Bear Babysitter

Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear Punch! (くまクマ熊ベアーぱーんち！) is the second season of Kuma Bear. And, it’s pretty much the same as the first season. There are a few new characters. But, nothing about this season is a huge departure from Season 1.

At its heart, Kuma Bear is a slice of life series. It pretends to be an adventure series. However, it’s really not. I mean, what adventure is Yuna going on? It’s not like she’s on a quest to defeat a demon lord or anything. The series follows her daily life.

There are three main arcs in this season of the series. In the first, Yuna serves as an escort for a group of students. In the second, she goes on a quest to obtain mithril. And in the third, she helps make a noble’s birthday party a success.

The first arc may have been my favorite of the three. Shia, Cattleya, Malix, and Timol are students at the knight academy or something. And, for school, they have to go on a short quest to a neighboring town. So, naturally, Ellalaura asks Yuna to be their adventurer escort for the trip.

Because this is a school trip, it’s supposed to be fairly simple. Yuna’s job is only to make sure nothing goes wrong. If monsters show up, it’s the students who need to fight. And, for the majority of the quest, everything goes as planned.

That’s actually what I liked about this arc. We know Yuna can defeat pretty much anything. But, I enjoyed seeing how the students worked together to bring down weak monsters. To me, that’s more fun than seeing Yuna use her Kuma Punch to one-shot a boss.

Also, we got to see Malix’s character develop over the course of the arc.

Bear Seeking Mithril

Now that I’m thinking about it, the second arc is pretty good, too. It’s only now that Yuna realizes what it means to be in a fantasy world. Being in a fantasy world means the existence of materials like Mithril exist. She only realized this once she was introduced to Adamantium (or something similar).

So, why does Yuna care about Mithril? Well, at her core, Yuna is a gamer. And as every gamer knows, Mithril tends to be the rarest of the rare when it comes to ores. Naturally, that means Yuna needs to get her hands on some.

The problem is that whole “rarest of the rare” thing. It’s not easy to gather enough Mithril to actually make anything out of it. That is, unless you were able to defeat a Mithril Golem. But, Mithril Golems are so hard that defeating one seems like an impossible task.

Now, it’s not the Mithril that I care about in this arc. It’s the fact that Yuna actually goes on a real quest with at least a bit of challenge. Though, the challenge doesn’t really come from the golems she needs to defeat.

The challenge Yuna faces is that she’s handicapped by the party she’s working with. There are some other adventurers who are also attempting to defeat the Mithril golem. Though, they don’t realize that’s what they’re doing, at first. They think they’re just getting rid of all the golems in a cave and don’t know why they keep respawning.

It’s only once Yuna goes back into the cave on her own that she’s able to fight through all the golems. And as a reward for her efforts, she gets a chunk of Mithril. She then has the Mithril turned into knives for herself and Fina.

Solo Adventurer Yuna

Instead of going over the third arc of the season, let’s stay on the topic of adventurer parties. The adventurer party Yuna teams up with temporarily has four members.

There’s Jaden, Mel, Senia, and Touya. Jaden is a swordsman, Mel is a mage, Senia is an assassin or thief, and I forget what Touya is. Based on their party’s balanced composition, I want to say Touya is an archer. But, he could be another swordsman.

Anyway, they’re your typical fantasy series party. And that’s exactly what I like about them. I think having a varied party makes quests more fun.

This is something Yuna has been missing so far. Whenever she takes quests or runs into trouble, she’s on her own. She’s not working with anyone else. And, she’s so strong that she doesn’t need anyone else. There’s nothing she’s going to run into that’s going to be a problem.

Kuma Bear has plenty of supporting characters. And there are quite a few major supporting characters, like Fina and Ellalaura. So, sure, we get a lot of content where Yuna interacts with them. But, that’s not the same kind of interaction as if she had party members.

Think of a series like KonoSuba. I get that’s far more of a comedy than Kuma Bear is. But, what makes KonoSuba a great series? It’s the dynamic between the main cast. That’s precisely what’s missing here.

As things currently stand, Yuna doesn’t have any close peers. Everyone she interacts with tends to be either older than her or younger than her. And they tend to either be associated with nobility, or a random restauranteur. Yuna doesn’t have other adventurers her age with whom she shares common experiences.

Conclusion

Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear Punch! gets a 6/10. That’s one point higher than I gave the first season of the series. And, I do feel like this season was an improvement, overall. However, it’s missing the character dynamics that a lot of other isekai anime out there have.

