English Dub Review: Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear “Bear, Goes on Rampage”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Yuna wakes up for another day of adventuring. Feeling refreshed and fully recovered, she immediately gets to work.

Her hunting prowess quickly brings in stacks of wolves, boars, and other beasts. It’s going well, until she realizes she’s overwhelming Fina’s harvesting ability with her constant kills.

She agrees to take a break from hunting for a bit, but is at a loss for what to do with her time instead. Conveniently, she’s confronted by Lanz (Justin Duncan) an acolyte of Deberane. The rest of the hothead’s party learns that without their Tank, they’re unable to complete their goblin hunting mission, but the administrator helpfully suggests they get help from Yuna.

Yuna and Lurina head off on the quest. Normally, it would take a full day to get where they’re going, but the bear suit allows them to make short work of the distance. When they arrive, Yuna scopes out the cave and informs Lurina that there’s around a hundred goblins, rather than the reported fifty.

Of course, additional foes prove no issue for Yuna, who heads in to blithely take out the entire horde. After her whole “set the cave on fire” approach takes care of all but one, Lurina is concerned it might be a goblin king.

Yuna, however, isn’t worried at all.

She takes out the goblin king with little effort. All that’s left is to harvest the mana crystals, which Yuna leaves to Lurina.

Our bear suit clad protagonist instead opts to construct a house outside to take a nap, and even muses about how she can make a better one while Lurina attempts to lecture her for her laziness.

When they return with the mana crystals and corpse of the goblin king, the guild is amazed. Yuna is being called “The Bloody Bear”, a nickname she doesn’t exactly love. However, she’s also gained some new skills, and heads outside to try them out.

Her summon beast is a full size bear, that she can ride and is unable to fall off of. She’s thrilled about the potential to sleep while she travels. Even better, she discovers that she has two: one per puppet.

She returns to town, rents some land, and builds a house, with a dedicated harvest room for Fina. A mysterious young girl watches from behind a nearby tree.

Our take:

This may be the only series that could use the term “rampage” for a quest that includes a nap.

While it kind of derails the timeline of the very first episode (unless the scenes of Yuna back in the real world were flashbacks, or something? I’m probably overthinking it) this episode is starting to really flesh out the world of World Fantasy Online.

We’re introduced to more characters, including the official debut and naming of bear steeds Kumakyu and Kumayuru. Lindsay Seidel (Assassination Classroom fans know her as Nagisa) may not have the most inspiring lines to work with, but she lends these bears their larger than life “KUMA”s with gusto.

It’s also interesting to see the traditional party makeup, with Deborane’s crew. Two notable scenes from her meetup with this group include the “you pee your pants?” “ABSOLUTELY NOT!” “Cool bears.” interchange between Yuna and Lurina after the former uses her speed enhancement to run out to their quest location, and the group thanking Yuna for her help after they return with their spoils.

There’s also further development between Yuna and Fina. Especially sweet is when Yuna introduces Fina to her newly named bear steeds, Kumayuru and Kumakyuu. She even thinks to herself “I feel kinda like a big sister”, which clearly sets the tone for the relationship between these two characters moving forward.

Despite there still being basically no actual struggles for our protagonist, this episode still manages to be interesting. The lack of weird motives is…kinda nice actually.

All of the characters seem straightforward so far, and while the action itself can be interesting, most of what moves the show along is minor annoyances, which actually makes it a bit more relatable.

Overall, I’m still enjoying this show so far. Hopefully things switch up a bit next week, but if not, there’s more goofiness and lighthearted adventure to look forward to.