Structuring the Pilot: Bofuri
When talking about anime pilots so far, I have been sticking with the Shonen genre (with Fairy Tail and My Hero Academia). So, this time I wanted I switch it up a little and talk about an Isekai. More specifically, a video game Isekai, which feels like its own subgenre at this point.
For anyone unfamiliar with anime genres, the basic idea is that Shonen anime are going to be more action focused, and Isekai are anime where the main character(s) goes to another world. Even the literal translation of the word Isekai is approximately “different world” or “otherworld”. This is most comparable to the portal fantasy genre, with works like Chronicles of Narnia and Alice in Wonderland.
The genre itself presents different kinds of challenges that need to be addressed to some degree within its pilot. What is this place? How did the character(s) get here? What are the rules of this new world? There doesn’t need to be concrete answers, and in fact, many series will only answer them as much as necessary and leave it as a mystery to be solved later on, but there does need to be at least reference to them.
So, let’s take a look at how one show approaches this.
Bofuri: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense – “Defense and First Battle”
Written by Shingo Nagai and Fumihiko Shimo
English script adaptation by Kristen McGuire
Series Directed by Mirai Minato and Shin Onuma
Episode Directed by Yûshi Ibe
Opening: Gaming… Alone?!
Maple has to try her first VR game by herself.
The series opens with Kaede and Risa talking on the phone. And before I get any further, just to keep this simple, I am going to be referring to Kaede as Maple from this point on. It is the name she chooses for the game (in the next scene), and the one she goes by most often throughout the series.
We learn in this opening scene that Maple has never played a video game, let alone a VR one, but her friend Risa has talked her into trying NewWorld Online. Unfortunately, Risa is stuck studying tonight and can’t play with Maple, but she encourages Maple to play anyway.
Already the series is answering quite a few questions for us. What is the world Maple will go to? A video game. How does she get there? Her friend talked her into trying it. And while our third major question (what are the rules of this new world) isn’t answered in the scene, we do learn that our main character doesn’t know them yet either, which means we will learn right alone side her.
This opening also touches on an element that many pilots (especially the anime ones I have covered), have in common. That the pilot episode most often focuses in on a smaller subset of characters than the series may later have. This is an element that usually comes into play because fewer characters mean more development of those who do get the focus, but also, the audience isn’t overwhelmed by too many characters at once.
Just having Risa play the game with Maple wouldn’t have overloaded the show with far too many characters, but in this series the narrowing of characters in the pilot goes one step further than these more technical reasons. A core conceit of the show is built around Maple creating a character, and playing that character, in such a way that would be questioned and probably corrected if she were playing with someone who could give her advice. So, the small choice of having Risa stay out of the game is integral to building the premise of the show.
Act One: A Strong Defense
Maple builds her character.
Maple arrives in the starting village; decides to fight monsters.
Maple has a slow walk to the forest.
Maple takes on her first monster; gets a new skill.
Maple gets in a fight with a bee; her defenses rise.
Maple wakes up; she has even more abilities.
Maple leaves the game and realizes she’s played all night!
The first act is all about Maple creating her character and establishing the rules of the world of NewWorld Online.
We start off with Maple making the biggest choices toward building out what this series will be. After deciding on the name Maple, she chooses a shield as her weapon, and puts all her stats into VIT (Vitality, the defense stat). As she explains, this is all because she doesn’t want to get hurt.
Upon going from the character creation menu to the starting village, Maple is immediately faced with the downside to her choices. With all her stats in VIT, everything else about her is going to suffer. The episode demonstrates this entirely through her movement. She moves incredibly slowly because has no stats in AGI (Agility, the speed stat).
She’s faced with the problem: does she keep this character, or start over? After a few minutes, she decides to with it, she’s come too far already.
Luckily, she knows video games at least well enough to know she has to do some monster fighting to level up and asks someone where to go. The woman who helps her is met by a man after Maple leaves. And together, they look to another man that they are meeting up with, who doesn’t even talk here. These characters aren’t in the rest of this episode, but especially with the way the series allows them point of view for this moment and lingers on the final figure, we are shown they will come to be important (and they are in fact going to be major rivals later on).
