The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

Bofuri

What's It About? 

Kaede Honjō is invited by her friend Risa Shiramine to play a virtual reality MMO game with her. While Kaede doesn't dislike games, what she really, truly dislikes is being in pain. She creates a character named Maple, and decides to put all her points in VIT to minimize pain. As a result, she moves slowly, can't use magic, and even a rabbit can get the best of her. But as it turns out, she acquires a skill known as "Absolute Defense" as a result of her pumping points into VIT, as well as a "Counter Skill" that works against special moves. Now, with her ability to nullify all damage, she goes on adventures.

Bofuri: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, So I’ll Max Out My Defense is based on Yuumikan's light novel series. The manga is drawn by Jirō Oimoto and Yen Press is releasing both the light novel and the manga in digital and print.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

A game should be fun, and we all have fun in different ways. That's fine. It doesn't explain the burning rage Maple, the heroine of Bofuri, gives rise to in me, however. I suspect it's a case of the humor of the series simply not working for me, because while the series is ostensibly meant to be making fun of MMORPGs and the series about them (and their for-now-fake VR counterparts), it mostly comes off as someone not understanding the basic concepts of how such games work. That, not to put too fine a point on it, can be irritating.

Not that the manga's first volume is totally irredeemable. Kaede, or Maple as she's known in-game, is the sort of loveable airhead who's been making comedy series work for years. She's the kind of person who just sort of goes with it, whether that means starting a game in the first place because her best friend wants her to or sticking to a misapprehension about how games work because, well, changing her mind isn't something that Maple really worries about. In the case of Bofuri, Maple's total lack of understanding about why one might have six separate stats to put points into leads to her putting all of her points into defense. Forever.

It's not clear whether Maple's fear of getting hurt (that is, feeling pain while in-game) is a valid one or is another one of her misunderstandings. She seems to be able to taste things when she eats them in the game, and there's one mention of “stinging” that she feels, but what we don't know is if the sting is the only way pain manifests in the game's world or if all of this is somehow in her head; likely the answer is something along the lines of only positive sensations being truly felt. But the idea of pain is one that she's latched on to, so she's sticking with it, no matter what. This makes her ludicrously overpowered after a fairly short time, and people are so baffled by her playstyle that she quickly becomes an unwitting legend in the forums; the forum discussions are some of the more fun parts of the volume. Maple's personality also can lend itself to humor well, particularly when she goes from being so upset that she killed a monster that she makes it a grave to acquiring the skill “moral turpitude,” which is a pretty extreme shift.

Despite that, this can be very, very annoying. As Maple just kept pouring points into defense I was practically screaming at the book, begging her to just think and do something else. She's sunny and silly, but that goes too far at times in pursuit of humor. I suspect that if you're not, and never have been, a player of MMOs this will be a lot more entertaining. But if you were ever (too) serious about them…let's just say that Maple and her story can be a bit of a trial.