Characters / Bofuri: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense.

This is the character page for Bofuri: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense..

Maple Tree Guild

The guild founded by Maple and Sally. While they are small in number, they are often considered by the in-universe player base of NewWorld Online to be the game's "strongest party" due to their high synergy. Despite their notoriety, however, anyone who gets to know them will soon realize that they are also a team of oddballs who frequently humor the antics of their leader.

In General

• Amazon Brigade: Downplayed. While it does have two guys in Kanade and Chrome, the majority of the guild is made up of female players, and every single one of them, the guys included, are complete badasses.
• The Dreaded: This guild is compared to a final boss Demon King and mini-boss demon generals. By the time NWO's fourth event started, they're considered to be even more dangerous than both Mii's Kingdom of the Flame Emperors and Payne's Order of Holy Sword guilds by NWO's players.
• Logical Weakness: Even though the guild is composed of strong players, their lack of numbers is detrimental in battles where numbers would provide an advantage, as losing a player greatly affects the guild's combat strength. Additionally, while it's very unlikely to happen, losing Maple in battle would severely weaken the guild. The inverse is also true; In any situation where they have to hold the line, they are capable of handling pretty much anything since their small numbers means less miscommunication and better teamwork, where large numbers means that there will be more collateral damage and casualties (as shown with the Flame Emperors in the fourth event.)
• One-Man Army: Every last one of them is considered this. Maple and Chrome are nearly indestructable, Mai and Yui are obscenely destructive, Sally and Kasumi are too fast for nearly everyone, and Iz and Kanade have unmatched versatility.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: The general reaction towards Maple when she shows off new skills, such as Atrocity and Predator, which she uses to solo the guardian to the Level 3 world. Though her guildmates are strong too, they are compared to sub-bosses while Maple is the final boss.
• Quantity vs. Quality: With only eight members, Maple Tree is quite small in number compared to other guilds, but each member is very formidable, often equivalent to officers in other guilds, and their team is greater than the sum of its parts.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Maple didn't choose the members of her guild based on anything resembling party utility or strategy. She chose them because she liked them as people and simply wants to play and enjoy the game with them.
• True Companions: By the time of the fourth event, all of the members have become a close-knit, well-coordinated team, with each of them having every other members' backs.
• Two Girls to a Team: Inverted. Chrome and Kanade are the only two guys in the guild.

Main Duo

Maple / Kaede Honjou

Voiced by: Kaede Hondo (Japanese), Megan Shipman (English)

The main heroine of the story, a girl who was convinced to play New World Online by her friend Sally. Unaware of how games work, she chose the Great Shielder class and invested all her skill points into Defense to avoid being in pain - accidentally becoming a Nigh-Invulnerable defensive powerhouse in the process. She later learns the ropes of the game and becomes the guildmaster of Maple Tree.

