The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide – Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill Season 2

What is this?

Transported to another world, Japanese man Mukohda uses his magical “online shopping” skill, plus a seemingly bottomless magical inventory, to make all sorts of amazing food as he travels. He’s joined on his travels by a group of intelligent animal familiars who love his cooking.

Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill Season 2 is based on a light novel series by Ren Eguchi and Masa. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

How was the first episode?

Kevin Cormack
Rating:

I’m not always the biggest fan of the isekai genre. In general, most entries bore me to tears, so it takes something special to make me sit up and take notice. In Campfire Cooking’s case, it’s MAPPA‘s inhuman ability to make every morsel of featured food look so damned appetising. In this episode, protagonist Mukohda whips up some grilled Venom Tarantula legs that are basically just like big lumps of crab meat. Now, I don’t even like crustaceans or shellfish, but somehow MAPPA made even these fantasy abominations look delicious. Clearly, it’s some kind of black magic.

Mukohda has one of those overpowered “cheat skills” we often see in modern isekai. In a way, his “online shopping skill” isn’t that different from Reborn as a Vending Machine’s Boxxo’s abilities, except he doesn’t need to transmogrify into various cuboidal appliances to summon suspiciously modern Japanese condiments. It’s probably best not to question the logic of such plot contrivances, but I do wonder what a viewer entirely alien to the increasingly granular and obscure isekai genre might make of all this.

Campfire Cooking’s other main strength is its slightly loopy magical familiar characters. Since arriving in this fantasy world, Mukohda’s been gradually adding to his group of hangers-on/hungry pets. Fenrir/Fels is an enormous dire wolf with an appetite to match. Squishy slime blob Sui is adorable and worryingly omnivorous. Now, he has a third familiar in the form of tiny pixie dragon “Dora-chan”, who has been following our travellers around for a while, desperate for a taste of Mukohda’s fragrant cooking. Dora-chan can’t stand his new name, and I can’t blame him. Mukohda’s cooking skills vastly outclass his imagination.

This is a wonderfully cosy, low-stakes show, a fantasy travelogue and cooking showcase all in one comfy, colorful package. There’s minimal drama, but plenty of gentle chuckles and intricate food porn. I’m surprised, yet very glad to welcome a second season, and so far it’s off to a decent start. While it may not be to everyone’s tastes, I’ll lap up each subsequent episode with relish.

Jeremy Tauber
Rating:

I had a doggone good time binging all of Campfire Cooking’s first season in just a mere two days, so you can imagine my excitement when it came to watching this new season’s first episode. All of the cozy culinary vibes from the previous season are intact here, and even with the introduction of a new character, there’s nothing that this episode does that moves the needle in a whole new direction. And it’s all the better for it.

First, the characters. Mukohda, as your typical isekai protagonist, doesn’t have a lot of personality outside of being a good cook. Normally, I’d say this is bad character writing, and it doesn’t help that he dons the same black hair and green clothing I’ve seen from so many other isekai protagonists. None of this matters thanks to the delectable meals he cooks (seriously, I want to DEVOUR those spring rolls) and the bond he shares with the great wolf Fenrir, who is less of a majestic, legendary beast and more like a big ol’ woofer who begs for treats. I’m sure I’m not the first to point this out, but it’s a still gag I never get tired of, and it’s satisfying to see another iteration of it pulled right out of the gate.

The episode’s opening moments quickly reintroduce Mukohda and Fel, and they argue about food in a way that feels like an old married couple would. Fel not only begs for his food as usual, but now he complains about how Mukohda doesn’t treat him like the legendary beast he is. It’s so funny to see Fel have an ego like that–he might have the strength of a divine wolf, but at heart, he’s still a puppy ever so reliant on his master to throw him a bone. Of course, Fel has to have a foodgasm every time he noms down on a big bowl of food, and honestly? Relatable.

Sui, the adorable slime, is there too, and while they’re not given much to do this time around, they’re not lingering in the background to rack up moe points either. A petite, wise-acre of a dragon Mukohda christens Dora-chan makes his entrance here, and while he wasn’t given the grandest entrance ever, I’m still looking forward to see how he jives with this isekai posse. The plot of this episode was pretty standard. The gang slices up some tarantulas in the woods,
they go cooking, and then they go off into a town market. That is fine by me. I appreciate how the corpse of the earth dragon from last season is pulled out of Mukohda’s item inventory for continuity’s sake, as I did the idea of turning all of the slain tarantulas into raw meat for cooking.

Granted, eating arachnids is very much not my forte, but in this post-Haachama world, I guess anything is possible (IYKYK). The post-credits sketch involving the world’s goddesses is the weakest part of the episode, since it is just this show’s take on Kaonosuba’s Aqua. I don’t have a lot of room to complain, though, since it doesn’t interrupt the comedic flow of the episode. Overall, I’m very excited for this series’ cour to officially end so I can once again feast on Campfire Cooking’s second season like a delectable three-course meal I’ve been starving for.

Subscribe to Crunchyroll here!

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of Anime News Network, its employees, owners, or sponsors.