BOFURI: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense. Season 2

Episode 11

Strictly speaking, the material covered in this week's BOFURI episode isn't too meaningfully different from what we've seen in several of Season Two's past few episodes. All three of our focal guilds are cooperating, having played a round of party-member musical chairs in big ol' boss battles where tamed monsters are still the central focal mechanic. The biggest distinguishing element of this episode from the preceding one is that the selected squads have been intentionally assembled for proper min/max-ing and coverage of abilities instead of people being scattered and reforming with whoever they could find. It means they're all properly on their A-game for taking on the fights they're assigned here, turning things into even more of a show-off showcase than usual for BOFURI's over-leveled occupants.

So while the content is hardly different from the sequences of Big Fights that BOFURI has shown off before, the big draw for this episode is that it is really showing off this time. Yes, after a year-long delay followed by several other intermittent weeks off, Silver Link's efforts have at last culminated in this penultimate entry for the season, delivering on the kind of spectacle we came to expect from the first season's lavish let's-plays. The presentation of each phase of party members sequentially taking on their assigned boss monsters becomes a build-up in itself since it affords each of the main Maple Tree guild members their own rotated turn in the spotlight while knowingly building up to the last fight with Maple, Sally, and their extra girlfriends at the episode's end.

One gets the impression the strongest staff members the production team had at their disposal were corralled together to work on this episode in the same way party members in the show were optimally arranged together. Yes, the big, bombastic elements of the fights can merit crowning commentary in a moment, but things are apparent as a step up just from the smaller elements. Witness the first fight in the episode as May, Yui, and the others take on what looks like a giant Whiscash from Pokemon. There's a sequence of intercut impact frames on Dread killing the colossal catfish that represents the kind of sizzle you expect from setpieces that are intentionally all style like this stretch. It's even apparent out of combat, like in the snippet where Mii and Frederica climb onto Mecha-Maple's back for a lift, which features small, shifting movements of character acting from both of them that reminded me of the best sort of background business characters would bob around within the first season of BOFURI.

Even the broken-up big fights are still defined by their distinctions. BOFURI is playing around not just with the variety of biomes you expect from levels in an MMO but with the angle of their locations. So you have May and Yui's squad traversing invisibly under the water in a way that lets them avoid all encounters besides the boss while Kanade and Iz's crew head up to a flying island which is technically only populated by a boss monster, but one that summons additional supports for everyone to fight. The trick is showing how party members' powers, particularly those from their pets, make them a natural fit for their assigned challenges. So Kanade's slime-copying ability helps him match that minion-summoning boss, while Kasumi's snake friend works well as an impromptu sand shelter in the desert. The participating characters comment on these choices of the right combinations of members, showing that Maple and Sally's strategizing was bang-on. So our Maple Tree leads aren't just the sociable magnets bringing everyone together; they're also stepping up into actual, unifying leadership roles.

That's an undertone of growth that compliments the fully realized visuals of this episode. The final fight is effectively everything you want from an episode of BOFURI like this one, running through all of Maple's forms against an enemy designed after her as a hard counter. She's more than a match for it anyway, of course, further helped out by the smooth sakuga action I've been seeking from Sally since the beginning of this season and still more cool bits from Frederica and Mii. And it's nice to see those two get along as a bonus. There are innumerable other smaller bits in this last stretch I also appreciate, be it the tiny animation of Sally yanking Maple away from the boss's attack in the background at one point or seeing the devs deploy multiples of that boss as a regular enemy as an effective kind of end-game escalation.

It all means I'm still solidly on board to see how BOFURI will bring it home with its final episode at last arriving next week (fingers crossed). They're even still feeding the conceptual game-development side with ruminations from the devs regarding balance and the point that these three now-cooperating guilds are so strong that any attempt to balance enemies based on them would alienate the other 99% of NWO's player-base. We'll see if they do anything deeper with that or if it will simply remain an aside joke. After so many false starts, both within and without the production of BOFURI S2, there were moments in this one's procession of combat sequences where I could almost feel some fatigue setting in. But its climactic capstone wound up convincing me that it was indeed worth the wait.

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BOFURI: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense. Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris is a freewheeling Fresno-based freelancer with a love for anime and a shelf full of too many Transformers. He can be found spending way too much time on his Twitter, and irregularly updating his blog.