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• The Ace: Quickly became one of the top players in New World Online after the first event, surprising everyone with her oddball skills. The top guilds and Devs are wary of her growing strength and many players run away from her in events since they know she can kill them with one hit.
• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • Pretty much how she plays the game. She never really played games before so she has no idea of proper stat balance, leading her to keep putting all of her stat points into VIT. It is because of this that she is able to get rare and powerful skills simply by being constantly attacked, as well as gaining resistances and outright immunity to certain attacks.
  • At one point it's stated that most of the best gear and skills come if the boss you encounter is stronger in more stats than your own. Since Maple only ever increases her VIT stat, she gets the best stuff from every boss she encounters.
  • Her battle with the Super Boss of the 4th layer was a result of her mistaking it for the gateway boss that would allow her to reach the fifth layer. She beat it solo, after a grueling battle that forced her to use most of her skills, and gained a skill that could only be compaired to it's namesake, [Pandemonium}.
• Acquired Poison Immunity: Invokes this in one boss fight against a poison dragon with a breath attack in order to develop total immunity. She then uses this to defeat that same dragon in an unconventional way.
• Adaptational Dumbass: While she's already a Genius Ditz in the novel, being rather clueless when it comes to playing games, the anime goes and makes her dumber, removing most of her intelligent reasons for doing things and amplifying her ditzy Achievements in Ignorance playstyle, mostly as a way of increasing her cuteness.
• Adorable Abomination: After gaining [Atrocity], she is the same Maple everyone knows, despite transforming into a gigantic Kaiju Eldritch Abomination with a voice filter that makes her sound demonic.
• Angelic Beauty: More cute than beautiful, but Loving Sacrifice makes her a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white-winged angel.
• Armored But Frail: Puts all her points into Defense at the expense of everything else, including her health, which remains extremely low for her level. Therefore, attacks that have piercing damage is somewhat of an issue for this reason.
• Armor of Invincibility: The "Armor of the Black Rose", along with the associated greatshield and shortsword, not only pumps up her already insane VIT stat further, but it also comes with "skill slots" which allow her to use one of her skills for free up to 10 times a day in exchange for attaching it to one of her equipment pieces. In addition, it also comes with destruction growth, meaning that not only will it self-repair if it ever gets destroyed, but it'll get stronger as well, meaning that her equipment effectively always scales.
• Badass Adorable: Bright, shiny and sweet. Also an absolute monster in the game.
• Badass on Paper: Her accomplishments make many in the game to think she is a super-skilled gamer, when in fact she is incredibly naïve to how games work.
• Bad Powers, Good People: She is a Nice Girl to the core who is kind to everyone she meets, while at the same time her powers specialize in poison, devouring her opponents, summoning demonic beasts to fight for her and even transforming into one herself.
• Beam Spam: Maple's Machine God arms her with an array of beam weapons that she can fire simultaneously, allowing her to rain laser death upon her foes.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Maple's rather simple-minded nature, general ignorance towards how game mechanics work, and overall happy-go-lucky attitude belies her status as basically an In-Universe SNK Boss.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • When Sally got surrounded by the Order of the Holy Sword, she sends a message to Maple. The latter hurries up to her rescue.
  • When Kanade and the members of Rapid Fire are attacked by a giant squid raid boss during the 9th Event, she, Mai and Yui come to their rescue and subdue it.
• Black Knight: Wears black armor called "Replica of the Dark Knight" which is a black armor with red as its secondary color.
• Boring, but Practical: The "Shield Bash" attack, where she basically just falls on top of enemies with her shield held out in front of her. It's not stylish, but it does defeat a lot of enemies.
• Born Lucky: After the sixth episode, she somehow manages to end up in places that grant her invokedGame-Breaker skills even if it's completely accidental.
• Boxing Lessons for Superman: For all of Maple's crazy skills and her class as a Great Shielder, she never actually learned how to use her shield as a proper blocking mechanism like it's supposed to be.When Maple gains Helping Hand to wield multiple shields at once on the 6th Layer, Chrome decides to correct that.
• Breakout Character: An in-universe example. The Admins state that she has become the face of the game and people are coming in droves both to see what she does next or getting strong enough to beat her.
• Brought Down to Badass: The Devs specifically patch the game to counter her, making her Devour skill only usable ten times a day among others nerfs. She's still hard to kill thanks to her insane VIT stat, and still ends up gaining more and more OP skills despite the Devs' best efforts to prevent her from breaking the game.
• Cannibalism Superpower: She has gained several Skills, such as her signature Hydra and Atrocity skills, by simply eating monsters.
• Cast from Hit Points: Her Loving Sacrifice skill takes a chunk of HP to use, hence the name.
• Casting a Shadow: Her skills as a demon are dark based and even her poison skills looks like this in appearance
• Chekhov's Skill: Her gaining the Stout Guardian skill during the ice bird boss fight, while helpful for her survival then, seemed like something that would end up useless down the line, since her gradual accumulation of absurd defense means taking damage that actually lowers her HP enough to need it seemed like something impossible. It ends up turning out to actually be very handy to have during the fourth event, as in their showdown with Holy Sword, Payne manages to get her with a defense-bypassing attack that shaves off all her health. It's only because of the Stout Guardian skill leaving her with 1 HP that she was able to survive and turn the fight around.
• Cherry Tapping: It would appear that physically attacking her causes a small amount of damage to the attacker, as shown with the first monster that repeatedly headbutted her. This is also how she defeats encounters if weapons and poison aren't an option — she does chip damage by eating them until they die. This works because she can outlast 99.9% of all opponents.
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • She uses many skills that poison and paralyze her enemies so that she can have a chance of winning. Maple is also surprisingly vicious, which helps.
  • Maple's one weakness is her legitimately awful movement speed... Which she makes up for with the skill "Cover Move" that lets her teleport to allies’ positions to shield them. She takes double damage when using this ability but "0 times 2 is still 0".
• Combat Tentacles: Around the same time Kasumi was finishing her quest to get her snake companion, Maple, looking for possible monster partners for the rest of Maple Tree, gains the ability to produce and manipulate dark, slimy tentacles from her left arm. Worse, since she put that ability into one of her Shield’s skill slots, the Tentacles also have “Devour”, effectively giving her a way to use the skill from a distance.
• Combinatorial Explosion: Her entire schtick. Most players of New World Online treat it as the linear game it was designed as, but Maple applies more realistic or oddball solutions to the hyper-realistic game world and isn't afraid to experiment. If her next idea doesn't result in a Game-Breaking Bug, she'll probably try it. Hilarity Ensues.
• Comically Invincible Hero: She's incredibly powerful and functionally impossible to kill... in a video game with no real-world stakes. The question is generally not whether Maple can win in a fight (yes, and it will very likely be amusingly disturbing), but whether she can make new friends and teach people new, fun ways to play a game they all enjoy.
• Counter-Attack: Maple's Counter skill basically allows her to add up her damage output in her next attack in proportion of how much damage she received. She uses this to great effect in her first battle with Payne.
• Cute Little Fangs: First shown when she was about to eat the poison hydra.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Because New World Online is an immersive VR game whose timeframe dilates hours into days, she suffers this after returning from a School Break of playing the game for a week. This causes her to do things she would do in game in real life like try to pull up her shield instead of dodging a ball during gym.
• Dark Is Not Evil:
  • Wears black and red armor and her skills are dark and poison-based, but she is very much a nice person.
  • Even some of her forms are this, her demon form appears more menacing and has a deep voice, and her machine god form is dark as her armor and produced dark beams.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: While [Machine God] looks like it has overwhelming fire power, mechanically it works by a lot of individual bullets dealing a small amount of damage. As Maple encounters enemies with stronger defenses it gets less effective.
• Defeating the Undefeatable:
  • She and Sally manage to defeat Silverwing, a boss monster stated by the admins themselves to be impossible to defeat because they made it that way.
  • She scores clean victories over "Flame Empress" Mii and "Holy Sword" Payne. Defeating the latter becomes even more amazing because Payne is the highest leveled player in New World Online.
• Deflector Shields: Machine God has this as an ability, preventing any weak hits from connecting, including hits with piercing effects.
• Discard and Draw: "Heaven's Throne" is a skill that produces a divine throne for her to sit on. It's effect prevent her from using 'evil' type skills like Atrocity and Big Urn Curse, but in exchange reduces damage by 20% and heals her by 2% per second, all while having complete immunity to knockback. It synergizes with Myrter's devotion so well that as long as she has allies they cannot die and neither can she.
• Draw Aggro: One of the first skills Maple gains is "Provocation", which makes all enemies in the vicinity target her.
• The Dreaded: Maple rapidly gains a reputation for being legitimately invincible, to the point where the developers aim a patch at her specifically.
• Eaten Alive: How she gains [Hydra] and [Seeping Chaos] skills. For the former, she eats a poison hydra after her shield and sword become unusable, resulting in her eating the thing after she gains immunity to poison. For the latter, when a demon boss was trying to eat her, and she was eating the demon from the inside.
• Explosion Propulsion: How she maneuvers while using "Machine God"
• Extreme Omnivore: Thanks to the fact eating things is a viable way to kill enemies in the game, whenever she's in a situation where eating something has a better chance of beating an enemy, or she sees the possibility of gaining new skills from the consumption, she's fully open to doing so, no matter how disturbing the "food" is or how edible it actually would be in real life.
• Famed In-Story: Maple develops a reputation as a nigh-invincible player over the course of the story. The administrators even consider her now as the game's mascot player since she was partly the cause of the game getting more popular.
• Fearless Fool: Maple is just happy to be playing the game and having fun, thus sometimes her wide-eyed enthusiasm causes her to accidentally wander into some dangerous place. Thanks to her Nigh-Invulnerability, though, she's able to walk out of these dangers and emerge with even more powerful upgrades than she had before.
• Feel No Pain: Maple literally doesn't feel pain from any attacks inflicted on her because of her absurdly high defenses to the point that sometimes they just bounce harmlessly off her. Of course, any attack from powerful monsters or players can affect her sometimes.
• Follow the Chaos: Need to find Maple, follow the trail of explosions and weirdness, and you will eventually find her.
• The Fool: She doesn't mean to be The Walking Fortress, it just happens.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: At the start of the story, Maple was just an ordinary girl who got into a MMORPG because of a friend. However, because of her unorthodox playstyle, she accidentally becomes a nigh-invincible player who constantly throws both players and game administrators into a loop because nobody can predict what she'll do next.
• Game-Breaker: She gains several very useful skills over the course of the series, almost entirely by accident. When combined, these skills made her defense stat skyrocket so she's effectively invulnerable while also giving her good offensive capabilities. After the first event tournament, the game developers implemented a patch targeting some of these skills, as well as adding armor-piercing mechanics, specifically to prevent another Maple from happening. These skills are:
  • [Absolute Defense]: Doubles her VIT stats.
  • [Giant Killing]: Doubles all her stats if 4 of her stats other than HP and MP are lower than that of her opponent. Since every other stat of hers is 0 aside from VIT, this effect will always be active no matter who she's facing. Combined with [Absolute Defense], her VIT skyrockets to over 800 by level 20,
  • [Poison Immunity]: Gives her total resistance to poison, effectively rendering herself immune to one of the things that can bypass her defense.
  • [Hydra Eater]: Gives her full access to a plethora of powerful poison attacks and also makes her immune to paralysis.
  • [Big Urn Curse]: Grants all her poison attack a 10% chance to instantly kill her opponents, applied per hit and ignoring poison immunity. Stacks beautifully with [Hydra Eater] above.
  • [Devour]: Allows her to "eat" enemies and attacks with her shield and generate excess MP for her skills, with weaker enemies acting as cannon fodder while stronger enemies get heavily damaged, letting her continuously use powerful weapon skills and abilities. There is a great reason this skill in particular is Nerfed to have only ten uses per day.
  • [Loving Sacrifice]: When active, grants [Cover] to every ally in its radius, which combined with her high VIT stat makes them functionally immortal, especially how it nullifies the "glass" part of the STR twins Glass Cannon build.
  • [Seeping Chaos]: An ability-set based around granting a Lovecraftian Superpower, while the basic abilities provide a long-range attack, the true power of it is [Atrocity], which turns Maple into a Humanoid Abomination with a Lightning Bruiser stat build, and even if it's killed she'll just revert to normal at full strength.
  • [Machine God]: Allows the generation of laser-shooting machinery on her body, the power of the weaponry correlating to the quality of her armor, with the caveat that creating machine weapons destroys said armor. Since her normal armor set has an auto-repair function that also strengthens it with every break, she always gets the highest-power weapons with each use, and in fact every subsequent use is slightly stronger.
  • [Pandemonium]: This could only be described as a weaponized Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (which in fact is the exact name for it in the Japanese versions), allowing her to summon a huge army of demons to fight in her stead while boxing in the enemy. This was clearly meant to be an end game skill since its requirement was to beat a Super Boss solo without nerfing it.
• Genius Ditz: While she's a bit ditzy and clueless when it comes to gaming, she's actually quite smart and knowledgeable when it comes to non-game stuff. She's also a surprisingly good artist.
• Glacier Waif: Choosing the Great Shield build means that she can endure most attacks, but her avatar matches her real-life body, which is fairly small.
• Godlike Gamer: Quickly becomes one of the top players of the game despite her lack of prior gaming experience.
• Gold and White Are Divine: Deliberately contrasts her black and red shield by commissioning a gold and white one. Later, she commissions an entire ensemble in gold and white to go with her Loving Sacrifice skill
• Good Is Not Soft: Exaggerated and parodied. New World Online really is just a game, so the horrific violence that players inflict on each other in PVP has no moral consequence, and there's no real contradiction between Maple being a friendly, considerate Nice Girl and a nightmarishly brutal Humanoid Abomination. She can poison people to death, grind them into paste, or turn into a kaiju and eat them alive, and all it ends up being is a way for her to meet new friends.
• Good Wings, Evil Wings: Whereas Loving Sacrifice, an ability where she sacrifices HP to create a barrier to protect her allies, has her sporting white wings, the Reverse Rebirth version of the skill, Unreachable Thirst, has her sporting black wings, while any damage directed towards her will instead be received by her allies and summons.
• Gradual Grinder: With Maple's fearsome ATK stat of zero and [Devour] quickly being nerfed to have limited uses, she has to rely on Damage Over Time and Death of a Thousand Cuts to defeat enemies. While her poison eventually gets incredibly strong, the strategy remains the same.
• Guardian Angel: After gaining the skill Loving Sacrifice, she became one for the rest of her guild, allowing an AOE to protect them with her VIT. Her character even changes into an Angel when she activates this skill.
• Healing Factor: Not her but her armor... and it gets stronger with each breaking. And it’s instantaneous.
• Hidden Depths: As her downtime during the first event shows, Kaede's also quite talented as an artist.
• Idiot Hair: Kaede sports one in both the game and real life, which signifies her utter naivety and cluelessness when it comes to both gaming and social interaction. It even twitches in response to her thoughts and emotions.
• Idiot Hero: Downplayed. She has absolutely no idea how gaming is supposed to work, but she quickly catches on to anything around her and is also a skilled tactician who can come up with out of the box tactics on the fly.
• Instant Fan Club: After her performance in NWO's first event, other players have taken a liking to her and consider her as an adorable and awesome player. There's even an in-universe forum thread dedicated to Maple called "The Guardians of Fort Maple."
• Kaiju: Her "Atrocity" skill allows her to transform into a giant monster with four limbs. Her friends makes use of her monster form as a mount to travel to places faster.
• Last Chance Hit Point: The "Stout Defender" skill, which lets her survive any attack with 1 HP once per day.
