Yuru Camp Ep 12 – Grand Finale! (Winter Games 2018)

• Genre : Slice of Life
• Studio: C-Station

And here it is boys and girls, the very last episode of Yuru Camp unless it gets another season… But since it will no longer be part of the Winter Games,you will have to enjoy it without me!

It’s been a wild season! Those girls went camping, they talked about camping, the took a lot of baths together and most of all they ate! They ate so much….

The episode starts off and I realized something was a little off. For one, Rin was looking mighty fine. I was about to go turn myself in to the police when I realized with relief that it was a flash forward and the girls were all adults now. I was a little disappointed that aside from Rin they all looked pretty much the same but I was relieved that the years of constant non stop binging didn’t seem to have has too much effect on their physiques.

I remember being really impressed by this turn of events. A flash forward showing us how the now grown girls catching up on their lives and reminiscing on their friendships was in my mind a very smart move, sweet, interesting and I for one did not see it coming. I wondered if that was a different dog though. I was getting ready for an actual story driven episode when, it turned out to be a goof. It was just Nadeshiko being silly it seems. Back to the exciting camping action we went.

After the little dream sequence, the first half of the episode was dedicated to yet more communal baths, I don’t know how these places stay in business since the girls are always all alone there, and a montage of still shots showing us the girls watching anime on a tablet. No for real. We didn’t get to see much of the anime they were watching, unfortunately. It would have been cool if we got a sort of Yuru Campception.

At the halfway point, we finally got to the scenes I’ve been waiting for, for weeks now. Namely a few quiet moments between Rin and Nadeshiko as they comfortably chatted in their sleeping bags. These little moments, quietly establishing their growing friendships are by far my favourites and I enjoyed the scene a lot even though they talked about food half the time.

The calm and meditative mood carried over to the next scenes as Rin and Nadeshiko get up at the crack of dawn to cook breakfast and are eventually joined by the other girls. Everyone is still sleepy and a soothing slightly drowsy atmosphere prevails as a beautiful sunrise ushers in a new day. Unfortunately they went a bit overboard with the soundtrack here as it goes right past majestic into cheesy but the use of light and shadow as well as the burnout colour palette are both stunning making for another great scenes.

After that we are treated to a second, longer still montage of the girls packing up and leaving. No really. And the series closes out on some lackluster club stuff. I usually don’t watch the end credits so I can’t say for sure but I think they may have been different this time.

There was a lovely closing tag of Nadeshiko solo camping and Rin coincidentally bumping into her that somewhat echoed and inverse the first episode. It was very sweet and a nice way to end the series but it did make me realize that of the little we do know about Nadeshiko’s personality, she would really not be the type to go solo camping unless everyone else was busy. From what I could tell, the communal aspect of the experience was one of her favorite parts. But I understand the scene needed to be set up that way to get the little ending they wanted and like I said, it was quite sweet.

Overall the episode was probably one of the better ones. It did go back to the aspects I enjoy for which I’m grateful and was fairly in line with the series as a whole.

Looking back I must say I quite enjoyed the art here even though the designs were pretty samey making girls with similar hair difficult to tell apart. The colours were wonderful. Animation was ok, with some loss of details with distance and not too much movement to speak of.

I really wish they had concentrated much more on the contemplative aspect of camping as I found all the school slice of life elements pretty average and nowhere near as impressive as the calm and quieter moments. I’ve been assured that Yuru Camp is a masterpiece and by far the best the genre has to offer. This is slightly disappointing as I found the character development a little flat for my liking and this isn’t really the type of humour that makes me laugh out loud. But I know a lot of people loved it and I can see it’s merits.

My main takeaway though is that I’m ok with not seeing teenage girls take baths and eat unreasonable amounts of food for a little while. I’ll wait until the summer season before picking up another one of these.

I’m glad this was a nice episode and I hope TPAB, Leap and AstralGemini, enjoyed it as well.

For the very last time, please enjoy some screencaps!