The isekai sub-genre came to stay it seems. It has morphed from the post-Sword Art Online virtual worlds into a disgusting soup of non-creativity, taking over the industry like a tsunami, but with sewage instead of salty water. It became hard to pick a show and not be dazzled by the similarities with almost everything else releasing in the past years. Damn, it’s a horrible time to watch animes in general. We only have shitty long-running shounens and these craps of isekai.

Okay. From time to time one of those shows are worthy of our time, but it is damn rare. Well, at least it was. The secret of making this influx of isekai more enjoyable seems quite simple: dust the boring male lead and turn it into a moe festival.

Yes, turn it into a moe festival.

Noukin did that and was quite fun, considering its limitations, and the Ascendance of the Bookworm also managed to achieve a decent degree of quality with the charming young girl as the heroine.

Itai no wa Iya nano de Bougyoryoku ni Kyokufuri Shitai to Omoimasu is yet another of those shitty long names that should not exist and I never bother to even read (I just copy and paste them here), but it comes with some very funny moments to share along with every crap we can expect from an isekai. Well, let us call it Bofuri for short, because that is the real name of this show.

Bofuri is about young Kaede, a high-schooler who is invited by a friend to play a recently released virtual MMO called New World. She doesn’t want to get hurt, so she stacks her character with vitality and boost her defense all the way up. Yeah. She becomes basically immune to damage here, a slow walking tank that is ready to become legend in this game.

The OP lead is still here

Well, at first, Kaede’s character, Maple, is just a very tough cookie to damage. It is not that she is overpowered, she just doesn’t take any damage at all, a reminder of some late 90’s RPGs where balance was never really a worry for development teams and we could craft ridiculous builds that blocked all damage from early enemies (Ragnarok Online, Star Ocean, and many others). It is funny and provides some very weird and interesting ideas for the first episodes.

Maple, however, is just yet another isekai lead, meaning she becomes the overpowerful piece of shit no one can defeat. It’s the same as always, but yet again the fact she is a genki young girl who wants to have fun makes everything a lot more enjoyable than seeing a young prick who wishes to bang all girls and cater to the generic male protagonist template of a guy who is a dick yet everyone loves. Maple is lovable, friendly, and cheerful, so it makes sense people gather around her. Yeah, she is not swarmed because she is OP and that is an interesting bonus.

It evolves

Of course, just being overpowerful can hardly be fun for more than a few eps, and Bofuri surprisingly understands that, shifting the “full-defense” build of Maple to something more like “this girl does crazy stuff and becomes overpowerful because of that”. I mean, she eats her enemies, she comboes paralysis with poison, she makes a flying turtle, she is damn lucky to simply think out of the box before the developers of the game do. It’s like a conventional quality assurance procedure, where you pick a really random subject to test your product and they try it in ways you would never expect. Well, the New World staff did not had this procedure, and thus Maple is here to break their game through the most bizarre ways.

Not for long though

Well, it comes a time where the unconventional Maple stops really working and the story just ass-pull some quests to give her unimaginable power. It is way less funny than before, still, her genki behavior, friends, and the interesting PvP events manage to deliver a second half that is more about seeing Maple have fun than just seeing how powerful she is. It works considerably, although more because it deliver in expectations than because it surprises you with weird stuff.

Not so cute

Silver Link studio delivers some cute moe-esque shows here and there, so they know their stuff. Bofuri, however, is severly lacking in quality when compared to most of their other recent works. The background scenery is generic, the characters are not that cute, and the overall animation is simple. The armor design is nice though, and it is much more detailed than most other medieval fantasy games around.

Bofuri is yet another reason to understand that the isekai genre fails more because of its traditional boring male lead than anything else. The simple swapping of gender automatically removes the most annoying cliches, such as the harem building, blushing, and shameful sexual innuendo that most of those shows rely upon. The lead being a charismatic and cheerful girl also helps to ensure there is some consistency as to why people flock around them.

Anyway, what is most important is that Bofuri can be incredibly funny during its first half, delivering a comical view of a full-defense girl with a weird character build and funny ideas of how to play a game whose rules are pretty much open. The fact that Kaede is not stuck in the game also helps to make this less like the recent influx of generic isekais (yeah, this is a trend almost a decade-old by now).

The second half is not as funny, but still enjoyable to a decent degree. You can watch some interesting match-ups, the PvP provides weird scenarios, and Maple remains a joy to follow around.