for Two

34-year-old solo camper Gen Kinokura prefers his own company and no one else when camping. He encounters Shizuku Kusano, a 20-year-old absolute beginner at camping. The two somehow ended up "solo camping" together.

Solo Camping for Two is based on the Futari Solo Camp manga series by Yūdai Debata. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

It is never a good sign when you're reminded that you need to cover the second episode of a new show, and your first thought is, “Oh, yeah, I completely forgot that even existed!” Solo Camping for Two didn't make quite as terrible a first impression as a show as Shizuku did with Gen in that premiere, but I'll be damned if it didn't fail to leave a lasting mark of any kind. The question, then, is whether this second opportunity to imprint itself on any curious viewers is more successful than the first.

No, it is not. I'll just get that out of the way right now. The one thing that it does benefit from is getting past the irritating meet-uncute that our two leads had to endure in that first episode. So, whether you missed Episode 1 or were just afflicted with mediocrity-induced amnesia like I was, you can just roll with their narratively convenient friendship as it is presented here and simply pretend that these two make a decently cute pair of campers. To be clear, I'm not saying that either Shizuku or Gen is particularly interesting or fun to hang out with for twenty-minute stretches at a time. They're just, you know, functional protagonists, this time around.

Unfortunately, everything else that rubbed me the wrong way about the premiere is still in full effect. The worst offender, in my opinion, is the artwork. I know times are tough for everyone, and I do my best to be as gracious as I can be with productions that are obviously being funded on some executive's loose pocket change and the trampled willpower of the industry's remaining animators. Still, in my opinion, half the point of an anime about camping is to allow the viewer to join its characters in basking in the great outdoors. Even if Solo Camping had halfway-decent character animation —which it does not — it wouldn't be worth a damn if the scenery that the characters went to explore didn't manage to express the simple but powerful beauty of Japan's great outdoors.

Instead, what we get are the same two or three muddy-looking and virtually indistinguishable backgrounds pasted onto every scene, over and over, with each sequence being directed with all of the emotion of a local dentist's TV ad. It's already hard to believe that Gen and Shizuku want to go out of their way to spend this much time with each other, but it's equally difficult to see why either of them wants to go camping in the first place. It's almost impressive that this completely animated cartoon has managed to give the impression that it ran out of money to shoot on location and had to opt for some crew member's uncle's backyard.

So, I guess Solo Camping for Two might appeal to you if you have been trapped inside a blacked-out bunker for so long that you will settle for literally any depiction of two random people walking around and touching grass, no matter how bad the actual experience ends up being. Otherwise, I don't see why anyone would need to join Gen and Shizuka on their, er, “adventures.” Two is already a crowd, so far as solo camping is concerned, anyway.

“Ah, another season, another cozy hobby anime about camping and the great outdoors.” That's what I was thinking to myself when I started the first episode of Solo Camping for Two. It wasn't long after that, though, that our first main character, Gen, is introduced to our second main character, Shizuku, by stumbling face first into her ass-cheeks while he's trying to set up camp in the woods. That was when I figured that this might not be a hobby anime, after all. After another dozen minutes of Shizuku aggressively pestering Gen into being her camping buddy, lest she spread rumors about him being a sex-pest or die alone in the wilderness due to her inexperience, I realized Solo Camping for Two wasn't going to be a very cozy anime, either.

On the one hand, I shouldn't have been too upset at these revelations, since friction and actual character conflicts are usually much more interesting to me than watching a bunch of friends just chilling under stars and sipping hot cocoa or what have you. Then again, I was never a big fan of the catty mid-2000s rom-coms that featured a bumbling idiot constantly bickering with their distaff counterpart for 90 minutes before inevitably falling in love, and those flicks are honestly the closest comparison I have to the overall vibe that Solo Camping for Two is going for.

Now, I get that a lot of the personality-clashing here is being used on purpose to get us more invested in Gen and Shizuka eventually becoming closer (as camping buddies, at least, if not as romantic partners). The secret to setups like this is that the main characters in question have to be charming enough on their own for the audience to bear with the prickly early stages of the relationship. How else do you think Matthew McConaughey survived his “Failure to Launch” Era? Here, though, neither Gen nor Shizuka stands out as exceptionally likeable or interesting in their own right, and that makes us less interested in seeing them hang out together in spite of or because of their differences.

It doesn't help that the production values from SynergySP are…not great. Half the fun of any outdoorsy show is getting to bask in the lush background and warm impressions of what life is like when you can just get away from it all. A great nature anime walks a fine line between being stylized enough to stand out from the crowd while still capturing the real-world appeal of the scenery all around us. Solo Camping for Two does not really accomplish any of that. It's perfectly adequate looking, I suppose, but that just doesn't cut it in this particular sub-sub-genre of cartoon. If the show isn't making me jealous of its characters enough to inspire my own sojourn out into the natural world, then what is even the point?

