Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill

Episodes 1-3

It was bound to happen sometime. I knew after the delightful first episode of Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill that I was in trouble, but the next two episodes cinched it. After who-knows-how-many iterations and failed attempts, the goddamned "Isekai Anime with a JRPG Stats Menu" sub-genre has finally done it. It has produced an anime that has been scientifically engineered for me to love it unconditionally, and I cannot tell you how filled with despair/joy/confusion/shame/ravenous hunger I am now that I have fallen for its trap. Long live Mukohda. May his reign be glorious and slathered in various culinary sauces.

Or, perhaps I should say “Long live Fel, the Goodest of Boys,” since the real secret sauce in Campfire Cooking's recipe is clearly our protagonist's friendship with one of the fiercest, hungriest, and floofiest god-beings that this strange new world has to offer. My biggest worry about the long-term prospect of this show was initially its lack of especially interesting supporting characters; the adventuring party that Mukohda initially befriends in the first episode are a friendly and likable bunch, but their personalities don't exactly stand out, and the same can be said for virtually every human we've met in the show. Mukohda himself is just interesting enough to avoid earning the dreaded “Potato-kun” moniker, but if every character in Campfire Cooking was going to be little more than a passably interesting so-and-so for Mukohda to serve food to, I don't know if any amount of gorgeously animated pork cutlets and teriyaki bastes could have persuaded me to stick around for the long haul.

Without Fel, Campfire Cooking might have faded into obscurity as an uncommonly decent isekai anime with some nice-looking food porn. With Fel, though? Now we're cooking with gas. Do you have any idea how many times I have personally dreamed of wandering a fantasy world with my giant talking doggo and making kickass Japanese cuisine with my handy trans-dimensional link to an impossibly well-stocked and affordable—but legally distinct from Amazon.com!—online shopping Nirvana?

…Okay, fine, I've never actually had that particular dream before watching this show, but Campfire Cooking makes me wish I could go back and implant that dream into the mind of my younger self, which has to be some sign of the anime's quality, right? Did you see how goddamned delectable that Red Garlic Steak Bowl looked? My God.

It also helps that this show is pretty funny. It's not a bust-a-gut riot like, say, Kaguya-sama or Asobi Asobase, but it'll make you snort air forcefully out of your nose in amusement at least three or four times every week, and that ain't half bad. The joke about Fel's increasingly apocalyptic hunting expeditions has yet to get old. The show has some fun playing around with the usual fantasy RPG conventions, like having Mukohda momentarily question whether it is ethical to consume the flesh of humanoid pig monsters or all of the gags about the preposterous stat increases that our hero can produce with a bunch of cheap sauce bottles and some halfway-decent meat.

While the series rarely looks or sounds particularly impressive, Campfire Cooking in Another World has got charm and humor to spare, and that's more than enough to satisfy my weekly cravings for now. It could yet be that the recipe will get old if the series doesn't give Mukohda more consistent characters to play off of, but don't be surprised if my all-consuming adoration for Fel is enough to fuel my enthusiasm for decades to come.

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

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.