• Lightning Bruiser: Under normal circumstances, Maple is a Stone Wall with limited-use situational damaging attacks. However, over time she has gained various skills that allow her to gain genuine mobility and consistent ATK, mainly through transformation skills. Her Atrocity skill turns her into a massive demonic monster with decently sized HP and moderate ATK and AGI, allowing her to put on a genuine offense, while her Machine God skill allows her to produce various mechanical weapons from her body with long-range, high-power attacks, with the full power of the skill turning her into Flying Firepower, able to zip around the battlefield dodging attacks while raining destruction down on her enemies. However, as a trade-off for this immense power, these skills have major limitations. Atrocity can only be activated once a day, meaning she needs to plan when in the day she'll use it if she doesn't want to waste it, and Machine God requires sacrificing her armor in order to create weapons, with the strength of the armor determining the strength of the weapons, though the fact Maple's main equipment has an auto-repair function that makes it stronger every time it breaks negates that limitation and turns it into a strength instead, as every use of Machine God makes the next use even stronger.
• Light/Darkness Juxtaposition: In an odd way, Maple has two skill sets that fall into light and dark, but they are not compatible in the slightest. Her "Evil" skill set has Lovecraftian Superpower and demon summoning capabilities and death curses, but most of them seal off her other skills. Contrast with her "Holy" skills, which synergize horribly with her evil skills and one of them, [Throne of the Heavenly King] even seals away all evil skills, including her own.
• The Load: During her premier adventure with Sally and Kasumi where they're tethered together in a dungeon with outright unbeatable snail monsters, her lack of straightforward mobility skills and low agility cause her to be literally dragged around by her swifter teammates, and she contributes very little in this particular part of the second event.
• Logical Weakness:
  • Her entire offense is focused around her skills, and all her skills have limitations to how many times she can use them per day for one reason or another (Devour only works 10 times a day post-nerf, her armor only gives her 5 free uses of her other skills before she has to rely on either her abysmal MP or using devour to fuel her skills, etc.). Assuming one could both exhaust her vast repertoire of trump cards and find a way to get around her absurd defense stat, then she's just a sitting duck with no means of fighting back. This is how Payne nearly manages to defeat her. He challenges her at night when she's already exhausted most of her skills, and the sheer level gap between them means that he has the stats and skills to break through Maple's defense. The only thing he didn't count on was that Maple still had Atrocity.
  • More pressingly, there are entities in the game that can outright seal or even steal skills. Sealing skills leaves Maple a sitting duck (albeit one with a hide like adamantine) that needs to be bailed out by her guildmates. On the other hand, stealing Maple's hilariously broken skills doesn't do much to her, but causes a world of trouble for her guildmates.
  • Defied with regards to poison. Maple discovers early that it can bypass her defenses, so she develops resistance and, after fighting the Poison Dragon boss, eventually becomes immune to it.
  • Invoked by Mii during their fight. Maple's Loving Sacrifice can only protect those within its area of effect and the area of effect moves with Maple, so Mii threw attacks that knocked Maple back so her allies could target Mai and Yui.
  • Ultimately Maple lacks efficiency. While she can utterly annihilate whole guilds with her raw power (as the Flame Emperors learned in the fourth event) she cannot handle siege offensive very well at all.
  • The most effective debuff to use on her is the classic ol' [Sleep]. It is usually used as a means of temporarily stunning an opponent, as they wake up as soon as they take damage. However, because Maple's VIT is so ludicrously high, she almost never takes damage. Unless the opponent is loaded on piercing damage and actively targeting her, [Sleep] leaves Maple completely neutralized until she wakes up naturally. The devs are absolutely delighted when they realize this.
• Lovable Coward: How she ended up becoming the Walking Fortress; she assumed she could feel pain from being hurt in game, freaked out, and decided to put anything and everything into not being hurt.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Maple's acquired skillset from bosses are quite nightmarish.
  • Maple's Seeping Chaos powerset she got from eating an Eldritch Abomination boss grants her a few terrifyingly monstrous abilities, whether it's the Predator skill that spawns two tentacle demons, or the Atrocity skill that allows her to transform into a giant monster which looks like a combination of Godzilla and an Alien, all of which left her teammates utterly gobsmacked.
    Chrome: "I see she's finally quit being a human."
  • She gains another horrifyingly monstrous skillset in the "Invitation of Ocean Floor", which allows Maple to grow Combat Tentacles that are paired with her Devour ability.
    Anonymous Sorcerer: So, now she has something that is between human and monster form.
    Anonymous Archer: Human form? Well, I guess. But how much of her is still human?
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: The main reason for Maple choosing the "Large Shield and Sword" class. Her second shield, as seen in the Light Novel cover, is as big as she is tall.
• Meditation Powerup: After falling asleep and getting constantly attacked by small monsters, she gains a skill called Meditation, which allows her to regain 10% of her health for every second she meditates. She uses this in combination with her high VIT to gain resistances to many different attacks.
• Min-Maxing: Prefers to invest EVERY skill point she gains in VIT so her other stats are abysmal, but she acquires rare skills and can still defeat enemies by clever use of these skills that take advantage of her VIT.
• Mook Horror Show: Most of her fight scenes against other players typically portray her as something akin to a monster rather than cast her in a heroic light. This is especially noticeable with her battle against Mii, which outright uses Ominous Pipe Organ and Ominous Latin Chanting "Boss music" for the reveal of her Machine God form.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: After gaining the “Helpful Hand” Accessory she now has two additional corporeal Arms that also have shields. This is not even including [Atrocity], which has four arms to begin with.
• Naïve Newcomer: Never played a game in her entire life before playing New World Online. She needed to ask older players how to find monsters and armor, and Sally became her guide on learning more about the VR world.
• Nice Girl: Surprisingly brutal tactics aside, this is easily Maple's defining trait. She's ceaselessly kind, seems incapable of harboring ill will towards people, speaks politely with everyone she meets (her opponents included) and even thanks monsters for helping her get stronger, to the point where she invites all of her opponents to party with her guild after the fourth guild war. She even breaks down crying after the first monster she comes across accidentally kills itself after attacking her for hours. Chrome makes note of this, musing that her trust in everyone could possibly get her in trouble one day as he noted that following her giving him Syrup, a very rare animal companion, there was nothing stopping him from just taking him and joining another guild aside from the fact he isn't that kind of guy.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Maple seems to be generally oblivious to how unsettling her various skills and creativity are to others.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: As time goes on she builds up several special forms, such as her angelic Loving Sacrifice skill, her demonic Atrocity skill, and her mechanical Machine God skill, resulting in her becoming an angelic demonic mechanical god by the end of Episode 8 of the anime. This becomes especially true once she starts mixing her forms, at one point literally becoming an angelic demonic mechanical tentacle monster.◊
• No-Sell: Never feels anything thanks to her high vitality and can tank hard hits without getting damaged. It took a really powerful player and his entire party buffing him to truly damage her, and not even that was able to defeat her entirely.
• Not Quite Flight: [Machine God] cannot fly conventionally. Instead, Maple uses the recoil of her weapons to achieve a sort of flight.
• Not the Intended Use: Tends to innovate this with her skills, such as using Cover Move as a movement skill to keep up with Sally or using her Venom Capsule trap on herself to neutralize fall damage down a cliff.
• One-Hit Kill: Barely any timed had passed after the developers implemented enemies with poison immunity and titanic bulk to try to impede Maple when she gained "Big Urn Curse" from a sketchy side quest, which gave all her poison attacks a 10% chance to instantly kill. This applies per hit and "Hydra" is a multi-hitting attack that leaves poison fields that also hit the opponent, thus undoing a ton of work the players and developers did to work around her playstyle.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Played for Laughs. By dumping every single skill point she earns into VIT (Vitality), she became all but immune to attacks from both NPCs and other players, letting her clean them up with powerful abilities and weapon skills that don't care about her lack of offensive stats.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: She regularly applies real life logic to the hyper-realistic game world, whereas regular players and the game's developers operate on video game logic. This is the primary reason for many of her Achievements in Ignorance, and even after learning how to play the game properly, she chooses to roll with her unorthodox playstyle because she finds it fun.
• The Paralyzer: Her usual equipment, received from defeating the Poison Dragon, includes a weapon with an area of effect paralysis skill called "Paralyzing Shout".
• Person of Mass Destruction: While in her normal state she's already incredibly powerful, and Atrocity effectively makes her The Juggernaut while active, Machine God is all about turning her into this, bearing down on all enemies with overwhelming long-ranged firepower, capable of annihilating pretty much everyone and everything in the area. Of course, if you know anything about the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, you know that this applies to [Pandemonium] too.
• Poisonous Person: The "Hydra" skill lets her essentially flood any area she's in with three streams of liquid poison. Also, she later gains "Venom Capsule" which lets her trap a target inside an orb of poison, and later on "Toxic Division" which allows her to make multiple copies of herself that are made of exploding poison.
• Power Dyes Your Hair: Loving Sacrifice turns her hair blonde for the duration. It also turns her eye color blue. This makes her look like a classical angel.
• Power Nullifier: A chain quest she activates on the 9th Layer has her sporting a black pattern on half of her face that prevents her from using any of her abilities sans Devour (as that is assigned to her shield instead of Maple herself) and Helping Hand (as that is accessory-based).
• Power Stereotype Flip: Her ever-growing array of skillset consisting of Lovecraftian Superpower (including Hydra's poison abilities) contrasts with her cheerful and kind personality, and it has been brought up by others as a Running Gag.
• Punny Name: "Kaede" means "maple tree". Also since her in-game name is Maple, it is Maple's Story. Naming her pet "Syrup" continues to run with the pun.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Played With. Maple's first non-default suit is a rare drop from the Poison Dragon that just happens to be in these colors. While she's easily the least threatening character in the show, to both the game developers and her opponents, she is also a total sweetheart.
• Red Baron: "The Walking Fortress". Substitute walking for flying once she gets Syrup to become her mount. The light novel adds "The Fur Ball Fortress" when Maple is using "Woolly" and Poison at the same time.
• The Rival: Payne considers Maple as one after realizing that he can't beat the latter even at his prime during the guild war arc.
• Rocket Jump: She can do this by shooting Machine God onto the ground. While players holding onto her back are fine, this move would heavily self damage most other players without her high VIT. She can also sort of fly by shooting in the air.
• Rule of Cool:
  • Specifically assigns one of her skills to unsheathing her dagger because she thought it would be cool to do so.
  • At one point, Risa cheers her up after finding out that defense piercing moves now exist, because it would be way cooler to let other people see that whatever they can throw at her will only result in Scratch Damage.
• Scratch Damage: How she defeats the Poison Dragon - she just eats at it (the only attack she had left that does any damage after her starting gear is destroyed) until its health is depleted. This is also what most players who have piercing attacks can do to her because even with piercing damage, her defense is still too high.
• Secret-Keeper: Following her chancing upon finding Mii when she's acting as her real self without the Lady of War persona, Maple agrees to keep this side of her secret from everybody else.
• Self-Duplication: The technique [Toxic Division] allows her to create up to three poisonous clones of herself that not only have her high defensive stats, but can also explode and launch poison shrapnel when she re-activates the skill.
• Series Mascot: Thanks to her impressively crazy build and even more impressively crazy feats, she grows to become a sort-of In-Universe example, as mentioned by the developers after the 4th event. Everybody who knows about the game knows about her, and her very existence draws more gamers into playing the game.
• Shape Dies, Shifter Survives: As a tradeoff for how it has a once-a-day use limit, [Atrocity] has a nifty trait where even if Maple is killed in that form, something easier to do thanks to equipment stats not applying to it, she'll revert to normal exactly as healthy as she was before activating it.
• Shield Bash: Though less "bashing" and more "falling on the enemy with her shield". Her shield is her primary weapon, though.
• Shoot the Medic First: No. Under normal circumstances a skill like Loving Sacrifice, which redirects all nearby teammate damage and debuffs to herself, would make a player want to remove the source of the cover immediately, but Maple's titanic VIT stat makes this nigh impossible. It's actually more efficient to target the teammates instead to pile damage and effects onto her. Mii and the Flame Emperors take advantage of this in the 4th event by stacking knockback attacks, resulting in Maple being sent far away from her guildmates and out of range for Loving Sacrifice and Cover Move. They'd still have to deal with Maple later, but they'd have better chances against a Walking Fortress without an army manning it.
• Smarter Than You Look: She may have zero experience when it comes to games and be completely ignorant about how they work, but Maple is actually pretty intelligent. Most of her success comes about because she thinks things through using regular logic and intelligence rather than game logic, which repeatedly helps her through the game when sheer luck isn't enough.
• Stock Light-Novel Hero: A unique light-hearted take on the subgenre. Maple is a newbie gamer whose timid disposition motivates her to build her character with every point placed in Defense. Thanks also to Maple's fearless ignorance she also stumbles into some of the strongest monsters that the game devs never intended to be fought with her specific set of skills, and thus gains insanely powerful skills and equipment from the rewards. Maple quickly becomes known for being one of the most powerful players in the game, but her cute and friendly personality can't help but win her many friends and allies. This being a "cute girls doing cute things" type of show, Bofuri lacks any type of harem elements.
• Stone Wall: An extremely rare protagonist example of this. The only stat she bothers to improve is VIT, making her almost impossible to defeat conventionally. On the other hand, in the beginning, her attacks were pathetic and she required a mix of creative thinking and pragmatism to even deal damage to tougher enemies. She evolves into a Mighty Glacier after adding some unique skills to her arsenal. Ultimately she has the single highest stat in that game at the end of Season 1, with a Vitality stat 5 DIGITS LARGE.
• Take Up My Sword: The premise of the Machine God quest. A manifestation of the outdated technology that the Steampunk city was built over bestows a magic cog to Maple, to seek vengeance on the current civilization in his place... after putting him out of his misery.
• Taking the Bullet: What “Cover Move” is supposed to do, as any damage you take while using his skill is doubled. This is subverted, however, as Maple's high defenses are able to cancel out the drawbacks of the move.
• Taking You with Me: One of the abilities from Machine God, Break Core, is a self-destruct. She didn't like the idea of it when she read the description, but ends up using it against the Oni boss of the 4th layer to force a draw after she used up all of her other offensive and defensive skills. She unexpectedly survives it with half health due to her high defense, resulting in her win.
• That One Player: She becomes this via Achievements in Ignorance. By the sixth episode, it's gotten to the point where her finding more invokedGame-Breaker skills has become so common that the developers are just trying to pretend she doesn't exist.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Played straight and inverted at the same time. The Kraken could not eat Maple, and tried to get rid of her when she started eating him, unfortunately for the poor octopus, Maple found him delicious and would not leave until her meal was finished, with her even acknowledging it's spicy flavor.
• Unskilled, but Strong: She's a complete newbie in MMORPGs but accidentally became the strongest player due to bumbling her way into gaining powerful skills in weird ways. By the time the Devs nerfed her, it's too late as her stats make her a literal walking (later flying) fortress.
• Voice of the Legion: Whenever using her Atrocity skill, she gains a deep, booming voice that sounds like multiple people speaking at once. Despite this, however, it doesn't do anything to make her seem super-scary, and instead still manages to be cute enough to detract from her rather frightening form using this skill.
• Was Once a Man: Played for Laughs whenever Maple acquires a new skill, her friends and even other players wonder if she's still human even after gaining skills such as Atrocity.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Maple's Machine God Full Burst.
• Whole Costume Reference: Her regular armor and use of a tower shield are basically a black and red version of the female lead Shielder/Mash Kyrielight in her Stage 3 outfit from Fate/Grand Order, a mobile game that came out and gained massive popularity in Japan a year before the Bofuri novel began.

