Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill Season 2

Episode 5

We've finally reached what seems to be the end of this dungeon arc. As per usual for Campfire Cooking, this has been an excursion erring on the cozier side of things rather than the adventurous. There are no surprises here, and the gang fights and eats their way to glory. If you're feeling cynical, you'll label this as formulaic and repetitive. To an extent, it is. Me? I'm a slice of life junkie, so of course I'm on board with this. It's a formula that ain't broke, so why fix it?

The last episode ended with the Campfire Cooking gang smack-dab in the middle of a forested part of the dungeon, and right out of the gate comes. A. Big. S N A K E Y B O I. Muhkoda naturally chickens out of fighting such a gargantuan beast, leaving Fel, Sui, and Dora-chan to do all of the heavy lifting. More parts of the dungeon are explored, and I still find myself overtly fond of the way it's designed. The coal mine bit of the dungeon, with its darkened reds and wooden shafts, reminds me a bit of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap's Cave of Flames. The desert area serving as the dungeon's final area has a vastness akin to a John Ford Western, which is pretentious to say I know. Still, it's hard not to jump to that conclusion when you've got Muhkoda riding on Fel through the sands and canyons of the dungeon no differently than how John Wayne rode through the sands and canyons of the American southwest.

It wouldn't be an episode of Campfire Cooking without...well...cooking. And to my surprise, this episode boasts FOUR food segments, which might be a record number. The food looks as good as usual, especially those pork chop sandwiches--no, really, someone needs to make ten of these. I'll admit that as much as I liked this episode, this is where we start running into some flaws. The food segments here pad the episode out. I wish there were more spice given to the dungeon crawling, because it feels a bit skimmed over here.

The monsters the gang fights here are so easily defeated that most of them fall to their knees in just a matter of seconds. A brief montage fast-forwards through still frames of fights with giant crabs and a ginormous earthworm that looks like it came straight out of Dune. That snakeyboi fight I mentioned at the beginning is defeated right before the OP plays its opening notes. Not that I'm expecting something dramatic and action-packed here, but there could have been a bit more going on with these fights, especially since it took four episodes to get this deep into the dungeon. But oh well. The climax of the episode makes up for this by having the gang square up against the dungeon's final boss: a bullish behemoth. Spoilers: the gang wins. At least this time, there's a decent amount of attention given to this fight, with some moments of sakuga that make this behemoth fight metal, at least by Campfire Cooking's standards.

Flaws aside, Campfire Cooking still maintains its status as one of the most enjoyably comfy shows airing this season. Now that the gang has exited the dungeon, I'm looking forward to what the rest of this Hungry Doggo Isekai Show has in store for us.

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Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.