Ladies and gentlemen, sit down, gather ’round, prepare the appropriate beverage if you got the review title, and let me tell you about the joys of horribly breaking video games in ways they were and weren’t meant to be broken. Because when you get down to it that’s what Bofuri (“BOFURI: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense.”) is all about.
I would be willing to wager that most if not all of the people who are reading this review have, at some time in their lives, played a video game. I would even hazard that, video games being what they are, at the very least most of you have encountered something in a game that either was not working as intended or that really, really shouldn’t have been working that way even if it was vaguely intended. That is, a bug, an exploit, or a particularly cheesy strategy that seems at least a little like cheating. Whether you farmed puddings in Nethack, clipped through walls in Mario, stacked dodge in an RPG to the point where your character was physically unable to be hit, or just found a way to produce an endless army of unstoppable endgame space monsters at the start of a game of Civilization II – Test of Time, you’ve been there.
It felt pretty good, right? Like you got the better of the game, of the system itself. For however long or short your chicanery was effective, it was probably pretty fun. There’s more than enough entertainment to be had in a good struggle with a game that really kicks your rear, but transcending all conventional challenge also has its appeal.
Bofuri follows Kaede (better known by her in-game name Maple), a girl who’s not really in to games, but whose best friend Risa (who ultimately goes by Sally in game) is pretty serious, and insists she play a new-launching full-dive VR MMO. Sally herself will be a few days behind, but that’s okay, Maple can get started on her own.
Maple, being clueless about video games, puzzles over her build at first. She reads what the statistics do and then decides, as the longer version of the title says, that since she’d rather not experience pain, she’d better put all her points into the defense stat.
It sounds nightmarishly simple as a mechanism by which a character would gain absurd power, but build overspecialization is frequently the source of some bizarre interactions, when the numbers were balanced around “normal” builds and start to break down when something is too far in the bell curve tails.
Maple’s initial experience is fun for her, if a little odd and frustrating. She’s basically immune to the attacks of starter enemies, but moves glacially slow. She does discover, almost accidentally, that players can unlock skills by experiencing attacks or performing actions in the world rather than just leveling up, which provides much of the rest of what she needs for her combo.
Everything kicks into gear when a friendly higher-level player gives her some potions and answers the way to a dungeon she could level up in (meaning with a party, not thinking she’d be dull enough to go in alone). Maple wades through the Poison Dragon dungeon and comes ultimately to the boss room where she faces the poisonous dragon Hydra itself. Between her massive defense and health pool for her level, she’s able to tank some of its attacks, and she uses the potions she was given to heal through more and more. All the poison exposure – several times her absurd maximum hp bar – starts to level up her poison resistance, until the point where it reaches immunity and beyond. Now with the boss having no way to damage her, Maple uses her head and decides that the best way to injure it without a good weapon would just be to start taking bites out of the stupid thing.
And, wouldn’t you know it, there are a few payoffs for this silly yet functional win. In addition to poison immunity and standard boss loot, Maple discovers that eating enemies is another way to gain new powers (like any Nethack player would no doubt try) and that the first player to solo a particular boss – in this case, Maple for the Poison Dragon – is awarded a unique and powerful set of gear.
Now decked out in exclusive outfits with a broken shield that devours any enemy that touches it (one of the few of Maple’s advantages that actually gets patched by the devs in story, giving it limited daily charges after she places third in a pvp battle royale thanks to people trying to attack her and getting instakilled), Maple quickly goes from nobody newbie to absolute sensation. When Sally finally manages to join the fun, the situation gets even better, as they locate a hidden dungeon that Sally ultimately uses her pro gamer skills to run solo, scoring her own unique artifact as well as new “learn by doing” powers along the way.
The game developers gradually implement “Events” (typically large PVP scenarios) and new “Levels” (worlds or at least zones to explore, possibly with their own themes) and Maple and her friends (first Sally and then several others she meets in game and recruits to her founded-for-an-event guild, Maple Tree) keep coming across strange corner cases and forgotten quests with bizarre rewards that end up adding to their power, particularly Maple’s as she learns to combine all her various discoveries into new and terrifying forms that make her scarier than any final boss the devs could cook up… or at least would if she weren’t such a sweetheart.
To that end, it’s not particularly useful this time to go through the plot in order. It’s a lighthearted show with this heavy element of video game exploitation (a mix of familiar cleverness and wish fulfillment), so you kind of know Maple is going to stumble her way through the events (which get the most focus of any particular element) and at least not lose in too hard a way even if she and her guild don’t come in first. The biggest one is a guild Capture the Flag event where the other big guilds, recognizing Maple as a major rival, aim to take her guild down by the end. We actually get some pretty neat action there with the fights between the various friends and rivals, and with Maple having to pull out absolutely every one of her tricks to come out on top.
And I know what some of you are probably thinking: doesn’t this sound like a sucky Isekai wish fulfillment, something like In Another World With My Smartphone? Well, there’s one huge delta – aside from the writing quality in general – between that show and this one that matters a ton and helps make Bofuri not just tolerable but fairly charming: Bofuri isn’t an Isekai.
Sure, we spend pretty much all our time with these characters in game, seeing them as their player characters and not their normal selves. But, and this needs to be stressed, it’s just a game. There is no gutterball of life and death stakes, no drama that’s being sucked out by letting Maple be an absurd powerhouse, because there are no life and death stakes and no such heavy drama to begin with. Even if Maple can herself never die, she can still fail objectives in the events by not being able to jump through the right hoops or by being outmaneuvered and outplayed, and… that’s enough.
It’s much less grating to let Maple have all the advantages because, within the context of her own experience, they’re not real. None of this is real – except for the friendships that Maple forms through the game and the fun she and her friends have. That’s real, so that’s what we get invested in. We watch not to see whether or not Maple is going to make it out of something, because even if she did die against the plot contract of the show’s premise it would only be a minor irritation. We watch to see how she and Sally and all her other friends relate, and what next crazy thing they come up with, how Maple gets her next bizarre combo power by doing everything right and applying it wrong, or how she gets along with temporary enemies like rival guild leaders Mii and Payne. It’s one part cute girls doing cute things and one part exploit-happy Let’s Play of a game that just happens to not actually exist.
This is why I brought up what I did at the beginning. The show thrives on its ability to create the feeling of a joyful bout of game exploiting, and its ability to deliver that feeling to the viewer through Maple’s well-meaning ascension from ordinary player to force of destructive nature still blithely unaware that she’s done anything particularly unnatural. It’s the same kind of fun you get from watching someone utterly demolish the balance of a beloved game just for the heck of it, which is usually quite funny when presented right.
For all that, Bofuri gets a B from me. There are no drama and no stakes; there’s not supposed to be. It’s only not a pure slice of life because the gameplay itself has interesting moments where you can feel something like stakes, even if they’re wholly simulated. Does it really matter how well Maple’s guild does in capture the flag? No, but it’s kinda nice to root for them anyway. More than anything, the focus is on making friends and finding bizarre entertainment, and that is entertaining enough on its own.