YuruYuri has clearly served its time. They call it easy going but quite frankly its now become just plain old lazy. After two series that have been met with success they clearly thought they could put together any old thing and people would gobble it up and the sad thing is you just know they will.
When you look at the staff list the problems become apparent straight away. Different animation studio, different director, different scriptwriter... the list goes on. The original staff didn't want anything else to do with this property so the producers had to find any old half rate team to make it. The voice actresses all return but they sound like they've been at about 20 cigarettes everyday. When you're an adult forced to pretend to be a middle school student while dancing on stage singing bad songs it's clearly starts to be a drain on your soul. They just wanted to get the paycheque and got out of the recording studio as fast as possible.
So on top of the staff and actors phoning it in, we also have the financial department being stingy with the money. Why not, they know it'll sell so why not maximise return by spending as little as possible. To just give you an idea how cheap this is, the opening sketch is based on a manga chapter where they imagine the show as a Hollywood production, but do they get Hollywood actors to voice the parts? No, they just get the Japanese cast speak awful English. This may sound like a cute idea on paper but the end result is awful. You can't understand a thing they're saying and it misses the whole point of the original. I could have farted a better performance into the microphone. This is the opening and it basically sets the tone for the whole thing, cheap and bad script. Clearly the scriptwriter had no understanding of what a joke is.
Honest, a lot of the "jokes" in this are just shout out to what's popular with the fanbase. Kyoko opening the door to shout "Sugiura Ayano" (oh tee hee hee because it's the opposite of what usually happens) or Chinatsu not making something bad (oh tee hee hee because it's the opposite of what usually happens). You can just tell the audience of overweight greasy pimple faced otaku sitting in the sweaty cinema all giggling to themselves every time something like this happened and it just makes me sick to my stomach. The worst joke was when they literally described in words the Akari~n effect. They may as well have had he words "THIS IS THE JOKE GUYS" flashing on screen. And when I consider the opening scene failed to even lift a far better told Akari~n joke (not nessessarily good, but better then this tripe) from the manga you really start wondering why they got this guy to write a script for what is meant to be a "comedy" show. Sometimes they jump to scenes to show the other characters like Akari's sister. They don't serves any purpose but to, again, give a shout out to the viewer. However, on top of all that, the worst form of panda pandering in this was the bath scene. No, just no. No I don't want to Akari's bare buttocks on the screen. She's 13 for goodness sakes. The absolute worst scene seen in my life. I don't even want to think what the target audience were doing at that moment.
I suppose the biggest problem this OVA faced was it tried to tell a complete story when the original series is a sketch based show. At least in the original when a joke failed to deliver you'd be whisked to another scene where they'd at least try to come up with another one even if they all did fall flat. This is just one long sketch stretched for an hour and not once did it work. Oh, I guess I didn't mention the story; they go camping. That's it. Most shows would make that an episode but, oh no, here we have to pad it out to about three episodes worth of time. The only redeeming aspect of all this is that they finish it off with a sign that says The End so we can truly hope that it is and this property can finally be laid to rest since they've dragged it for far too long now, ergo it can Akari~n. It's funny because that's another way of saying it should disappear! HA HA HA! Now laugh fans laugh!