Before Maple reaches the monsters, we have a very quick scene that exists just to emphasize how slow Maple is moving and how much it sucks for her. She is seeing that she should at least put some stats in AGI. But then she reaches the forest with the low-level monsters, and this is where she doubles down on her choices.
She stumbles upon a monster she comes to name “Mr. Bunny”. She gets scared, especially when Mr. Bunny attacks her. But turns out, her defenses are so high that as hard as this monster tries, it can’t hurt her at all.
And this is where Maple learns a major aspect of the game, that repeated (or highly specific) actions can award abilities. Because Maple is hit so many times, she is given an ability called Total Defense, that basically doubles her VIT. Because of this, and how well the fight goes, when she accidentally kills Mr. Bunny and levels up, she continues to put all her new stat points in VIT. And this is why the previous tiny scene of her moving so slowly was important. It’s about building out that she now knows she should raise other stats, but because this fight went so well, she continues to build VIT instead.
Maple continues to have the games rules reinforced to her as she first finds herself being attacked by a bee and actually takes damage for the first time, because this bee causes poison damage. While it freaks her out at first that it hurts her, she soon gains Poison Resistance – Weak, and this is where she first chooses to purposely get hurt even more in order to build up her resistance. And in the end of the fight with the bee, she is rewarded with a ring that doubles her VIT (if four of her other stats are lower than her enemy’s, which they always should be if she continues to keep them at 0).
After all the fighting she takes a nap, and we get our first look at Kuromu. He doesn’t actually do anything in this act, just sees this weird girl sleeping while monsters attack her and goes about his day. But it sets him up for later and makes him curious about this person.
Maple wakes up in the game and has gained even more skills and levels and dumps all her new stat points into VIT again.
With that super successful first day, she logs off. And, oh no, it’s after midnight. She has accidentally played NewWorld Online the entire night, a very relatable feeling.
In the end, this act has introduced us to the game world, explained the stat system and how Maple’s choices affect her play, introduced the idea of repeated actions granting new abilities, and teased four future characters. And through all of this, the emphasis was on Maple’s personality. How she felt about everything happening, how she reacted to each monster. How she didn’t want to fight anything cute. Having Maple as the only real character in the vast majority of this act to both give an explanation for her choices in the game, and really explore who she is while doing it.
Act Two: Conquering a Boss
Maple needs gear and asks Kuromu where he got his shield.
Maple is too broke for new gear.
Maple is pointed toward a dungeon to get treasure.
Maple heads to the dungeon.
Maple begins her trek through the dungeon fighting small monsters.
Maple defeats the boss and is awarded one-of-a-kind armor for her success
Maple tells Risa about the game; Risa is revealed to be a pro gamer.
While the first act shows us that Maple is building and playing a character in a very counterintuitive way, the second act shows us that this kind of character build can be super overpowered.
Maple is back in the game for her second day in a row! She logs back in inside of the starting village and becomes jealous of everyone else having nice gear while she is just in her starting equipment. She sees Kuromu, the guy who saw her asleep in the forest, and because he is a “Great Shielder” too, she asks where he got his stuff. And, probably in part because of the fact he was curious about her in the forest, he agrees to take her to the woman who made his gear.
Kuromu takes Maple to see Iz, the crafter. This is all setting up a few things. We have Kuromu and Iz being established as characters who will continue to be in the series (most officially when Maple adds them to her friends list). There is the idea that some players have abilities to make things for others. The importance of money is brought up, which leads to how you can find a lot of treasure in a dungeon. And Kuromu gifts Maple some potions, our first time seeing these exist.
With all this new information, Maple is off to find some treasure. Iz and Kuromu point her in the direction of the poison dragon’s labyrinth, leading to us getting another moment outside of Maple’s POV, as she leaves and the two are left to hope she isn’t planning on going there by herself. Giving these characters even a brief moment of POV continues to reinforce their probable importance, and their worry about the dungeon teaches us it is a dangerous place.
