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

Bofuri : The Rising of the Shield Heroine (not the actual name, but it should be) is what you get when you successfully combine two of the most popular genres in anime : Video Game Isekai and Slice of Life CGDCT (Cute Girls Doing Cute Things). Maple and her friend Sally are a couple of teenage girls who one day decide to play together a virtual reality video game. In an amazing twist on the isekai genre, they do not get stuck inside the game or die and get reincarnated in it, but instead just have a fun and wholesome time of playing together withtheir new online friends, before logging out and going to sleep (because they have school tomorrow), and then living their normal lives like the rest of us. It is a surprisingly refreshing take on the Video Game Isekai genre, and fit very well with the wholesome atmosphere of a CGDCT.

One of the strengths of that series lays in depicting a video game that feels credible, and you really feel that they are playing an actual video game with all its design flaws. Those flaws are what allows Maple to get rapidly and incredibly overpowered by min-maxing her character like a noob and then stumbling into a couple of exploits because she is a crazy noob that will just do anything that comes through her head instead of playing the game normally, and has fun doing random stuff. Like ignoring a monster attacking her because it is cute and cannot harm her, or trying to eat a dragon bit by bit because she broke her weapon and has no other way of attacking it. Of course, the poor developers nerf her every time she gets too powerful like this, but that doesn't stop her from finding new exploits and then getting even more powerful. Half the charm of that show is watching Maple crazy antics and trying to guess what she will do next. The rest is her interactions with her equally eccentric friends, and watching Maple and Sally have cool fights against various fantasy monsters.

All in all, I would recommend that show if you are looking for a fun and wholesome anime with likable characters and a lot of action and cool fights.