Laid-Back Camp Season 3

If I were to summarize the Season 3 of our beloved Cute Girls Doing Camping Things Anime, it would be "flanderized". I had a weird feeling watching the first half, but in the second half it became clear, that instead of continuing with the winning formula of "slice-of-life with a focus on the camping hobby", the direction changed towards just "camping". The ending trip is the quintessence of that: the build up to it is made utterly irrelevant by the fact that the characters just immediately jump from one activity to another, just appearing at the final camping trip, which is usually something special, the next day after finishing their long trips the previous day. There isn't any focus on the school, or work, or just quiet home life - just camping, camping, camping (or other similar activities).

Same can be said for the narration. If, for example, cooking portions before Season 3 were a short and nice distractions, scattered throughout the season, then now they've became a frequent, overly long part of the episode structure. It is as if the producers just wanted to do "more of the things that people liked". As you can imagine, too much of a good thing can become quite tedious. Same can be said for exposition - characters are constantly talking or thinking. I'm not 100% sure if that is something that was present in such amount in previous seasons, but it definitely feels like this one is lacking a certain amount of quiet, and characters just doing something, without telling us what they want to do.

Season 3 also fails in its self-imposed goals of introducing the new characters, who supposedly will be more prominent in Season 4. Despite showing them from the very beginning in the opening, those two get less time and development than some of the side characters, who only appear for a small part of their respective episode. This reminds me a lot of the New Game!! (season 2), which also tried bringing in new characters despite having a large enough cast, and only gave them a few episodes at the end with essentially an irrelevant story that wasn't built up properly, and was resolved as abruptly as it was brought up.

One of the last, and, perhaps, smallest issues I have with Season 3 is how background characters are integrated. Whenever the background character has more than a couple of lines of dialogue, their voice feels out of place, as if some sort of guest star cameo. This isn't supported by anything I could find, so I assume it's just something that feels a bit out of place when usually 99% of voices belong to the main characters and their relevant side characters. However, I enjoy the idea of protagonists interacting with the world outside their own little bubble.

Now, I want to make it clear that I have still enjoyed this season. Better visual quality of the backgrounds and better CG graphics certainly made it a very pleasant watching experience, and while the new art style took some time to get used to, it never got in the way. Music is still on point, the humor stays nice and mellow and does the same jokes that I've came to love from the first two seasons (which isn't a bad thing, except when they get used too often - see the first paragraph). But I'm now anticipating the next season with much less enthusiasm, then I was anticipating season 2 and 3.