English Dub Review: Bofuri: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, So I’ll Max Out My Defense “Maxing Defense and Christmas”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

As Christmas draws near, New World Online finally releases Level 4 concurrently with a special holiday event in which rare and exclusive items are at stake.

Our Take:

You better max out your defensive skills because Maple and the gang are back with more gaming adventures in the VRMMORPG world. This show has been on my radar constantly while I was browsing on Hulu. The concept of a girl with the strongest defense in an MMORPG video game has piqued my interest more times than I can count. 

The season two premiere starts with a special Christmas-themed event in New World Online, with Maple (Megan Shipman), Sally (Jad Saxton), and the gang attending the event. The event, known as Level 4, is a Japanese-themed area set on the permanent night, where the players compete in battling monsters to retrieve their particular items. After the event, they received Christmas-themed costumes and weapons, with Maple getting the rarest item: the Rudolph costume. As the team suggested, Maple definitely looks cute in that outfit.

It doesn’t leave out a tease on what’s to come for the second season. However, the episode does offer a sweet and charmingly humorous filler plot that also did well in briefly introducing me to the game’s world. The main storyline only consists of Maple and the others getting into minor harmless predicaments. One of them is Sally engaging in a duel with Frederica (Lindsay Seidel), a magician who helped Maple level up. The other scenario involves Kasumi (Tia Ballard) finding the Purple Phantom Blade, which causes her to end up in a temporary childlike form. That moment was the best part of the episode for me due to Kasumi’s clothes not fitting her child form, much to her embarrassment.

Overall, “Maxing Defense and Christmas” is a suitable late Christmas gift for fans of Bofuri waiting for more adventures of Maple and her crew. The English voice cast was charming in their roles, including Megan Shipman as Maple, and the animation was solid regarding its action scenes and locations. There were a couple of moments that left me feeling a bit lost regarding the characters.