Sally / Risa Shiramine

Voiced by: Ruriko Noguchi (Japanese), Jad Saxton (English)

Kaede's best friend, who convinced her to play New World Online. An energetic girl with a history of professional gaming, her build in-game is a high-agility Glass Cannon which allows her to take advantage of her heightened real-life reflexes to dodge attacks.

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• Action Girl: Maple aside, she's the next strongest member of the Maple Tree guild and one of the best PvP players in the game, as shown in her rampage on the sixth day of the second event. The others even compare her to Maple.
• Best Friend: To Maple/Kaede. She's the one who got her into the game in the first place.
• Blood Knight: While it doesn't come up too often, she occasionally has shown a rather enthusiastic attitude towards killing monsters and other players, with her considering player-killing to be the ultimate example of thrill and excitement in MMOs.
• Brainy Brunette: Both in-game and real life. She's Maple's number two in the guild, the unofficial strategist who plans out the guild's actions in events, and has brown hair.
• Building Swing: Gains a web swinging skill from the 6th event.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: She pulls one on countless hapless players in the second event, slaughtering them all without any problems. This raised her reputation with other players and made her as feared as Maple.
  • She also delivers one to Frederica when she threatens to reveal her new in-game pet to her.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The swashbuckler build Sally has is, according to her, one of the hardest to play due to constantly having to watch out for enemy attacks lest she be taken down in one hit. At the same time, playing such a challenging role is what makes it so exciting for her.
• Dual Wielding: She wields two knives in reverse grip as her weapon.
• Fake Weakness: Sally pulls one against Frederica to feed false information about her combat ability.
• False Flag Operation: How Sally operates in the fourth event guild war by stealing the orb of a guild then luring the minions of the said guild to another guild to incite fighting while stealing both orbs.
• Foil: In contrast to Maple, Sally is the typical VRMMO Light Novel protagonist, being a veteran gamer with incredible reflexes and a Dual Wielding Magic Knight avatar, which just serves to contrast with how silly Maple is being.
• Fragile Speedster: In deliberate contrast to Maple, she invests most of her skill points into AGI (Agility), so she qualifies as one of these. Conversely, she doesn't have ANY points invested in VIT.
• Gamer Chick: Unlike Maple who is as new to games as they come, Sally is a gaming veteran with several championship trophies in her room.
• Gathering Steam: One of her skills is Sword Dance, which increases her STR while in combat for every attack she dodges.
• Genki Girl: Energetic in contrast to Maple's reserved nature. She even carries her friend on her back when the two want to go to a dungeon.
• Glass Cannon: In addition to AGI, she also invested her stats in STR. So she can deal a lot of damage, but any hits will take a lot out of her, though as a glass ninja, she can dodge those hits.
• Godlike Gamer: While she doesn't get as much in-game respect as the true legends like Payne and Mii, the fact remains that she's the nearly-as-powerful sidekick of an authentic in-universe Game-Breaker who proves herself to be an invaluable ally and a deadly solo fighter time and again, and she got that way through pure skill rather than Achievements in Ignorance.
• Guile Hero: Frederica surrenders a duel to her, which leaves her to withhold info about her own guild while selling intel of a mutual enemy guild also without revealing too much about her skills. Sally outdoes her by bluffing two skills on the spot, selling them entirely through her physical prowess, misdirecting Frederica with misinformation.
• Holographic Disguise: Her second armor set, which she gets in the 8th Layer, provides a variation on disguising herself with digital illusions: The jacket that's part of the set allows her to rename and change the appearance of her skills and equipment. Meanwhile, the weapon in the set is a dagger that can only change itself to a different type of weapon (while remaining the handling and skills of the dagger), but also allows Sally to create hologram versions of any skill or magic anyone else had made during a certain period of time.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: As a Guile Hero, she usually keeps her hand well-hidden for tactical purposes. This leads to most of her duels with Frederica seem like close contests in which she only wins because of an 11th-Hour Superpower. However, Frederica makes the mistake of teasing her by claiming that she wants to show off her new in-game pet while insinuating that it is a type of ghost or horror-themed monster (which Sally is very easily scared by). In response, she decides to stop her from summoning it by defeating her before she has a chance to. Resulting in her going all-out for once. The fight is over before Maple even finishes waving them off, with Frederica not even having the chance to use a single spell. Frederica is convinced that she was actually trying to kill her. (As it turns out, her tamed monster was actually pretty cute.)
• I Know Mortal Kombat: Inverted. Her physical prowess in real life, such as having good reflexes and being a good swimmer, is what allows her to pull off incredible feats in the game.
• Invisibility with Drawbacks: Her "Vanish" skill makes her invisible for a short time.
• Jack of All Trades: Her skillset is mainly comprised of basic spells and attacks, and her main strategy is mainly to spam these in quick succession. She even gets a "Jack of All Trades" skill, which reduces the MP cost on her skills in exchange for reducing the damage they deal.
• Ninja: Her Character Balance, Skills, and outfit all fit a ninja ascetic.
• Non Sequitur, *Thud*: After stealing a lot of orbs during the fourth event, and going back to the base where her teammates are, she explains that she managed to draw every single part of the area where the other guilds are working around, and what's the best strategy to get their orbs too. After saying all that, she then says she'll take a quick nap, before dropping exhausted to the floor. Having a vast speed can consume a lot of stamina, after all.
• Number Two: Sally is a formidable player in her own right, and is considered as the second strongest member of Maple Tree.
• The Rival: Sally becomes Frederica's rival after NWO's fourth event and constantly challenges her in the arena.
• Projectile Webbing: She gains a skill from a giant spider boss that allows her to use [Silk Manipulation], granting her even more option of mobility and more means to impede her opponent.
• Scarf of Asskicking: The equipment she won from soloing a boss shortly after joining the game includes a long scarf. It flutters dramatically as she dodges attacks and dances around her opponents.
• Sdrawkcab Alias: Risa's New World Online character, Sally, is her name with the syllables reversed.
• Single-Use Shield: One of her passive skills, Empty Vessel, allows her to evade a hit once a day that would otherwise instantly kill her at full health.
• The Strategist: With her vast experience in games, Sally serves as the duo's brains and, later, as the guild's strategist.
• Super-Reflexes: As a result of her being a veteran gamer and general athlete, she has developed some amazing reflexes, which when applied to her agility-build-based game character makes her basically untouchable.
• Super-Speed: One early skill she acquires is the aptly named "Super Speed", which massively boosts her AGI stat for a time, complementing her Fragile Speedster playstyle very well.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Despite her normally brazen confidence, she is utterly terrified of ghosts. Unfortunately for her, there are many times where she's forced to confront her fears:
  • The 1st layer quest that grants her the "Super-Speed" skill requires traversing a haunted forest full of undead monsters, during which she's constantly jumping about and tries to hide in a nearby house while Maple gawks at the pretty-looking spirits.
  • The 6th layer is haunted house themed. Soon after her guild arrives there, she logs out saying she'll be back when the 7th layer is added. She does try to overcome her fear when she learns about items that'd be really good for her, but she just has a traumatic experience while exploring a mansion with Maple.
  • The 5th floor of the 7th event tower is also graveyard themed. So Maple has to come up with ideas so that Sally is hidden while Maple goes through it alone as fast as possible.
  • The above strategy is repeated when Maple Tree goes to fight the boss to the 7th layer (a giant ghost).
  • After seeing Chrome's monster companion that's a floating armor, she becomes paranoid that Frederica might have an undead companion and tries to avoid her. When she's eventually caught, she uses very aggressive moves to quickly win the duel before Frederica can do anything. She's angry at this but summons her new companion anyway. After she forces Sally's eyes open, she's embarrassed that it was just a small yellow bird.
  • When she and Maple participate in a Boss Rush in a 7th layer dungeon, she gets a little nervous upon realizing each wave is based on a different layer in the game, as she realizes that one of them will be based on the haunted house themed 6th layer.
    • When it starts, Maple has to drag her into a safe tunnel who then blindfolds herself. Then with Maple’s suggestions, she shoots random spells at the undeads' direction. Then she creates several AI controlled clones who don’t have a problem slicing through the horde. After the wave is over, she’s upset that it was the last one so she doesn’t get to redeem herself.
    • Afterwards, Risa attempts to confront her fear by picking up a horror-based VR game and playing it with Kaede. Unfortunately she faints early on the first level and gives up.

Additional Members

Kasumi

Voiced by: Saori Hayami (Japanese), Tia Ballard (English)

A samurai who placed sixth in the game's first event, who packs incredible speed capable of matching Sally. Initially hostile to Maple and Sally, she befriended them after completing a quest together.

