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

BoFuri is studio Silver Link.’s latest addition to the torrent of video game shows that’s flooded the anime medium since the release of Sword Art Online. The premise is exactly what you’d expect after a cursory reading of the title. Kaede Honjou, a complete noob, decides to start playing the newest VRMMO, New World Online (I’m not buying that the notion that the NWO abbreviation is an accident), at her friend’s insistence. Since her friend would not be able to log in for the following days because she had to study for upcoming exams, it fell to Kaede to play on her own for a fewdays and figure out the ropes. Once in-game, she creates her character, Maple, and out of fear of getting hurt, stupidly specs all of her stat points into vitality. However, though her build shouldn’t have been effective, through a series of bullshit contrivances, she somehow acquires one broken tank skill after the other and gets so absurdly tanky that she becomes famous within the game’s community and other players nickname her the Walking Fortress.

Let me be very clear. If you’re in any way decent at RPGs or understand basic game design on any level, then Maple’s power escalation will be completely dead to you. Don’t even try to make sense of it. To put it bluntly, this is a video game show for people who suck at video games, RPGs in particular. You have a protagonist who doesn’t understand stat weights at all, doesn’t even know what the concept of minmaxing means, specs the worst build of all time, and creates the most appalling cesspool guild in the history of cesspool guilds.

The twist? Everything works out! It’s wish fulfillment for bad players that says: “Hey, you know how you suck at RPGs because you fuck up all of those basic things? Are you jealous because players who have an IQ barely above room temperature are so much better than you? Do you not understand why your ‘social’ guild that has an open-door invitation policy and pledges to ‘help weaker members level up and get stronger’ isn’t successful? Then Maple is the hero for you!” And in truth, to anyone with any sense and understanding of how RPGs work, she does everything wrong, but what do you know, she turns into one of the most ridiculously overpowered players in the game, and when I say ridiculous, I mean ridiculous.

In a way, I suppose the show tries to make some sort of esoteric point about how you don’t have to obsess about being like the high end try-hard nerds with no lives who minmax everything, what matters is to just have fun.

People often call her the love child of Kirito from Sword Art Online and Naofumi from The Rising of the Shield Hero, but I feel she much more closely resembles Rimuru from That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (which reminds me I have to finish watching that show). Pretty much every single thing she does in the game, no matter how trivial or witless, somehow ends up granting her one godlike skill or stat boost after the other. She LARPs as Magellan from One Piece, literally goes Super Sayian, turns into a fucking Gundam, and even does that thing Kirito did in Alfheim when he turned into a giant demon, pff, all the things!

None of it makes sense. You know what, though? It doesn’t have to. If you watch this expecting it to be a proper video game show, such as SAO or Log Horizon, and critique it as such, then you will be disappointed. However, if you take it for what it is, a wish fulfillment cartoon laden with cute girls just frolicking around and having a good time, then you will have a good time, too.

I clocked what BoFuri was within the first 10 minutes and set my expectations accordingly. As such, I had a blast watching it. It kept me smiling the whole way through, which few series can say they’ve achieved, and I would sincerely burst out laughing every time Maple failed her way into discovering yet another completely broken and unrealistic ability that would have no place in even the alpha of any real game. It truly did take me on a trip down memory lane, reliving all of the confusion and wonder I felt as a newbie in WoW, all the mistakes I made, and all the cockamamie ideas and theories I had about how the game works and how I unironically thought I would become invincible once I learned one spell or another, or obtained this or that item.

The only difference being, of course, that I wasn’t an anime protagonist, so decent players just laughed at me and put me in my place. By far the most unrealistic aspect of BoFuri is how the entire game community instantly fell in love with Maple for how adorably nooby she was, so they collectively decided to look out for her and help her out, because she’s a cute lil’ waifu. Bro, I don’t care how cute she is. Are you kidding me? Ain’t no way. Yes, gamers are a bunch of simps, I’ll grant you that, but they’re shitlords above all else – shitlords first, simps second. Any self-respecting gamer would have mercilessly fucking shit on her for being a noob, and she would have been crying herself to sleep and slitting her wrists before uninstalling. Gamer words would have been flying around on rapid fire mode.

Maple’s ascension took me so far back that I even remembered The Ballad of the Noob. If you don’t know it, then I warmly encourage you to look it up on YouTube. It’s a classic. Besides, setting aside all of Maple’s absurd game-breaking abilities, the show is also full of legitimate classic RPG spells and abilities, such as Intervene, Shadow Step, Ardent Defender, Purgatory, Titan’s Grip, Sprint, Vanish, Taunt, Challenging Shout, Incapacitating Roar, Entangling Roots, and many more. I don’t remember what each one was actually called in the show. Regardless, even if you don’t recognize the World of Warcraft names I’ve listed, I’m sure similar abilities exist in a litany of other RPGs. Just the fact that aggro is a real thing that exists in this game in any capacity made me extremely happy.

