Review of BOFURI: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense.
"BOFURI: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense" is a lighthearted slice of life anime about two girl friends adventuring in a virtual reality world while learning about the game, making friends, winning championships, etc... I won't get into any important part of the story but I'll need to speak a little about the things that happen in this anime to explain why I disliked it. The world is interesting and the characters are likeable and maybe even relatable... At first glace, it's just that at the same time those characters lack depth and don't go through any kind of development,and the VR world always seems to bend to their imagination making them incredibly powerful, I swear every issue is fixed by Maple's Hydra (A poisonous dragon thing she gets in one of the first areas of the world) being used in a different way than originally showed which was a poison attack, it can also:
-Pin them/push enemies back
-Poison large bodies of water
-Fill containers with its poison
-Create a poisonous gas area that stays that way for extended periods of time
-Create a ball of poison to envelop Maple (and later her friends) to roll down hills without taking damage and even to just shoot through dungeons at lightning speed
-Be used to create an impenetrable defensive poison bubble cocoon around maple
-Be used as a remote shield to stop incoming attacks
And the list goes on, you get the idea.
The example I gave with Hydra goes for most things or situations, the two main girls always are the best at what they do because this VR game seems to be impossibly complex and versatile, it will respond to whatever silly idea and give absurdly powerful skills as a result like:
-Just getting stung by a monster until you develop resistance to any poison attack
-Eating a monster to gain powers
-Speedrunning the same dungeon to farm EXP
Again, the list goes on, even defeating any of the bosses around the world gives either a unique weapon/armor or an overpowered skill.
If this is the idea the writer intended then it's great, such a unique world lends itself to creating a very nuanced story with lots of creative action, but this doesn't happen, apparently everyone else is so dumb that they don't get any overpowered perks like our MCs, most other people don't even use any skills while fighting and act like filler characters, and when we do see interesting skills they're like speed boosts, stun spells or fireballs while Maple is unlocking godly powers. if the world is going to be rewarding our MC with overpowered skills for every small thing then everyone should be incredibly powerful, not just her.
The only other people that get good skills are Maple's team, nothing as good as her, but they're powerful in their own right, able to wipe hundreds of players on their own, this includes Sally who gets many powers but her real ability lies in the fact that she's somehow too skilled, through her own sheer ability she can overcome attacks that should be impossible to defend for her, and kill anyone with ease. She's a kid with not much gaming experience, so this skill can only be sort of explained because she's agile and athletic in real life, for a kid, but if this is the case then there should be plenty of adults in better shape than her, meaning more coordinated and agile, this is never the case.
Maple's neverending flow of new OP skills is explained through the devs watching maple and being astonished at her stunts, meaning that they created this world with skills hidden everywhere but only Maple finds them one after the other being a kid just playing however she pleases, no one else should be finding these skills apparently, and the devs are baffled, they for example, somehow programmed into this world that if someone takes a few bites from a boss then that person gets the ability to turn into something akin to godzilla with OP magical abilities, but are perplexed to see Maple finding one of the myriad of powers they've planted into their world. They even nerf Maple once, but the thing they nerfed wasn't even a skill, it was a shield that killed everything it touched instantly with no limits or repercussions, how could they have predicted that the shield would be OP!
The story still feels very bland and poorly executed, a slice of life + action anime sounds like a hard idea to execute but one with a lot of promise, for me BOFURI was a big disappointment that didn't deliver on the characters and the consistency needed for a believable and enjoyable VR fantasy world. The ending was a good chance to show the OP team struggle, but in this anime anytime Maple finds any resistance and seems to struggle, it's because she's trying not to use too many of her abilities, not because she's in any real trouble, the main antagonist Payne was painfully unutilized.