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• Badass Normal: Putting Iz aside, between Maple's impenetrable defense and monster skills, Sally's overwhelming agility, Mai and Yui's immense strength, Kanade's vast arsenal of spells, and Kuromu's extended survivability thanks to his armor, Kasumi's straightforward fighting style and lack of gimmicks aside from her sword skills gives her the distinction of being the most normal member of Maple Tree combat-wise.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: She shows envy of the other guild members gaining powers by going off and doing their own thing and wishes she could get in on it too. Upon reaching Floor 4, she does acquire a unique katana, Bewitched Sword Yukari, that puts her on the same playing field as her guild mates, but using it comes with a host of drawbacks, such as turning her into a small child when she overuses it's abilities.
• Contralto of Strength: She has a decently low and somewhat sultry voice, which fits well for the most straightforward fighter in Maple Tree who also has the curviest body among the girls.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: In the novel, using any of her stronger sword techniques comes at the cost of drastically reducing her equipment's durability. This is mitigated when she gets the self-repairing katana Bewitched Sword Yukari, but using that weapon's skills also come with a cost, such as Blood Blade cutting her HP in half and Purple Phantom Blade turning her into a child for ten minutes.
• Early-Bird Cameo: While her face is kept partially hidden, the manga adaptation has Kasumi show up in a quick panel right before the second event starts, glaring seriously at Maple, hinting at their eventual clash later in the event. The anime meanwhile gives her an even quicker one-second cameo alongside Kanade.
• Embarrassing but Empowering Outfit: Invoking the power of Bewitched Sword Yukari changes her outfit to one that's form-fitting and cleavage-exposing, which embarrasses her from the indecency, but in exchange she gains stats and skills that let her catch up to her teammates in power. She finds it especially embarrassing when she gets turned into a child by her sword skill debuff effect shortly before Shin runs into her, as the bandages loosening in that form almost caused a Wardrobe Malfunction in front of him, causing her to scream when he points it out.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Following her acquisition of Bewitched Sword Yukari, she gains access to a bevvy of mystical gimmick skills, enhancing her regular Lightning Bruiser build into becoming on par with the craziness of her guildmates.
• Everything's Better with Samurai: In a game where most of the weapons and equipment are of medieval or fantasy origins, Kasumi is the only one rocking a traditional Samurai appearance.
• Fangirl: She utterly adores traditional Japanese culture, shown quite well by using a samurai-inspired playstyle, invoking Katanas Are Just Better by making sure every weapon she gets is one, and presenting a Lady of War image through both her outfit and attitude. As such, finding out that Floor 4 of NWO was Japanese themed was a dream come true for Kasumi, and she wasted no effort in spending all her money to decorate her room in the Maple Tree guild house with tons of memorabilia. The Web Novel reveals that she spent enough to make five Maple Trees, and given the 5,000,000 gold price for creating a small guild, this comes out to a whopping 25,000,000 gold that she spent on decoration alone.
• Fire-Forged Friends: This is how she ended up befriending Maple and Sally. She initially tried to pick a fight with them, but after facing through a Chained Heat dungeon together, they leave on friendlier terms that eventually lead to her joining Maple's guild later.
• Graceful Ladies Like Purple: Her skirt is a deep, rich purple and is the most elegant member of Maple Tree. Her attire also turns purple when she's using the Bewitched Sword Yukari.
• Iaijutsu Practitioner: Her primary form of attacking and using skills involves drawing her sword in this fashion.
• I Am Not Pretty: On at least one occasion she has protested wearing an outfit that emphasizes her cuteness and beauty, since she believes it's wasted on her, seemingly oblivious to how cute and pretty she herself is.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Her preferred weapon-type is katanas, fitting with her Japanese motif.
• Lady of War: A woman who carries herself with the focus and grace befitting a traditional Japanese lady who also placed sixth in the first event.
• Lightning Bruiser: Has incredibly high attack and blinding speed, and while nowhere near as high as the likes of Maple or Kuromu, her survivability isn't too shabby either.
• Logical Weakness: Her skills draining her weapon durability and her weapon skills having crippling side effects means that if her opponent accomplishes the herculean task of weathering her initial onslaught, Kasumi is not likely to survive for long.
• Pink Means Feminine: Her main color is pink, which serves to highlight her presence as a woman of class while still kicking all kinds of ass.
• Power Dyes Your Hair: Upon using her Origin of Sword - Void skill, her hair temporarily becomes white.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Using her Origin of Sword - Void skill, her eyes turn red.

Kanade

Voiced by: Satomi Arai (Japanese), Brittney Karbowski (English)

A mage who Maple befriends during the second event. He has a knack for puzzle-solving and analysis.

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• Akashic Records: His unique Magic Staff (albeit lacking the "staff" image) is outright named Akashic Records, which represents his desire to learn knowledge alongside his Photographic Memory. It's special ability involves granting 9 random skills from the 3 skill types per day, representing drawing from the root of all knowledge to enhance his "skills".
• All There in the Manual: The official anime website has him listed as a young boy, and a single offhand line during his light novel introduction refers to him as male. Not one other mention is made about his gender in any of the mediums, with heavy use of gender-neutral writing for unexplained reasons, especially the manga and anime that leave out the aforementioned novel line.
• Confusion Fu: The highly randomized skillset from his staff and his ability to store any mana-based skill for later use, combined with a highly intelligent and calculating mind for using them, means it's incredibly difficult for most players to effectively fight him, as his current move-set and how he'll use it is completely unpredictable.
• Curtains Match the Window: His hair and eyes are a matching red color.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady: At the end of the fourth event in the light novel, he slots himself in on the girls side of the table, and fits right in according to Chrome.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The anime adaptation gives him a quick one-second cameo alongside Kasumi right before the start of the second event.
• Exhausted Eyebags: Perpetually has these, although whether he's actually not getting enough sleep or just has an avatar designed to look that way is unclear.
• Hard Light: His [Phantom World] Spell allows him to make Sally's [Shadow Clones] solid and able to do real damage. He uses this on Maple's [Atrocity] to make several giant monsters.
• Magic Staff: As a magic-user Kanade's chosen weapon type is staves, though his Akashic Records doesn't resemble one in the slightest, even when active. It grants him 9 random skills for a day, every day.
• Photographic Memory: Has some of this.
  • The puzzle to upgrade the Akashic Records was huge and almost pure white and was meant to be practically impossible to solve. But by perfectly recalling the shape of the pieces he easily makes progress and completes it in hours, although he still needed a break once in a while.
  • He quickly memorizes Sally's notes about the entire map of the 4th event.
  • During the 6th event his party encounters a complicated maze of stairs, walkways, traps and magic circles. There's also a lever that rearranges it. While everyone else is confused on how to proceed, he recognizes the correct path which is the one that stayed constant after the arrangement.
  • After the 7th layer was opened, he found a library to gather more information about the monsters that could be tamed. When Maple and Sally inadvertently walked into the quest that led to Syrup and Oboro evolving, Kanade was able to piece together the info they had to help their quest, because he had read and memorized every single book in the library.
  • At the start of his quest to gain his mimic slime companion, he is able to figure out the forms that the slime takes first by noticing an NPC character that he hadn't seen before in one of the town areas, then by checking a room that it crawled into and, after leaving for a second, returns to check to see if anything looks different.
• Playful Cat Smile: He occasionally sports this expression when feeling cheeky.
• Random Effect Spell: The Akashic Records skill works like this, giving Kanade access to a daily random assortment of 9 skills, 3 from each of the three skill types.
• Red Is Heroic: Is covered from head to toe in a red coloring scheme, fitting for his play-style as The Red Mage.
• The Red Mage: Thanks to the unique staff Akashic Records, this becomes Kanade's fighting style. Every day Kanade gets a random set of new skills and can scribe one-use versions of mana-based abilities into the staff. The net result is that Kanade can use spells and skills from a wide variety of classes, making the moveset he has at the current moment wildly unpredictable.
• Rubik's Cube: International Genius Symbol: A variation; Kanade's mainly interested in solving puzzles and his primary weapon, Akashic Records, takes the form of a segmented cube that loosely resembles a Rubik's Cube when dormant.
• The Smart Guy: Kanade's main interest in the game is solving it's many puzzles and riddles.
• Squishy Wizard: He has one of, if not the most versatile ability set among all the players, which becomes especially true after gaining his Vancian Magic staff upgrade, and a decent number of the spells he can store are quite powerful on their own regardless of his weak stats. But he has some of the lowest HP and VIT among everybody, with only the zero-point twins being more fragile, so anybody that can get past both Maple's AOE defense and his own crafty fighting style will find him rather easy to crush.
• Support Party Member: While his Random Effect Spell and Vancian Magic does grant him access to a large repertoire of combat magic and skills, his lower level, weaker stats, and general Squishy Wizard play-style means he doesn't work very well as a main fighter. But that same skill repertoire makes him work great at supporting his teammates, such as buffing them, healing away or blocking damage, and applying Status Effects to enemies in order to set up easier kills.
• Vancian Magic: After upgrading his staff by solving a second difficult puzzle, Kanade gains the ability to store spells by expending twice the MP cost and some time to scribe them in. Once inscribed, he can fire off the stored spells instantly and at no further MP cost.
• Weak, but Skilled: Out of everybody in the guild, he has the lowest overall damage potential, and when the guild was first formed he had the lowest level, but despite that, his Akashic Records staff gives him the most versatile skillset out of the whole guild, especially once he gained the ability to store spells, and his high intellect means he's very good at figuring out the best ways to use his abilities.

Chrome/Kuromu

Voiced by: Noriaki Sugiyama (Japanese), Anthony Bowling (English)

One of the first players that Maple meets, a more conventional great shielder with a more balanced mix of offense and defense. Friends with Iz, he also participates in the New World Online chat room. Ranked ninth in the first event.