Maple gets to the labyrinth and is first met by slimes. She flattens a bunch of with her shield and she is rewarded with her first offensive attack, Shield Attack. From here, we just montage our way through to Maple finding a massive door in the heart of the labyrinth.
The massive, three-headed, poison dragon reveals itself, and Maple pulls out her dagger to fight. Unfortunately, the dragon’s poison is so strong that it melts all her gear. But her fight with the bee taught her an important lesson: repeated hits with poison will give her more resistance. So, Maple comes up with a plan. She will let the dragon poison her, and just before her health reaches 0, she will take a potion that Kurumu gave her, hoping she will have enough potions for this to work.
We watch Maple’s plan in action, demonstrated most by her health bar going down and up repeatedly. She is down to her last potion, because we need that extra bit of tension on if her plan can actually work. And, upon getting hit this last time, and taking the last potion, it happens: her Poison Resistance upgrades itself, and she now has Poison Immunity.
But not being hurt by the poison isn’t enough, she still needs to win this fight, and she has no weapons. When the dragon goes to bite her, she gets the idea to try the same, and it works. She chomps this dragon all over until she finally wins, and in doing so, gets new special abilities like Hydra Eater, which lets her use poison magic, and new armour, for being the first person to ever beat a dungeon boss by themselves on their first try.
Between stats boosts from her gear, and all the levels she has shot up through the episode, her VIT has gone from 128, to 864, with all her other stats still at 0. And while just numbers don’t really mean anything to us here, we see what it means firsthand when she is able to defeat this dragon almost entirely because of the fact that her defense is so strong.
And of course, the episode ends with a little tease. Maple is on the phone with Risa, telling her all about her time in the game. And we see more of Risa’s room. Turns out, she has trophies for her video game skills. Risa is literally a pro gamer. What will this mean when she plays with Maple?
All in all, this act introduces us to more of the world and its rules through things like having Iz be a crafter and Kuromu giving potions (not to mention setting them up as reoccurring characters); we get a tease of Risa to get us curious to watch more; we see what a dungeon is like; and we see the true test of if Maple’s playstyle can work.
Maple only fought tiny low-level monsters in the first act, something they could have decided was only possible there. But in this act, they not only have her defeat the boss of a dungeon, but they give her armour that specifically tells her that no one else has ever done this before. Not only is focusing on defense working, but it is allowing her to defeat enemies that no one else has defeated on their own.
Conclusion
As mentioned up top, a pilot to an Isekai series has three questions that it really need to at least address on top of all the other usual pilot necessities. These are the questions of: What is this place? How did the character(s) get here? What are the rules of this new world? And How Bofuri answers the first two, is almost entirely by using the subgenre, just having this new world be a video game.
While the rules of the world are also coming down to the fact that it is a video game, the series still needs to establish the rules of what kind of video game this is, and where it might differ from real video games. This is especially true because just watching someone play a game that fully follows real game rules would be entirely different kind of storytelling. This is not a Let’s Play, and there are elements of how NewWorld Order works that probably wouldn’t make sense as real game rules.
It has different goals that a real video game; these are rules designed for the most interesting narrative, not the most compelling interaction.
Take, for example, Maple just deciding to bite a dragon. This is set up as her realizing it as a possibility when the dragon tries to bite her, but in a real game, there would be some interface, some finite number of moves she has. The same can be said about her nap. The idea that she gets tired and goes to sleep in the game. Some games allow you to sleep or meditate to pass time, but this is taking that concept to an extreme for narrative purposes over what game design choices might be employed.
Then there is how much world building and exposition is brought in by the video game style abilities and descriptions. The armour Maple receives for defeating the dragon is doing so much world building. The fact that we learn explicitly that no one has defeated any boss solo on their first try before, tells us so much about how overpowered she has become and how there has probably been no one else who has even tried what she’s doing.
While a non-video game Isekai would have very different focus’s on how it explains this new world, potentially leaving a lot more as mystery, this series lays its cards on the table and leans in heavily to the video game aspects as both shorthand explanations and tools for building out its premise.
