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May 29, 2020
Maybe minor spoilers, I dunno:
As inferred from the title, this is Rin's journey to a sauna, and without Nadeshiko popping up out of nowhere. Plus, it's not Yuru Camp without some camping. Despite sharing the title with the Heya Camp comedic shorts, this is much closer to a half length episode of Yuru Camp. OVAs/Specials often worry me because they try to jam too much content into a single episode - fortunately, Yuru Camp's already lax pace actually works really well with a short episode for a change.
You get pretty much everything you'd expect from a typical Yuru Camp episode. The same peaceful music, with
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a few new tracks thrown in at the end. Same Yuru Camp humor. Same beautiful art style, and moving vehicles look slightly less mildly awkward! Only complaint was Rin's helmet mask alternating between clear and looking like a solid block of aluminum between scenes made her look more like masked Misaka Worst than I was expecting. There's only so much character development you can do in 10.5 minutes and usually specials can't get this right, and following Rin around for a day far exceeded what I was expecting.
All in all, it's a typical Yuru Camp episode while we wait for season 2. If you liked season 1, then you'll like this. If you missed this, then you didn't miss anything important other than missed enjoyment. To be fair, I didn't know about this in advance and found it by coincidence. But if you're reading this now, then you know about this episode - go watch it already!
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Dec 25, 2019
The year is 2019, and all single-season anime series have decided to announce a squeal. Idea Factory has decided to hop on the bandwagon, and I assume the meeting must have gone something like this:
"So we should bring back one of our series for a second season, but Mars of Destruction and Skelter Heaven were complete failures. Oh, we have the Neptunia series that aired back in 2013, and it has become much more successful after we released the games on Steam in 2015! But we're not comfortable sponsoring a whole season 2 yet, so let's just make a second OVA for it to test
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the waters first."
Since Hyperdimension Neptunia was one of the first anime that I've ever watched, I couldn't pass this up. So after 6 years, how does the sequel hold up against the original? The art style seems improved and more detailed now (I don't think some parts of the original's art are holding up well with time). They've matched the original art style so it still looks like the same series, but they've included blush and more detailed faces.
That's about where the positives end. The animation was only good at best, with a few spots that were noticeably underwhelming (like Nepgear running with stiff arms). The story and development were almost nonexistent, not that I expected much from a single episode, but what was there just felt off. It doesn't help that it follows a different story line than the games. The writing didn't flow well, and several lines didn't feel natural. It even felt lacking in the trademark Neptunia humor.
As someone who has always enjoyed the series despite its flaws, this OVA simply felt like a disappointment to me. I'm honestly pretty confused why they made this random OVA so suddenly to begin with. If this was just an experiment and they are pushing for a season 2 with a story from the Victory games, I would hope the writing would be better but it could have some potential. Unfortunately, this OVA doesn't contribute much interesting to the series, and you could probably pass over it without missing out on much.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Mar 21, 2019
I went to watch this in theaters with 2 friends - 2 of us had seen the anime and the third had not. The question we asked ourselves when leaving was "who was this made for?"
This movie is a recap of season 1 from the beginning to the end of episode 8 or beginning of episode 9. Condensing about 3 hours of anime down into 2 hours means that a lot needs to be cut out. The original 8 episodes don't have an hour worth of fluff to cut, so a ton of minor scenes that gave important background end up getting cut. This ends
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up messing with the pacing of the story, and everything felt way to rushed. My friend who watched the anime and I kept reminding each other of our favorite scenes that were skipped, and there were a lot. Our friend who hadn't seen it kept making comments like "I didn't understand _____ until an offhand comment later on". He had a lot of trouble following the story, and needed to make a lot of assumptions just to keep up. We filled him in the best we could after, but he said he needs to read the manga to answer all of his confusion.
Even though I had watched the anime fairly recently, there were a number of moments that caught my eye as being jarring due to the bad pacing. Near the end of the orphanage arc, Riko runs off crying, then shows up at the beginning of the next scene maybe 20 seconds later perfectly okay as if nothing ever happened, because several scenes in between were cut. Habo just bursts out of nowhere because any appearance of him in the chase scenes were cut (as was all but 1 other scene with him in it), making that whole part just about Riko and Reg relaxing, then rushing, then relaxing again, and ended by an unintentional borderline jumpscare. I hope you didn't care about Kiwi, because almost every appearance of his was cut, and any background for when he does speak was cut. I feel the movie needed to be at least 20-30 min longer, as too much was cut.
So going back to my original question, who was this made for? It definitely wasn't made for anyone who hasn't seen the anime before, so I highly discourage anyone from recommending this to get someone new up to speed if/when season 2 rolls around. My friend likened it to watching an anime or movie on Youtube that was cut up and jumbled to avoid copyright infringement. As for my friend and I who had seen the anime, we either would've preferred to have just rewatched the anime or wish they had made an OVA instead (which we had never thought of before, but suddenly really hope they make one). I guess it does do what it's supposed to do - it was just a recap. My friend has much harsher words for this than I do and felt it was somewhat a waste of time. I personally did find some enjoyment in it, just not nearly as much as watching the original. Ultimately, I feel this movie is only for the die-hard fan of season 1 who doesn't have enough time to just rewatch it, which is a pretty limited audience.
I have slightly better hopes for the second movie when it reaches the US, as it should be a bit easier to fit only 5 episodes (one of which was double length) into 2 hours, but it will suffer the same problems. If you can afford only an extra ~90 min to just rewatch season 1 instead of watching both movies, you will likely have less regrets.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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