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• Action Initiative: Explained in the Light Novel, "Dead or Alive" has priority over "Stout Guardian" meaning that if the former activates, the later will be preserved for later.
• Boring, but Practical: His general combat style and skillset is somewhat simple and straightforward, at least compared to Maple, lacking any real flashy burst options, but the sheer number of passive skills and life draining abilities he has allows him to endure a ton of hits, with [Soul Sucker] preventing a strategy that would be effective against Maple herself from being even an option against him^note  A barrage of small piercing attacks that do Scratch Damage will be cancelled out by [Soul Sucker], potentially even healing him instead. In simple terms, expect a long, protracted and ugly fight against Chrome, with no reliable way to burst him down.
• Came Back Strong: His theme. The Novel revealed that he got his "Battle Healing" Skill, and many other Skills, through dying. His deaths scored over 1000 in the novel, which was the requirement to enter the "Grave of Ghosts", the dungeon where he got his unique armor. He eventually starts to wonder if this playstyle essentially makes him a zombie.
• Chekhov's Skill: The "Dead or Alive" skill ends up serving as the deciding factor of the Capture the Flag-themed 10th Event, as just before Chrome gets taken out of the event by Mii and Velvet, he manages to deliver the skill to Frederica via the "Homing Pigeon" technique of her bird summon, Knots, with the skill successfully giving her 1 HP left after she supposedly falls, allowing her to cast a wall in front of Velvet just as she's about to reach the opposing side's throne.
• Dark Is Not Evil: His special outfit is a red skeleton armor with a black tattered cape, his skill set includes things like life draining and flat out defying death like a revenant and his personal partner is an undead, animated suit of armor. These traits do nothing to stop him from being one of the nicest characters in the series, along with serving as the parental figure of the team.
• A Day in the Limelight: Chapters 66-68 of the light novel/chapter 20 of the manga/part of episode 7 in the anime involves him (and Syrup, whom Maple offered to help assist him) soloing a Secret Dungeon that can only be accessed by dying a certain amount of times in the game.
• Determinator: It's not paid all that much attention, even when the story focuses on him, but the fact that Chrome beared through numerous deaths in order to properly master his Great Shielder build shows that he isn't easily discouraged. This is shown quite well when he fights, as even though he doesn't have Maple's absurdly high defense, he still does his best to keep his allies safe while fighting, with his armor making it where even the possibility of death isn't a deterrent against his will.
• Evil Costume Switch: Subverted. After soloing a Secret Dungeon, he gets a more sinister looking outfit, though he doesn't become evil.
• Face of a Thug: Based on how he never expected a young girl like Maple to talk to him, plus Iz warning Maple about following "suspicious" people, he apparently has a somewhat shady look to him, even if his design doesn't show it, with Maple mainly interacting with him out of innocence and naivety towards walking up to weird-looking people. Despite this, he's a pretty nice and cool guy who makes a good friend for Maple, along with doing his best to prevent Maple's naivety from screwing her over. He becomes this even moreso once he acquires his death-defying armor, as he looks like an outright demon wearing it while still being the same friendly guy.
• Fearless Undead: As he builds his death-defying skill set, he starts worrying less and less about dying, since his skill set means that death is not likely to stick at all. [Dead or Alive] and [Stout Guardian] preventing his HP from hitting zero and [Revitalize] and [Light of the Spirits] preventing him from actually dying, combined to make him seem undead, someting Chrome himself quoted.
• Foil: To Maple of all people. They are both nigh-unkillable Great-Shield users that can take on entire guilds and crush them, but their strengths and weaknesses are practically opposite. Maple is powerful, but her fighting style is very inefficient, dependent on limited use abilities and a low MP pool, and her only way to avoid death if her defenses are breached is a one use Last Chance Hit Point. Chrome is very efficient, with most of his skills not even requiring MP, or even being called out to put to their best effect, and death-defying is a prominent gimmick of his. Maple is difficult to kill due to her insane defenses, where Chrome is hard to kill due to an abundance of passive HP healing and even more options to dodge death. Also, where Maple struggles under siege, Chrome thrives in it due to all the passive healing he gets. Case and point, when he was surrounded by endlessly spawning undead in the Light Novel, he was outlasting and wearing them down performing more like the archetypal undead than the actual zombies.
• Fully-Embraced Fiend: He started getting skills that made him ignore death like a life-stealing zombie, and decided to activly seek them out after seeing how useful they are. This ultimately resulted in him growing more than a little comfortable being surrounded by monsters and weak players, seeing them as little more than sources of healing.
• Greek Chorus: He's identifiably one of the participants in the Once an Episode instant messaging conversations commenting on what insane thing Maple did in the game this episode.
• Healing Factor: He has a downplayed conditional example in “Battle Healing”, which restores 1% of his HP every 10 seconds while in combat. Though this gets overshadowed by the attributes he gains from his special armor, to say nothing of his medal skills and everything else he got. He was even able to take a direct from Code Alpha, the final boss of the eighth event, and immediately heal off all the damage.
• Implacable Man: In sharp contrast to Maple, who is all about increasing her defenses and acquiring defensive abilities in order to negate all damage in the first place, Kuromu goes about it from the opposite direction, building his character in a way where he can power through death and keep fighting regardless:
  • To begin with, from the moment he first started playing he took to the idea of developing a Great Shielder build the old fashioned way, which involved him repeatedly dying countless times in order to perfect his ability to block and negate damage, and his sheer perseverance resulted in him coming back stronger every time, developing new death-defying skills over time through the simple fact that he died so much.
  • Then he acquired his special armor, which was only available to the first player that soloed a dungeon that could only be entered by players that died over 1,000 times, something he managed to do in a short amount of time through perseverance despite how little time had passed in real life since the game first launched by then, and his abilities increased even further, providing him with various forms of life recovery and death-defiance that stacked with all the skills he already gained through repeated revivals.
  • Revitalize prevents him from dying at all for a brief period, which makes Chrome compare himself to a zombie.
  • A few of his later novel skills make him even crazier, such as one that grants him complete invulnerability for 10 seconds once a day, and another that heavily amplifies the effects of all his recovery skills, both self-earned and armor-based.
  • Adding to all of this is when he received his personal partner Necro, an Animated Armor with a few neat tricks that stack on top of all his pre-existing abilities. This partner acts as an Equippable Ally, granting him the "Armored" skill that provides a combative Stance System, allowing him to choose between "Strong Armor", which massively boosts DEF and provides an Attack Reflector at the cost of reduced STR and AGI, and "Attack Armor", which leaves him with his normal defense but grants him even stronger life drain and amplifies his offensive capabilities.
• Last Chance Hit Point: His "Dead or Alive" skill gives him a 50% chance to survive a lethal blow with 1 HP. Notably, this is not tied to a cooldown like Maple's version, instead relying entirely on chance. He takes it further by also having "Stout Guardian", which means "Dead or Alive" failing to activate is not guaranteed to take him out, with him having two ways to dodge the reaper.
• Licked by the Dog: When lamenting how he's the only one in the guild who looks like a death god for some reason, Syrup crawls over to comfort him in its own way.
• Life Drain: After acquiring his special armor, he gains a few variants of this. [Soul Eater] heals him when he kills something, [Life Eater] grants him health when he hurts something, and [Soul Sucker] restores some of his health each time an enemy hits him. This allows him to play into an HP-based tank build rather than Maple’s VIT-based tank build.
• Lightning Bruiser: As opposed to Maple's pure defense, the twins' pure offense, or Sally and Kasumi's majority speed, his balanced mix of stats and incredible self-sustain lets him do all of that effectively, though leaning a bit more on the Mighty Glacier side.
• Logical Weakness: Completely defied. Chrome is the only player in Maple Tree to have no weakness to exploit, save that he has no big burst options and he is slightly slower than most top players. His survivability is rivaled only by Maple, his versitility is surpassed only by Kanade and he offence is nothing to scoff at. This lack of weaknesses is one of the reasons he is so hard to kill.
• Malevolent Masked Man: Part of his general villainous aesthetic in-game is a creepy skeletal mask over his mouth. As mentioned elsewhere in his entry, though, he's only 'malevolent' when fighting in New World Online, and is otherwise a gregarious Nice Guy.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: The moment Maple gains the ability to use three shields, Chrome takes it upon himself to teach her proper techniques for blocking. His forum buddies are naturally terrified.
  He's gonna make her unstoppable!
• No-Sell: As explained in the light novel, most ailments have no effect on Chrome. Poison, Paralasis, Stun, Sleep and Freeze just flat out fail to affect him, adding to the whole undead theme.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Due to the fact he chooses to develop a more respectable build, he gets worried that he'll just be a worse version of Maple. However, her focus is on tanking damage and dealing Status Effects, while he is fast enough and has decent enough natural ATK to focus on weapon skills in addition to his shield, making him very different from her. This also is refected in his abilities, as Maple only has her insane Defense, 'Stout Guardian' and a number of limited use skills for survival. Kuromu has 'Stout Guardian' and 'Dead or Alive' to avoid death, a respectable HP pool, and multiple infinite use ways to restore health passively to keep him in the fight.
• Perpetual-Motion Monster: Some players see him as this, as even killing him doesn't seem to work thanks to "Stout Guardian" and "Dead Or Alive" constantly keeping him from dying and his myriad Life Drain skills and passive healing methods keep him coming back for more punishment. It was to the point where he was one of the handful of players that did not die during the fourth event at all!. His fellow forum buddies call him out on it after the fourth event.
  "You were just pretending to be human, Chrome."
• Player Versus Player: His strongest category, even beating out Sally in this regard. A 1v1 fight with Chrome is hardly fair, given that he can outlast any opponent save for Maple, and even coming into contact with him is a risk thanks to Necro's Attack Reflector. The few times he lost since he got his armor were due to being outnumbered by strong opponents who planned to take him down, and even that didn't work all the time.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Very similar to Maple (being a Nice Guy who just happens to be dressed like that), aside from having less black and looking more conventionally demonic.
• Seen It All: He barely reacts to the twins destroying the table when they are introduced to the guild, and his shock continues to decay as the series goes on.
• Ship Tease: Maple mistakes him and Iz as a couple.
• Team Dad: He's somewhat implied to be the oldest member of the guild, and he's always doing his best to make sure the rest of the guild is able to keep having as much fun with the game as they can, no matter what other players might do to try and ruin that or how Maple might make potential mistakes due to her niceness and naivety. Of course, some of his fellow chatroom companions question his means of "parenting" after Maple receives a black pattern on half of her face that seals away her ability to use any skills except for Devour.

Iz

Voiced by: Satomi Sato (Japanese), Caitlin Glass (English)

A crafter who takes commissions for custom gear, who later becomes the guild crafter. Friends with Chrome.

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• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: When she first meets Maple, she says that she can make her a shield that will compliment her VIT-based build for a million G. The second time they cross paths, Iz offers her a deal where if she brings her the crafting materials necessary, she can craft a backup shield for her for...a million G.
• The Blacksmith: Makes much of the members' gear. Shortly before the fourth event, she picks up an unbreakable set of equipment that allows her to make things wherever she wants.
• Glad He's On Our Side: Takes Maple's madness in stride because Maple is her guild leader. For instance, this line when Maple demonstrates Machine God.
  She's on our side, so it's okay. *Mirthless Laughter*
• Goggles Do Nothing: Downplayed. Iz wears a pair of goggles that protects her eyes when she's crafting. When she's not in the forge, she still keeps them on her head.
• One Hero, Hold the Weaksauce: Most crafters fight using bombs, but they can only carry a small number at a time. Iz acquires a set of gear that enables her to make more on the spot, which puts her into a similar league of brokeness as Maple.
• Ship Tease: Maple mistakes her and Chrome as a couple. Her response is a quick "He wishes!"
• Support Party Member: As she grows in her crafter class, while still mainly a Utility Party Member for equipment-crafting outside battle, she also starts crafting various buffing potions that allow her to enhance the abilities of her allies mid-combat just like Kanade, and her crafting skill means those buffs are massively stronger than the spells Kanade can cast along with restoring mana, with the trade-off that she needs to craft each individual single-use potion.
• Team Mom: Complimenting Kuromu's Team Dad role, over time Iz takes up the role of a gentle and supportive motherly figure to Maple, Mai, and Yui.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: When she has to directly fight, she primarily attacks with explosives. The reason for this is explained in the novel: NWO has a mechanic that nerfs a character's damage output when using weapons and skills as a tradeoff for specializing in non-combat activities; thrown items such as bombs, however, are exceptions to this rule.
• Trap Master: While she can't hold a candle to Marcus and his Trapper build, the various special skills of Fay allow her to set up hidden bomb traps before igniting them to blow up a massive area of both monsters and players.
• Troll: When Chrome jokingly stated he kidnapped Maple, she brings up the Report Player screen. After he freaks out she admits she was only joking.
• Utility Party Member: While Iz can fight with her trusty pickax and a generous supply of bombs, her true value to Maple Tree is outside of combat as their resident crafting expert.

Mai and Yui

Mai

Yui

Voiced by: Ai Kakuma (Mai) and Nanaka Suwa (Yui) (Japanese), Sara Ragsdale (Mai) and Kristen McGuire (Yui) (English)

Two sisters who, like Maple, invested all their skill points into one stat - strength. Maple recruited them after they were rejected from other guilds due to their unorthodox builds. In-game, they are hammer wielders with low survivability and mobility but absolutely ruinous power.

