Title: BOFURI: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense Vol. 2
Author: Jirou Oimoto (Art), Yuumikan (Story), Koin (Character Design)
Publisher: Yen Press
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 164
Genre: Fantasy, Comedy
Publication Date: December 7, 2021
The Story
Here, Sally and Maple (Kaede) are prepping for the game’s next event; however, before anything can start, the servers are going down for maintenance. When they come back up, they announced that some skills have been nerfed but there isn’t a list of which ones that were. When they log in, they noticed that Maple’s Devour skill was reduced to 10 uses but now absorbed double the MP. They also added armor-piercing attacks to the game. It suddenly dawns on them that all of the nerfs instilled were aimed directly at Maple!
Now that she can take damage, they decide to boost her HP and acquire some new spells and skills to help take the pain off of Maple not being completely invincible anymore. Two of the skills Maple picks up are Cover abilities. Combined with Sally’s new Superspeed ability, Maple now has incredible movement as she can use Cover to move to Sally’s location.
The event begins where there are 300 silver coins scattered throughout the world. The event lasts 1 game week (about 2 hours real-world time). If you collect 10 silver coins, you can exchange them for gold coins to buy skills and gear.
The rest of the volume focuses on the event with Sally and Maple checking out a couple of dungeons, one of which contains a boss that draws the attention to the game’s admins and developers. They claimed the boss was unbeatable but Maple and Sally still managed to do it. They scheme to pull out their trump card for the event’s final boss.
Characters
While we were introduced to our characters in the last volume, we didn’t get much development here in volume two. Maple and Sally haven’t really changed much personality-wise. They did; however, gain some new skills and Maple did receive a new shield that was crafted by Iz.
Outside of this, we were introduced to the development team. They seemed pretty concerned over Maple’s power level and the nerfs at the beginning of the volume were clear evidence of that. Once we formally meet them towards the end of the volume, it’s clear that they are not done trying to fix everything that Maple “broke.” (Hey, is it really her fault that they are incompetent when it comes to game balance? Whatever happened to proper internal testing!?)
I don’t know if I can really call these developers true antagonists. They’re simply worried about balancing their game so that nothing is overpowered… which is what all game developers do; however, the fact that they wish to summon an impossible boss for the event shows that they do have a devious side to them. Then again, I do remember GM events in MMORPGs that I’ve played where the development team did like to mess with the players. It could be something as simple as that. Maybe because I understand game design (I do have a degree in it), that I can’t really see anything that they’re doing as nefarious.
Final Thoughts
This series instilled some drama by making Maple not-so-invincible. I am a little shocked that they opted to go this route so soon, though. For a series that implies that Maple is a walking defense fortress, they were quick to balance her pretty quickly. While I do agree that Maple just being invincible would get really old really fast… I would have thought they would have let us enjoy her being super overpowered for a couple of volumes before pulling the nerf card on her.
It still didn’t detract from the quality of the manga, though. Maple now has Sally to play with and they make a pretty good team. They still found ways to make Maple really overpowered but the fact that she was now taking actual damage in this volume kind of goes against the premise laid out in the title a bit. Again, I expect this to happen… just not this soon. Pulling it off in the second volume feels like a bait and switch move to me.
That’s my only complaint. Maple is still as cute and adorable as ever and the series is still pretty addicting! I can’t wait to check out volume three to see what this so-called end boss is going to be and how Maple is, predictably, going to wreck its day!
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