Usually, the answer to that question is “The fun characters and interesting stories”, but we've already established Solo Camping for Two's deficiencies in those departments. So, what we are left with is an uninspired third-stringer of a cartoon that struggles to compare to most of its competitors. Maybe things will improve in Episode 2, but I doubt this is going to be a must-watch series of the summer for anyone, either way.

What exactly am I supposed to hope for in this show? I had some reservations after the first episode because I did not like the rough dynamic between the two leads. I definitely have some reservations about Gen being very standoffish and very rude, but I can at least understand and empathize with where he's coming from. He's just this guy who kind of wants to be left alone and enjoys the quiet time from camping solo. We don't need a lot of detail to entertain the idea that he just wants to have his moment of peace to get away from it all. It's really no different from someone coming home from a hard day of work and playing a game online or going out to the bar to get a drink. Yes, those are activities that can't be shared with other people, but they don't have to be. I really don't like shows that try to paint the picture that wanting to be by yourself is somehow a bad thing. I think we all need some alone moments to help us appreciate all the other aspects of our day-to-day life.

Shizuku is the main person I have a problem with because she's essentially doing the opposite of what she thinks she's doing. At the end of this episode, she admits that she is being a little bit selfish, but it's not a little bit! Almost every action or word that comes out of this person's mouth is incredibly self-centered and invasive. She is wrong most of the time, even when Gen is going out of his way to at least be a little bit patient with her and walk her through things. However, he's right that she is not equipped for this as a hobby, and she acts like she always expects someone to bail her out. Even hobbies require some amount of work, especially when it's something this thorough and potentially dangerous. She has made it clear that she did not do any research, she did not look into the grounds that they were going to, and even when Gen tries to let her down in his own gentle way, she just can't take no for an answer.

I get it, the show is trying to establish that you can have more fun camping with other people than you would by yourself. We already got a hint that something was going on in Gen's past that is contributing to why he wants to camp by himself. I get it, but we are starting off from such a bad foundation that the show feels like it's having the opposite effect on me. I DON'T want these two to get together based on how they are right now. The show even tries to hint at there being a romantic foundation, but I don't want these two to get together as camping partners or as romantic partners. I really hope there's a lot of course correcting that goes on because, as of right now, the show has to do a lot to sort of reevaluate my trust in the way that it wants to tell this story.

I have two strong conflicting feelings about this episode and potentially about this whole show. On the one hand, I love shows that educate the general audience about something that doesn't naturally come up for many people. I haven't gone camping that often, but I know people who have. It is a hobby I would like to explore further in the future. Having a show about a person camping alone as a means of educating me on what that's like sounds great. I was on board with the first couple of minutes of this episode, just slowly and quietly breaking down, setting up a campsite, and gathering firewood. It is not a premise for everybody, but I was feeling it.

Then our secondary main character gets introduced, and that's when the mixed feelings start, because I don't know why I'm supposed to like this girl at all. I like Gen with his burly face and angular jawline, but I also empathize with him throughout this entire first episode, where he just wants to be left alone. He's abrasive, but I felt like he had every right to be because it just felt like he was picking up after this girl at every turn. Some things couldn't be helped, like the fact that the buses weren't running and the campsite office was closed. But the fact that he had to sleep outside while she used his tent rubbed me the wrong way, the fact that we kept getting those dumb anime hijinks with him seeing her panties rubbed me the wrong way and the entire final third of this episode where she keeps overstepping his boundaries and forcing ourselves into her life rubbed me the worst ways.

I know this is all for the sake of setting up the premise, but having the main reason for this show be one character acting overly intrusive is not an interesting place to start. That's a very rough uphill battle, because you have to do a lot to justify why I should go along with this. If anything, I identified more with Gen by the end because I didn't want anything to do with this woman either, and yet she kept insisting on being around. Maybe it'll justify itself later, but so far, I yearn for the quieter moments of those opening minutes more than I crave the tone that this episode ended on.

Watching this episode on 90 minutes of sleep made me wonder if I was starting to have insomnia-related hallucinations. While the first episode of Solo Camping for Two was frustrating due to Shizuku's entitlement, it was at least competently produced. But if the show is starting to look like this on just the second episode… well, that's just yikes city.

The animation is bad in the normal ways. You'd think in a show about camping, they'd put a bit of effort into depicting nature's splendor. And they managed that with the starry night sky… in episode one. Episode two is nothing but photographs run through a blur filter, which doesn't create a sense of the joys of camping at all. The stiff animation is rife with shortcuts, talking heads, and still frames.