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• Adaptational Early Appearance: In the original Web novel, the twins didn’t show up until after Maple Tree made it to the third level. In the anime, they’re recruited just before the third event.
• Big Damn Heroes: With Maple, the twins comes to the aide of Kanade and the members of Rapid Fire when they are attacked by a giant squid raid boss.
• Cute Bruiser: Both are adorable girls with a lot of power behind their attacks.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Their usage of "Destroy Mode" is a twist on this. The ability allows the user to increase their hitbox and shorten skill cooldowns, but causes their VIT to be halved. For normal players, this is a double-edged sword. However, given how the twins' VIT stats are 0 to begin with, the side effect doesn't mean anything to them.
• The Dividual: Twindividual example. Outside of their contrasting black/green and white/pink color schemes, and Mai's Tareme Eyes and Yui's Tsurime Eyes, there's very little differentiation between them, with them always being seen together, usually working things between themselves when deciding on things, and their builds and skillsets are exactly the same. Even the overall design of their appearances are pretty much Palette Swaps of each other. The two do eventually get some individual moments, with one chapter of the comic anthology being a beach-based story on focusing on Yui wanting to repair a sand castle that she accidentally destroyed, Mai getting some screen time on her own during the preliminaries for the 8th Event, both girls getting separated from each other during the light novel's telling of the second day of the 8th Event, with Mai, after being found by Mii, eventually meeting up with Maple and Yui teaming up with Kanade before the two reunite, and Yui eventually having to battle on her own during the 10th Event after Mai takes the grunt of Mii's Inferno attack to allow her sister to take out Marcus.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: Tends to happen as a result of them putting all their points into strength. Examples include completely destroying a table that they accidentally hit their heads on and creating a giant wave when trying to splash Maple and Sally.
• Dual Wielding: The Destroyer skill they got from speed-clearing the poison hydra dungeon allows them to use two-handed weapons as if they were one-handed. The result is them dual-wielding massive sledgehammers. This gets upgraded to Octa Wielding after the two gain the Helpful Hand accessory during the 9th Event.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The two show up in episode 3 as a couple of novice players that Maple notices (with her remembering them when she and Sally look for additional members for their guild).
• Game-Breaker: invoked Thanks to the craziness of Maple when helping them power-level, these maxed-STR girls over time gain skills that take them from powerful to broken, such as Destroyer, allowing Dual Wielding of the One-Handed Zweihänder form, Conquerer, boosting their STR immensely, and later gaining the Helping Hand accessory, which allows them to wield even more hammers at once.
• Glass Cannon: Similarly to Maple, they invested all of their stats into one category, but with the stat being STR. So they're very vulnerable due to being as slow as Maple without the absurd defense, but their power is so high that even their weakest offensive abilities become what amounts to instakill moves, able to defeat all but the tankiest of players in one or 2 hits, usually the former, provided they can actually hit the enemy. In fact, their vulnerability causes them to be the first members of Maple Tree to get killed in the fourth event, when they end up left alone with Fragile Speedster Dread due to circumstances pulling Maple and her defense away from them. Later in the story they acquire some AOE attacks to deal with more evasive enemies, and while actually quite a bit weaker than single-target attacks, their ridiculous strength does well to offset the relatively lessened damage
• Humongous-Headed Hammer: While their preference for hammers as weapons already represented their brute-strength combat style, this gets amplified by how the types of hammers they wield are so big that, when it comes to their personally-made hammers, the head of one alone is almost as big as their entire bodies, which combined with how they dual-wield said absurdly-sized hammers perfectly encapsulates their Pint-Sized Powerhouse image.
• Inconsistent Spelling: Mai's name is spelled May in the dub of the anime, but is pronounced the same way.
• The Load: Their extreme Glass Cannon build is a much less safe investment than Maple's Stone Wall, and relies heavily on Magikarp Power to pay off. As a result, they require a lot of babysitting from other players early on. Given that Maple Tree is all about nurturing unconventional experimental builds, though, their guildmates are only too happy to lend them a hand until they can eventually repay their kindness.
• Magikarp Power: Their Glass Cannon build is just as tricky and time-consuming to get up and running as such things often are in real-life games, especially since their obsessive focus on boosting their damage leaves them just as slow-moving as Maple. Taking ages to get to an objective and then running the risk of getting killed in seconds is not a pleasant combination. On the plus side, once they've got enough levels and skills to play with the big boys, they're invaluable nukers for Maple Tree, and have managed to find a number of non-stat workarounds to let them bring their strengths to bear in solo/small-team gameplay as well.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: They acquire the Helpful Hand accessory in the 9th Event, allowing them to start wielding 8 hammers each, increasing their damage potential even further.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Played for Laughs, While the rest of Maple Tree are frightened by Maple's Atrocity skill, the twins are clearly admiring it.
• One-Hit Kill: As extreme Glass Cannon players, it's their ambition to deliver these to as many types of enemy as possible, and they're amongst the best in the game at doing so. They don't have to worry about their meagre defences if their foe is already dead, after all.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: Shortest members of the guild but easily the physically strongest.
• Weapon-Based Characterization: The preferred weapons for both of them are massive hammers bigger than their torsos, the slow speed and massive size compared to their builds perfectly exemplifying their Pint-Sized Powerhouse and Glass Cannon status. They later earn a skill that allows them to wield two handed weapons in only one hand, giving them the ability to use two large hammers at once (and later eight once they gain the Helping Hand accessory).

Guild Monster Companions

In General

• Animal Motifs: Most of the companions reflect various aspects of their respective trainers.
  • Maple/Syrup - Like a tortoise, Maple is very slow (with her being even slower than Syrup), her using a heavy shield as a choice of weapon being similar to a tortoise’s shell, and her high defense bringing to mind the stereotyped toughness of the animal's shell. Also, tortoises are usually seen as a sign of wisdom, reflecting Maple’s out of the box thinking when playing New World Online.
  • Sally/Oboro - Foxes are known to be agile and sly, which are among some of Sally’s strong traits. Also, foxes tend to be seen as more beautiful/cute, which fits a female player like Sally.
  • Mai/Tsukimi and Yui/Yukimi - Like bears, Mai and Yui can be seen as both cute (being among the youngest players on New World Online) and dangerous (thanks to them putting all their skill points on strength). Also, bear cubs are usually depicted in media as being seen in pairs, which reflects how Mai and Yui are twin sisters.
  • Kanade/Sou - Kanade is the Red Mage of the group, with his magic abilities being useful for either support or attack. As a mimic slime, Sou can transform into anything, and as such assists Kanade either in terms of magic support (as Kanade) or battle (as either Mai or Yui)
  • Chrome/Necro - This one is more a case of a Skeleton Motif, but Chrome’s specialty armor is undead themed while his skillset involves defying death to keep slaughtering his enemies, and his partner is Animated Armor whose abilities are designed to push back the reaper even harder.
• Horse of a Different Color: Many companions can learn the skill Megamorph, which enables them to grow large enough to be used as mounts. Maple is (of course) the first to make use of it, employing Psychokinesis to make Syrup the turtle fly. In Season 2, once everyone else starts getting their own companions, we often see Mai and Yui riding on Tsukimi and Yukimi to get around their low AGI, and Kasumi sometimes rides on Haku. All four are large enough to carry multiple passengers as well.
• Loophole Abuse: While players are restricted to having one Bridge of Bonds at a time once summons became widely available (thus meaning no more situations similar to Maple training Syrup and Oboro while Sally was busy getting some medals during the 2nd Event), they are still allowed to have others borrow the item a la Maple allowing Chrome to use Syrup. To effectively utilize Oboro's Swift Shadow ability (a move that allows a player to be invisible for a short period of time) against a group of ten players during the 10th Event, Sally and Kanade temporarily swapped summons with Mai and Yui so that way Oboro and Sou (who can transform into Oboro and use its abilities) can make the twins invisible while they use their multiple hammer wielding to stealthly take out the enemies.
• Pokémon Speak:
  • Syrup, Tsukimi & Yukimi, and Haku all say their species names in place of animal noises: Syrup says "kame" (turtle), Tsukimi and Yukimi say "kuma" (bear), and Haku says "hebi" (snake).
  • Fay originally was The Speechless, but after being named by Iz, its dialogue consists of saying its name.
• Sizeshifter:
  • Syrup, Tsukimi & Yukimi, and Haku are all capable of growing in size and being used as modes of transportation, with Syrup and Haku being able to carry all of Maple Tree, while Tsukimi and Yukimi can carry a twin and one or two passengers^note In the light novel, all instances of Tsukimi and Yukimi being used as transportation only had one passenger on them besides their respective twin. The anime, meanwhile, had Yui (and Yukimi) ride on Tsukimi alongside Mai and Marcus while Dread, who was likely Yukimi's passenger in the LN wheen the twins teamed up with him and Marcus, traveled by foot..
  • The anime shows that Sou, as a slime, is capable of stretching itself to serve as a protective barrier, as seen when it protects Kanade's group from a ninja-based monster during the first day of the 8th Event.

Syrup

Voiced by: Miyuri Shimabukuro (Japanese), Natalie Hoover (English)

Maple's pet, a small tortoise. Maple frequently uses a combination of Megamorph + Psychokinesis to grow him to massive size and allow him to fly, allowing him to serve as a means of transportation.

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• Badass Adorable: He's very cute, especially when he stands on his hind legs waving his front legs around, and even when using Megamorph maintains that cuteness. He's also very effective at supporting Maple when it comes to her deficiencies, such as binding enemies in place to make up for her slow speed, acting as a flying mount to make up for her lack of mobility, and having an energy beam attack in case her ranged abilities aren't available.
• Green Thumb: One of his skills, Mother Nature, allows him to summon and control various nature-related objects, with him regularly summoning vines in order to bind enemies in place. He also gains the ability to grow a rose patch that increases the damage of any being within its range after evolving.
• Horse of a Different Color: Thanks to Maple being incredibly slow, after Syrup gains the ability to increase his size, she uses him as a mount due to his higher AGI. Said increase in size also makes him big enough to hold all the members of Maple Tree at once.
• Irony: He's a tortoise, an animal known for being slow, yet he has a higher agility stat than Maple.
• Not Quite Flight: He gains the ability of technical flight by way of Maple using her Psychokinesis skill to levitate him.
• Planimal: Syrup has a much more grass-like shade of green to his body compared to normal tortoises and his most prominent skillset is having a Green Thumb, implying he's somewhat plant-like. This becomes more obvious after his evolution, as he grows a flower on his head and some petals on his shell.
• Punny Name: Maple gave him his name so that "together we'll be Maple Syrup!"
• Sturdy and Steady Turtles: He may not look all that tough given his natural small size and cuteness, but just like Maple he has a decently-high level of durability contrasted by moving at a super-slow pace, as commonly expected of tortoises, though ironically being marginally faster than his human owner because he at least has a small amount of AGI points.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Can fire a massive beam of energy from his mouth. So it's a turtle destruction wave, or, in Japanese, Kamehameha.

