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

With all the Sword Art clones trying to do the same "trapped in a videogame" basic outline, it's refreshing to see a take on the genre that just lets the fantasy world be a game and not a death sentence. Nobody dies in real life if they die in the game and they get to log out and go back to the real world with school or whatever whenever they feel like. It seems like there is some time dilation between the game and real life, though as several days can go by without a night passing in the real world. The game mechanics of thisworld are a little nutty, I don't think many of the writers of these things have spent any time studying actual game development or if they have they sure didn't understand it. There are phases of beta testing where the kind of shit Maple does is get patched out pretty early on. To the shows credit it does lampshade her ridiculous powers at every turn, and even has the devs all talking about how they can nerf her broken abilities, but the thing is unless the game is somehow procedurally generating abilities on the fly based on player actions I have trouble believing they would have added some of those into the game intentionally in the first place. Sure, developer oversight can sometimes lead to combinations of powers they didn't foresee that can make a particular skill overpowered, but there's no situation I can think of where the giant kaijuu form or the mecha suit should not be considered stupidly strong and in need of a good nerfing. Not to mention the ending when they just decided to leave her alone and let her do her thing because it would make players mad if they nerfed her again. What? In what world do MMO devs not get off on ruining fun and making the playerbase hate them. That's basically been Blizzard's default strategy since 2005.

So for game realism I'd give it a barely passing grade, but as far as overall enjoyment it's still a pretty fun show. If you like isekai power fantasies that have a quick progressing from OP to really OP and protagonists that are incapable of losing; so pretty much every isekai ever; you'll probably like this. It's a braindead genre you don't need to do a whole lot of thinking to watch, and sometimes that has it's own sort of appeal. 7/10