But there's something special about this badness that truly needs to be seen to be believed. A mundane scene of Shizuku chatting with her friends features a high-angle shot, staring at them from the pub's ceiling at an angle. In a side shot of Shizuku and Gen walking side-by-side, Shizuku's breasts rhythmically grow and shrink. There's little continuity between cuts, with characters noticeably changing poses every time the camera moves, their proportions growing and shrinking at random, with limbs that are too long or too short. When Shizuku makes potato pancakes for breakfast, in one shot they're a short cylinder, in one shot they're flat circles, in one shot they're kind of oblong. Gen picks up his tent to move it, and it kind of half-collapses as he's holding it. It's disorienting, but in a way that's kind of fascinating? It definitely messed with my head in my current state, as I found myself glancing around my living room to make sure nothing was warping and bending in my perception outside the TV screen.

Meanwhile, Gen and Shizuku actually manage to talk things out, bringing an instant improvement to both of their characters. I started the episode disliking each one immensely; Shizuku for her selfishness and Gen for being a mean old grump even after agreeing to do this. I mean, okay, she blackmailed him into it. And even if he was kind of a bastard, he never did her any kind of harm. So maybe I just hated Shizuku. But by the end of the episode, Shizuku acknowledges her selfishness and proposes some boundaries to make the experience closer to what both of them are looking for, showing some impressive growth. Of course, it came after her getting all blushy over being put in her place by an older man, which I certainly could have lived without.

Do I still hate Shizuku based on the first episode? Eh… I certainly don't like her or Gen enough to want to spend my time watching them. That animation, however? That may be fun for aficionados of production disasters.

Listen, I'm out here to support women. I love messy female characters who make selfish choices, mistakes, and do weird, gross stuff. I'm even quoted on the manga volumes of Wave, Listen to Me! professing my adoration of the protagonist Minari for this exact reason. I want you all to understand the weight of what I'm saying here: I hate Shizuku Kusano.

She's a self-centered nitwit who would be dead in the woods if she hadn't stumbled on Gen's campsite and he hadn't been kind enough to let her use his supplies for the night. She comes out to the middle of nowhere underprepared, apparently without even a change of clothes for when she falls in the river, is lucky enough to find an empty campsite with a fire going, and starts taking off her clothes in the open. Was going into the stranger's tent a bridge too far? Then she has the nerve to freak out when the campsite's owner comes back, begs him to let her stay there, and sleep in his tent while he shivers outside in the cold. Then she has the audacity to threaten him with sexual assault accusations to get him to teach her how to camp solo?

This selfishness completely overshadows everything else in the episode. The night sky is beautiful in the mountains, but how much can you enjoy that when you're looking at it with the world's most entitled woman? Sure, she can cook, but that also means she's stealing your shit and using it without permission. Gen is no great shakes either – when he declared Shizuku to be “the kind of woman he hates,” the gendered statement, rather than the kind of person she is, didn't endear him to me – but at least his annoyance with her is understandable. Relatable, even.

Her poor decision-making is so great that it bends the suspension of disbelief. She claims to be an experienced camper, even if only in a group, but that doesn't match up to her lack of preparation. If she decided to break off on her own because she was more enthusiastic about it with her friends, wouldn't she have better gear? Why the hell did she come to the woods wearing a pencil skirt, anyway? Her only skill is campfire cuisine, and while that beer can chicken did look tender and juicy, that doesn't mean much when she's parading around in her underwear for no human reason other than for the audience to stare at her equally tender and juicy butt. It just feels so forced, like the writer couldn't think of any other reason to force them together other than Shizuku's incompetence and blackmail.

Even if Solo Camping for Two were to pick up, this premiere would hang like a pall over the rest. Gen becoming friends with a girl who helped herself to his possessions and thanked him by threatening to ruin his life is just bad character writing. Maybe I'll finally watch Laid-Back Camp instead.

I thought the first episode of Solo Camping for Two looked…passable, but knew it was going to have to work overtime if it was ever going to approach the absorbing backdrops that were so instrumental to Laid-Back Camp's success. So, of course, it seems Solo Camping instead opted to simply clock out early. This second episode has a whole bunch of ugly trees populating the backgrounds of its campsites, and our hapless heroes seemingly repeatedly fall out of all of them. The idea of proportions and detail levels is a mere suggestion, even between characters who are standing right next to each other. Gen's time in the wilderness has gifted him the ability to magically change his head shape in real time as he moves, his facial hair appearing to be doodled on with a Sharpie. They drink a lot in this episode; maybe it's just an attempt to approximate the experience of their vision blurring as they become more intoxicated. It's immersion! I don't know why I'm trying to give this show any benefit of the doubt, as it's not like Solo Camping's improved anywhere else in its second episode. It's frustrating because it should be a slam dunk to sell me on a show where two grown-ups just hang around the outdoors and eat and drink together. Got knows I should love a ditzy anime woman who can hold a ton of liquor.

