Review of BOFURI: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense.

“Scrub Lord: How I Learned to Stop Trying to Git Gud and Embrace the Cheese”. That is what they should have named this anime. Bofuri is an anime that is set up just like any other Isekai. A boring protagonist becomes obsessed with some shitty RPG that works through some incredibly advanced virtual reality. We know that soon she will get stuck in the RPG world and be told that she’ll die in the real world if she dies in the game. We’ve seen this 10 million times before. But WAIT! She doesn’t actually get stuck in the game! In fact, there are absolutely nostakes at all! This anime was recommended by a friend as one of the most pointless anime ever made. After watching it, I have to agree.

This anime is literally just watching a Let’s Play in which a no talent, filthy scrub uses OP spells to cheese her way through a poorly balanced game with an unearned reputation for difficulty! Would you like to spend 6 hours watching a Twitch stream of a ditzy girl abusing Dark Souls 3’s questionable balance system? That is what this show is! The ditzy girl chooses pyromancer, pours everything into faith and intelligence, and just roflstomps every boss in the game with OP spells like Crystal Soul Spear, Grand Chaos Fire Orb, and Black Fire Orb. Doesn't that sound like something that warrants a 12 episode anime adaptation with a budget?

Despite Bofuri's simple and admittedly kind of stupid premise, anime can have a simple premise and still work. One Punch is about a normal guy who becomes the world's strongest superhero, but he's so OP that every fight is a bore to him and all his fellow superheroes are rendered completely worthless. When I first watched Bofuri, I thought it was going to be an isekai version of One Punch Man with the whole joke being how OP Kaede is. However, this really isn't a comedy series. Bofuri is a "cute girls doing cute things" anime that on rare occasion has a comedic moment. So now that we realize it's not a comedy, we have to ask ourselves why this was made and who was it made for? My immediate guess is that Bofuri was made for thirsty male gamers who want to imagine having a hardcore gamer girlfriend. However, it doesn't actually feature any fanservice whatsoever. The main girls are drawn very flat and aren't ever sexualized. There is no romance in the series. It doesn't cater to any weird fetishes or anything like that. So maybe this is actually meant to be a relaxing anime for gamer girls? Nope! Bofuri is classified as a seinen, which means it is in fact intended for older men. As someone in the seinen demographic, I honestly can't imagine why people think this anime is good.

I think my favorite running gag in the series is Maple killing difficult bosses by poisoning them from a distance and getting praised for it by hardcore gamers. If you want to troll gamer forums, go tell a bunch of Souls fans that you were clever enough to poison False King Allant, the last boss of Demon Souls to death and fish for compliments. They will get MAD because the way Kaede plays is always the exact opposite of how a respectable gamer is supposed to tackle these types of games.

So if Bofuri isn't a comedy or a fanservice show or an action show, it must have great character development right? Kaede must start out with some character flaw she has to overcome or she has to learn how to make friends and get along with others right? Well...no. Bofuri is a show about level grinding montages, moe garbage where nothing happens, and then tournaments that Maple/Kaede wins by being OP. There are no real character journeys in Bofuri. There is no overarching plot. When I said this series was just a bad "Let's Play" I wasn't exaggerating. Bofuri is a monumental waste of time. Sword Art Online gets a lot of shit, and we can all see it's a flawed adaptation of an imperfect light novel. However, it wanted to create a protagonist that would inspire lonely young men. It wanted to create a wholesome romance and when the author was called out for writing shitty female characters, he actually took feedback and tried hard to get better! SAO was a pioneering LN that hundreds of others ripped off and even today is still beloved in Japan. Bofuri is none of those things. It wasn't a daring series. It never tried in any category. It's like the anime equivalent of a shovel ware game that gets thrown on to Steam in order to trick a few suckers into buying it. Bofuri makes SAO look like The Godfather. The only reason I didn't give it a lower rating is due to the animation from Silver Fox, which is honestly pretty decent. This series looks far better than it deserves.