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Series Overview

Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear (くま クマ 熊 ベアー) is a comedy, adventure, fantasy series about a girl who finds herself stuck in another world — how unique! But, as always, there has to be a twist to set this generic isekai apart from the rest. This time, the protagonist wears a bear kigurumi and all of her abilities are bear-based.

Now, before I get into this whole bear-based thing, I need to say something about the title. Kuma is just the Japanese word for bear. So you’d expect the English title to simply be the reverse: Bear Bear Bear Kuma. However, that’s actually the title of an anime short that pairs with this series.

Okay, so there’s no separate English title then, right? Wrong. The English title is actually The Bears Bear a Bare Kuma. And now you know why I’ve decided to go with the Japanese title for this review. The English title is so bad that I can’t stand writing it more than this one time.

Back to the bear-based abilities. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this means Yuna can “do everything a bear can do.” That’s not at all what it means. It means that Yuna has every overpowered ability that all generic isekai protagonists do, but hers are all bear-shaped.

For example, if she were to use earth magic to create a wall, it would either be bear-shaped or have a bear pattern imprinted into it. The rules aren’t well defined, so the bear nature can manifest in any number of ways. Well, until the end of the series when it just doesn’t anymore for some reason.

What all of this is really means is that yes, it’s just as generic as the rest. It only has the appearance of being different.

Main Characters

Yuna is the protagonist of the series. As is typical for isekai like this, she started off as a gamer and then one day realized that she was in the game for real. However, this doesn’t seem to bother Yuna all that much because she didn’t really have much going on in her old life other than gaming 24/7.

The one problem Yuna does have is that she’s effectively stuck in her bear kigurumi because it gives her insane stat boosts. She’s embarrassed to wear it in public. But at the same time, no other gear could possibly match its stat boosts — so she bears with it (I’m sorry).

Fina is the other truly main character. She’s a young girl — younger than Yuna, who’s 15 — and she works as Yuna’s personal monster butcher. Whenever Yuna defeats a monster, which is very frequently, she hands it over to Fina to cut into usable materials. That’s really the only thing Fina does. So she’s not all that important.

While not a main character, Noire Foschurose is a character who shows up enough times to be mentioned. She’s the daughter of a local lord and quickly becomes Yuna’s number one fan. She even starts a fan club dedicated to Yuna, although it only has three members. Those are herself, Fina, and her friend Misaana.

The final character I want to mention is Atla. Atla only shows up at the end of the series (and in the OP) and she doesn’t play a large role. But she’s worth mentioning simply because she has the best character design of the series. Atla looks like a character out of DanMachi, but at the same time looks better than any DanMachi character.

A New Sub-Subgenre?

Isekai series with female protagonists aren’t new. They’ve existed for decades. However, they haven’t been the most popular over the past few years. I don’t really know the reason for this, but maybe it has something to do with the whole power fantasy thing being targeted more towards a male demographic who want to project.

But recently, there have been a few series that combine isekai with the moe-blob genre. A popular one of these anime from the beginning of 2020 is BOFURI. And even before that, I suppose you could count Endro~! That one’s not an isekai, but it’s a fantasy adventure, so it’s close enough.

I don’t know much about the series So I’m a Spider, So What? that’s going to be airing this season. But I do know that the protagonist is female, so maybe it’ll fit into this category as well.

Overall, I have to say that I’m not too big of a fan of this type of series. I think I’d rather either take a pure fantasy adventure or a pure moe-blob series. Combining the two just feels like it waters them both down. Rather than watching a good anime in either of those genres, you’re watching a mediocre anime that combines them.

As I’ve already said, Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear doesn’t do anything unique. It’s a standard isekai, power fantasy and all, that just so happens to feature cute girls. The cute girls help it feel a bit more unique. But at the end of the day it’s just a facade.

Conclusion

Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear is a 5/10 from me. It didn’t do anything poorly exactly. But it didn’t do anything well either. It’s a middle-of-the-road anime that I’m probably going to forget about until the second season releases at some point. And yes, a second season has already been confirmed.

Normally I would have something good to say about either the OP or ED, but this time around I don’t. Just like the rest of the series, they’re both pretty average and don’t stand out. The only good part of the OP is the shot of Atla pictured above.

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My review of Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear Punch! is available now.