But that would require that I could engage with these people on any endearing level. Gen continues to be a walking camping wiki cursed only to interact with someone who infuriates him at every turn, and Shizuku is still the person who infuriates him at every turn. The girl continues to seemingly have zero self-awareness, willfully ignorant of how Gen is straight-up not having a good time. "I promise I won't bother you!" she shouts, bothering him.

Given the amount of Shizuka's headspace this episode devotes to articulating her obvious crush on Gen, which she's also too dense to notice, I think that Solo Camping is working with the idea that this is romantic tension being stretched between the flaring tempers of its leads. But it's belligerence in a very "Are the straights okay?" way, as Shizuku straight-up muses if one reason she's interested in Gen is because "It's been a while since I've had a man tell me off when I deserved it." Girl, you're into what you're into but don';t farm your kinks off Gen here when it clearly annoys him. The guy visibly has more chemistry with his pack of camping gear than he does with Shizuka, and at this point, I'm rooting for him to escape from this situation by eloping with the camping gear.

I get some of what Solo Camping is trying to point out here. The parts where Gen's instructions to Shizuka, as he watches her learn about things for the first time, remind him of what he loves so much about this activity, I can understand how that works in terms of a hobby anime. And it does deliver some details on the camping experience I hadn't considered, even after three seasons of Laid-Back Camp, like the particular pros of packing and camping on foot. But those flashes of interest are not worth it when the great outdoors the show is trying to sell viewers on looks like great green butt. They can't even properly commit to the food porn, or depict the preparation of said food, or articulate the characters enjoying it. Pack it up.

If you were in some sort of hypothetical audience that wanted to like Laid-Back Camp but didn't think it was straight or fanservicey enough, well, here's the show for you. Solo Camping for Two finds its own experienced solo camper Gen stumble upon a helpless newbie in Shizuku, as he (reluctantly) helps her acclimate to the activity. However, despite ostensibly being led by characters who are grown-ups (an always appreciated aspect as an aging anime fan, myself) Solo Camping for Two has a lot of the issues that Laid-Back Camp felt like it was going out of its way to avoid, specifically the motivating mechanic of one character dragging another kicking and screaming into their desired activity.

Shizuku honestly isn't bad for the first part of this premiere. Sure, she's introduced panties-first before Gen stumbles on top of her and she yells "Kyaaaaa!~"—you know how it goes. But I could still sympathize with both sides of the roughing-it relationship as she found herself in an unfortunate, unprepared situation, and Gen tried to balance his sense of responsibility with his love of the undisturbed outdoors. There's even a kind of exchange as Shizuku brings something to the table by cooking some of the elaborate camping meals Gen couldn't manage on his own. Beer can chicken is just a bit more robust than Laid-Back Camp's Cup Noodles, after all. But even that falls into side-eye territory as far as the writing is concerned, as Shizuku in this context comes off as a helpless woman who can't take care of herself, but will take care of the viewpoint guy who's always fantasizing about some fresh-cooked meals.

The flipside, then, is that everything else Shizuku contributes to this arrangement is some generally obnoxious imposition. She bogarts Gen's tent as his own politeness compels him to spend the night outside in the cold. And more egregiously, she will not let up on her request to have him tutor her in camping on his own time despite obvious annoyance and firm refusals on his part. Yes, I can see a lot of Gen's attitude being coded as tsundere, and as a gruff-exteriored older ("older" come on, he's only 34!) guy it helps to dial up his appeal. But it still feels more like he's being compelled to go along with this arrangement out of adherence to the alleged fantasy of a drop-in camping girlfriend who will cook for him rather than anything resembling chemistry with Shizuku at this point. Right now, he just kind of finds her annoying, and I'm inclined to agree.

Really, Gen himself and his chill camping activities hold the most appeal for this series. It falls into the same neighborhood as seeing all of Shimarin's techniques in action in Laid-Back Camp, and Gen himself is an otherwise chill, relatable enough protagonist. The backgrounds aren't extravagantly lush or anything, but they look the rustic part, and if Solo Camping for Two plans on travelogue-ing up to different locales, it might bring it up more. But really, it just needs to resolve the relationship between the two leads into something more even and appealing; otherwise, it's going to be more obnoxious than laid-back. And that's not a fun feeling when you're trying to relax on a camping trip.