Finally, my enjoyment of the series and Maple as a protagonist is owed in no small part to the fact that I personally enjoy playing a tank and have a particular fetish for stamina stacking. Even when I know it’s not the optimal defensive stat to stack, and I do know it’s not the optimal defensive stat to stack, I still love seeing a humongous number on my HP bar. Even if healers then bitch at me for having an unnecessary amount of health and soaking up too much mana to heal, seeing a big number on the green bar still gives me the good chemicals!

As for the technical aspects of the show, I will say that I did not enjoy the color design. Some weird fading and saturation choices were made. Shin Oonuma, the director of BoFuri, was a student of Akiyuki Shinbo, the director of most studio Shaft shows. If you’ve seen anything from the Monogatari franchise, then you’ll know Shinbo has a penchant for eccentric visual presentation. As such, Oonuma tries to emulate his master’s style by giving each one of his shows some kind of striking visual flair. Granted, he is nowhere near the level of Shinbo, but I felt he managed to “pull a Shaft” with episode 11 of Chivalry of a Failed Knight. In my estimation, he did not succeed here.

That being said, the animation was solid. It wasn’t impressive by any means, not even in its most substantial sakuga moments, but solid nonetheless. What I appreciated most about the animation was how many CG elements it contained that were actually pretty decent, Maple’s Hydra (you’ll see) in particular. It fills my cold dead heart with optimism for the future. All these years, all of the horrific CG we’ve endured, it was not in vain! CG in anime is starting to get good! Hope is kindled.

Apart from the visuals, two things did stand out about BoFuri. Number one, the song Good Night sung by Rico Sasaki was a lot of fun and had a fantastic effect on the show, giving it a lot of individual personality, much like Glassy Sky did for the second season of Tokyo Ghoul, though not to the same extent.

Second, I was taken aback by how many heavy hitting voice actors the supporting cast boasts, such as Noriaki Sugiyama (the voice of Sasuke from Naruto, Ishida from Bleach, and Shirou from Fate/Stay Night), Kensho Ono (the voice of Kuroko from Kuroko no Basket, Giorno from JoJo’s Bizare Adventure Part 5: Golden Wind, and Hyakuya from Seraph of the End), Saori Hayami (the voice of Miho from Bakuman. and Miyuki from The Irregular at Magic High School), Satomi Sato (the voice of Wendy from Fairy Tail and Ritsu from K-On!), and my personal favorite, Nobutoshi Canna (the voice of Guts from the original ’97 Berserk, Nnoitra Gilga from Bleach, Cu Chulainn from Fate/Stay Night, Kabuto from Naruto, and Gawl from Generator Gawl).

P.S.: What follows comes with a very light spoiler warning. If I feel that the show has genuinely made any mistakes, and that’s allowing for it being a silly wish fulfillment cartoon, then number one, it’s the fact that sometime in the early episodes, right after Maple acquires the first couple of her broken abilities, the game developers are introduced as characters and they try to nerf her, the operative word here being try. That kind of breaks my suspension of disbelief. You want to have a story about a cute lil’ idiot waifu who dicks around in a video game and becomes invincible largely by mistake? Fine, but then that means we’re pretending that things like game balance and nerfs don’t exist. The moment you tell me they still do exist, regardless of how broken you attempt to make your waifu protagonist to compensate, that’s when you start to lose me.

Second, and this is the weirdest fucking thing about BoFuri, it appears that the game, NWO, has the ability to mess with your perception of time. For various reasons, events and such, the game is able to alter your perception of time so that what you legitimately experience as an entire week in-game, like, a proper 7-day cycle (honest to God, people go to sleep in-game during the night and shit), is only 2 hours in real life, literally just 2 hours. So, you log in now, wake back up 2 hours later, but you’re mentally a whole week older now. At the very least, NWO appears to be able to alter your perception of time by a factor of 84. That’s insane. It’s such a weird contrivance and this kind of technology would have so, so, so many potential real-world implications, it’s bizarre to see the show just mention it on a whim like “Oh, yeah, the game can also do this, by the way”, like, wait a second, hold the fucking phone, can we talk about this? This is a big deal! It is just my contention that the show could have handled the long duration of the in-game events in a way that did not necessarily require introducing technology that has Skynet-level implications.

Alas, fun, cute show. Enjoy!