Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill

Episode 8

I don't know if I've ever felt more visceral sympathy for our boy Mukohda than when, after slaving over a portable hot stove for, I dunno, thirty minutes or whatever, he is forced to watch his gluttonous giant dog and his equally greedy new traveling companions devour a literal mountain of karaage before he can even have a bite himself. I recently attempted my first-ever home fry of karaage, and let me tell you, if my janky-ass excuse for the meal is even 30% as good as what Mukohda whipped up, then those mercenaries have committed a capital offense. Fel's wrath will be swift and merciless.

I guess they also owe Mukohda for eating a battalion's worth of what are apparently some of the rarest and most delectable meats the realm of Leonhart offers. It's a predictable joke, essentially just a culinary twist on “Protag-kun is so powerful that it's genuinely absurd compared to the normal warrior,” but it still made me chuckle. That's good, too, since much of this episode continues to trade in the MMO-isekai minutiae that don't appeal to me very much. It makes sense that Mukohda has to complete an X-number of quests regularly to keep his Adventurer's Guild license or that a licensed Guild butcher would be a definite perk worth maintaining your membership for. Still, I can't pretend I care enough for it to warrant watching a whole episode of Mukohda and Co. making the anime light-novel adaptation of running some necessary but tedious errands.

Okay, so maybe “casual goblin genocide” isn't exactly a tedious errand, but you wouldn't know it by the terrifyingly casual way that Sui approaches growing giant and multiplying to slaughter and then dissolve the corpses of, like, hundreds of goblins. Sui's psychopathic glee at the prospect of a wanton massacre is another running joke that I appreciate, and it certainly made the second half of this episode more entertaining. Mukohda isn't exactly brimming with personality, but one of the most consistently amusing elements of Campfire Cooking is how our hero must play the beleaguered straight man to the insanely destructive monster friends that he's stuck with.

Next week, it seems like we're going to meet more of the goddesses aside from just Ninrir? That could be fun, though Ninrir herself has made such a shallow impact on the show that I can't imagine that more goddesses will change the status quo. That's maybe for the best. Perhaps Fel and Sui are enough for Mukohda to handle. Then again, Mukohda began this episode by praying not to be involved in any “trouble,” which guarantees that his life is about to become even more ridiculous come next week.

Rating:

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.