Title: BOFURI: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense Vol. 3
Author: Jirou Oimoto (Art), Yuumikan (Story), Koin (Character Design)
Publisher: Yen Press
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 164
Genre: Fantasy, Comedy
Publication Date: January 18, 2022
The Story
The special event continues as Sally and Maple continue their exploration of the land and its dungeons. They find themselves traversing a desert when they approach an oasis. While resting, a player comes up and greets them, stating that they do not wish to fight. So, Sally takes that the only way she knows… a challenge! This player has Super Speed just like Sally so it’s a race between the two until Sally ends up cornering her. Maple finally catches up and it triggers a 3-person dungeon where they are bound by chains that causes them to all share their fate.
After making it through the dungeon, we learn that the new character’s name is Kasumi. She’s an attack-type character who came in 6th place during the last event. She calls a truce (she never wanted to fight anyway) and ends up becoming friends with them after everything is all said and done; however, despite being friends, she ends up going her own separate way.
Through the desert and into a forest they go where they don’t find anything of interest. Beyond the forest is the sea where Sally does a bit of diving to find some metals. She finds an entrance to a dungeon underwater but since Maple is a heavy armor type, she knows that they can’t reach it together. When Sally returns she discovers that Maple has built a sandcastle with a young boy who is only level five. The boy’s name is Kanade and he offers to explore the dungeon since his respawn point is only 100 yards from there. Of course, he dies but reports what’s in the dungeon. Kanade then takes off stating that he already got what he came for… some sort of Rubik’s Cube that’s also a wand that took him four days to acquire due to it being locked behind a puzzle.
Maple and Sally find a new entrance to a dungeon and discover it was an alternate path to the same squid boss that Kanade found. Together, they fight to overcome it and turn their attention to gathering the last two medals they need to reach their goal of 20. To do so, Sally has a plan!
Characters
Two new characters are introduced here in Kasumi and Kanade, each with their own unique personalities.
Kasumi may be strong but she’s pretty humble. It was funny watching Sally try to fight her when Kasumi wanted nothing to do with it. After working together, Kasumi seemed pretty friendly and was quick to make it onto their friends list after their dungeon adventure together. I do like the detraction from the typical character archetype, though. Once you see a young girl clad in a gi and wielding a sword, you instantly picture some quiet, serious, and disciplined disciple; however, Kasumi wasn’t even close to that. She was just your average friendly girl so the fact that they didn’t stick to the trope was quite refreshing. The downside is that it kind of made her a bit one-dimensional and plain but with her becoming friends with them, there’s plenty of time to develop her into something a bit more than what we were presented with here.
Kanade, on the other hand, just reeks of deceit. Sure, he may look like a friendly young boy but when he mentioned the Rubik’s Cube being a wand, he wouldn’t explain what it does unless they were in a party together. Add in the fact that the wand was his only goal for this event seems pretty suspicious. Maybe I’m looking too much into it and the reason behind everything just ends up being wholesome but I’ve read enough manga to know a setup when I see one and this one smells kind of funny. We’ll have to wait and see how this one plays out as I doubt we’ve seen the last of Kanade.
Final Thoughts
I really enjoyed adding a couple of new characters to the mix because there is only so much you can do with Sally and Maple by themselves. When you have an in-game event such as this where it’s just exploring and dungeon crawling, it goes old pretty fast so I’m glad that they found a way to make things interesting by breaking up the monotony.
It appears as though we are nearing the end of the event with only a day or so left to go (in-game time). After that, I’m wondering if we will exit NewWorld Online and do some real-life exploration with Maple and Sally? That would be a nice change of pace which would allow us to dive further into their lives all while setting up the next big adventure within the game!
The series remains adorable as the dynamic between Sally and Maple just works. The devs continuing to scheme to try and thwart Maple is still pretty hilarious and it makes me curious to see what other obstacles they come up with to get in her way! This is quickly becoming one of my favorite fantasy series and I’m excited to see what comes our way in volume 4!
Be sure to follow me on Twitter @JJPiedraOELN
You can also check out other The Outerhaven reviews on your favorite social media networks:
Subscribe to us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theouterhaven
Subscribe to us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheOuterHaven
Subscribe to us on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/theouterhavennet
This item was provided for review by Yen Press.