Oboro

Voiced by: Akiha Matsui (Japanese), Samantha Herek (English)

Sally's pet, a small white fox. Can use fire attacks.

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• Ambiguous Gender: Oboro's gender is never actually mentioned at any point, unlike Syrup being repeatedly referred to as male. The English translation of the manga refers to it as female, but the anime never brings it up at all, only referring to it by its name.
• Asian Fox Spirit: It gives the idea of this, being a magical fox with fire and illusion powers.
• Doppelgänger Spin: It has a skill called Shadow Clone, which allows it to creates copies of any targeted entity, including itself, Sally, and allies, to confuse enemies. This can be used in a Combination Attack with allies possessing skills or spells that turn illusions solid, temporarily becoming a full-on Doppelgänger Attack.
• Multiple-Tailed Beast: As an Asian Fox Spirit, it has the potential to grow extra tails. It gains a second one after evolving.
• Playing with Fire: It has the ability to breath fire at enemies.

Tsukimi and Yukimi

Voiced by: Akiha Matsui (Tsukimi) and Aria Asakura (Yukimi) (Japanese)

Mai and Yui's pets, a pair of bear cubs.

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• Cosmic Motifs: The bears are inspired by the Constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.
  • In the light novel, the quest to tame them involved Mai and Yui following a bear cub to its den, where it would be found sleeping in a cradle made of starlight.
  • Among the moves that the two bears can use include the aptly-named Bright Star and Star Step.
  • Mai's bear partner, Tsukimi, is named after the the Japanese harvest moon festival.
• Expy: The pair, with the color scheme and the ability to have cub and regular size forms, are basically Kumakyuu and Kumayuru from Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear if they were teddy bears.
• Not the Intended Use: [Power Share] is supposed to add some of the bear's attack stat to the user, averaging them out. With Mai and Yui as their masters, they are the ones who get a power boost.
  • When the twins unequipped most of their gear and used some [STR] debuff potions from Izu (which also fits this trope, as it's supposed to be used on enemies instead of teammates), this technique enables the two to lower their [STR] to the thresholds needed do some damage on the mid-boss and main boss of the "Hellfire Causing Calamity" quest on the 10th Layer, both of whom have teleportation maneuvers that enable them to dodge the twins' One-Hit Kill attacks.
• Recruitment by Rescue: In the anime, the two become Mai and Yui's partners after the twins save them from a tree monster.
• Strength Equals Worthiness: In the light novel, after following the bear cub to its den, the quest to gain it as a summon requires a player to "show your power" by defeating its giant form. While this is meant to be a multi-stage boss fight, the fact that the ones taking part in this quest are Mai and Yui, all it takes is one combined hammer hit for them to prove their worthiness.
• Super-Speed: They have the Star Step ability, which enables them to run really fast, which helps mitigate the twin's Glass Cannon status even without Maple around. This ability resulted in making the quest to get them in the LN a little tricky for Mai and Yui, as they use the ability during the part where players have to track them, in cub form, back to their den.
• Uncatty Resemblance: After Mai and Yui gain them, their color schemes are changed to match that of their owners (black bear with green features for Tsukimi; polar bear with pink features for Yukimi).

Haku

Voiced by: Chitose Morinaga (Japanese), Veronica Laux (English)

Kasumi's pet snake.

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• Beauty Equals Goodness: Unlike most other snake monsters, which have a heavy Snakes Are Sinister image, Haku being much cuter and cuddlier exemplifies its status as befriendable.
• Feather Boa Constrictor: Kasumi carries it around like an impromptu boa when she first gets it.
• The Paralyzer: Haku can paralyze opponents with a Deadly Gaze, during which it temporarily exhibits Red Eyes, Take Warning.
• Strength Equals Worthiness: It joins Kasumi as her partner after she defeats its tough boss form.

Sou

Sou in its natural form

Kanade's monster parter, a slime that can mimic anything.

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• Ditto Fighter: Is capable of copying the abilites of whomever it's mimicking, thus making useful in terms of either magic attacks (as Kanade) or regular combat (as either Mai or Yui).
• Head Pet: Rides on Kanade's hat when in its slime form.
• Strength Equals Worthiness: Before doing the actual quest that would allow a player to gain it as a partner, a player is required to fight the mimic slime in a battle where it takes the form of the player.

Necro

Chrome's partner, a living suit of armor.

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• Animated Armor: He's an undead suit of animated armor.
• Equippable Ally: The "Armored" skill inate to him allows Chrome to equip him on top of his regular gear and grants him a Stance System.
• Playing with Fire: Both on his own and as an Equippable Ally, Necro possess a few skills that produce spectral flames for scorching enemies.
• The Speechless: He has yet to utter so much as a slight vocalization, let alone a single word, being as quiet as one would expect from an empty suit of armor, with the only noise he makes being a ghostly, windy Scare Chord.
• Stance System: Necro serves this role when equipped by Chrome.
  • 'Strong Armor' grants Chrome incredible defence and an Attack Reflector while Necro is in that state, at the cost of speed and attack power.
  • 'Attack Armor' foregoes increasing his defences in favor of increasing his attack range, lifesteal options and offensive power.
• Support Party Member: Necro's stats are actually a bit lower than a rare monster of his tier, but when [Armored] is used Chrome gets around half those stats added to his own. Necro will never beat a similarly leveled pet on his own, but he makes his master a lot harder to kill.

Fay

Voiced by: Akiha Matsui

Iz's monster companion, a fairy.

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• Fairy Companion: Fay is a fairy that acts as the monster partner for Iz.
• A Lizard Named "Liz": It's a fairy (a "fey") named Fay.
• Our Fairies Are Different: Fay is a fairy of an unusual variant, combining a general Spark Fairy shape with an Angelic Abomination-style appearance, only much cuter.
• Support Party Member: None of Fay's skills are designed for direct combat in contrast to the other pets, with even fellow support Necro being fight-capable as an Equippable Ally. Instead, it is packed with a variety of buffs, debuffs, and assorted support skills that massively boost the effectiveness of Iz's own abilities.

Order of the Holy Sword

The main contender for the title of the number one guild of NWO, it is a large guild with hundreds of members in the light novels. The Order of the Holy Sword is notable for the high quality of its leaders as three of the top five players of the first event are members of this guild.

Payne

Voiced by: Kensho Ono (Japanese), Clifford Chapin (English)

Leader of the Order of the Holy Sword, and considered to be the strongest player in the game when it comes to PVP. Is also significantly higher level than just about every other player, with his level estimated at around 2-3 times Maple's.

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• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: Payne possesses the Great Shielder exclusive skill, Stout Guardian. While the web novel notes that he's using a shield during his fight with Maple during the Fourth Event, the anime never once has him holding anything but a sword.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Many of his attacks go through defense, which proves to be a problem for Maple. He also has the Defense Break skill to further cut his enemy's defenses.
• Big Bad: Played with. He's the protagonists' most powerful and influential enemy, and the source of a great deal of their most serious problems... in a PvP MMO that everyone in the show treats as the light, inconsequential entertainment it is. Naturally, following their first proper confrontation as rival players, which of course ends in his defeat, he becomes an Ex-Big Bad who switches to having a Friendly Rivalry with Maple instead.
• Disc-One Final Boss: He's the last major opponent faced in Season 1 of the anime, with him and his guild giving Maple Tree the most trouble, and Payne himself coming very close to beating Maple. Once Maple manages to turn the tables on him and his guild, the rest of the event is pretty much smooth sailing for Maple Tree.
• Dragon Rider: In Season 2, Payne tames a dragon as his monster companion, naming it Ray. Ray is normally a Shoulder-Sized Dragon, but it knows the Megamorph skill, allowing it to become large enough for Payne to ride and carry multiple guildmates along with him (and incidentally giving it a passing resemblance to Lugia).
• The Dreaded: Payne is often referred as the final boss alongside Maple by NWO players, being the unstoppable force to her immovable object. During NWO's fourth event, which was a guild war, he's the only player to legitimately injure Maple, which forced the latter to activate her Atrocity skill.
• The Faceless: The majority of his screentime in Season 1 shows him from behind or in shadows, with his face finally being revealed in episode 10, which is the point when he truly started getting involved in the story.
• Foil: He and Maple contrast heavily, especially when fighting each other. He's a veteran gamer whose playstyle is what you would expect from someone who knew their way around MMORPGs, in contrast to Maple being a total gaming newbie that uses a crazily unorthodox build entirely because she doesn't know any better. He's also the Unstoppable Force to Maple's Immovable Object, specializing in overwhelming offense coupled with blinding speed and decent defense in contrast to Maple being a massive Stone Wall with situational combat abilities.
• Godlike Gamer: He has ranked the No. 1 player since the game started and is rumored that his level is already 3x higher than Maple's. Fights with him show that he's very solid in terms of skill as well.
• Go Out with a Smile: Smiles and accepts his defeat after Maple finally uses her Atrocity skill to defeat him.
• Graceful Loser: After spending all his time up to then being effectively unstoppable, he takes his defeat by Maple's hands surprisingly well. He still vows to improve and defeat her, but he remains on good terms with Maple Tree.
• Hero of Another Story: He would be the hero of a more standard power fantasy video game manga.
• Last Chance Hit Point: Shares Maple's Stout Defender skill, which allows him to survive a lethal blow with 1 HP every day.
• Level Grinding: Skills and gear aside, one of Payne's main combat assets is that he simply grinds enough that his levels - and therefore stats - are much higher than his enemies. Even in a situation where he's outmatched, the fact that his numbers are bigger than his enemies' still gives him a huge advantage.
• Lightning Bruiser: With his high stats and honed skills, Payne moves fast, hits hard, and doesn't go down without a lot of effort on his foe's part. He generally only takes one strike to kill anything (landing a One-Hit Kill on Iz and Kanade during their first fight), and is one of the few that can say they've seriously harmed Maple.
• Meaningful Name: The premise of the story involves Maple becoming a Stone Wall because she doesn't want to be hurt, which in other words means she hates pain. So it's very fitting that the player who poses the greatest genuine threat of damaging and defeating her goes by "Payne".
• One-Man Army: Befitting his status as the highest-leveled player of New World Online, he can take on hundreds of players by himself and still come out victorious.
• The Paladin: His armor set has a holy knight aesthetic, his build is that of a Magic Knight that combines skilled swordsmanship with Holy Hand Grenade style Spell Blade attacks, and he named his guild "Order of the Holy Sword".
• Properly Paranoid: In the days leading up to the guild war event, Payne becomes increasingly concerned about Maple and her guild despite their small numbers and continually tries to keep tabs on their progress. The rest of his guild try to downplay this, saying that their resources and Payne's high levels are more than enough to compensate, but they don't realize that, given how we see Maple gaining boss-tier skills left and right, Payne actually has every right to be worried.
• Villainy-Free Villain: In a show with actual stakes, Payne would be a dangerous and ruthless villain. As is, he's just a guy who plays a PvP MMO with significant Video Game Cruelty Potential very well, and is friendly to the protagonists outside of combat events. The only reason we're rooting for our heroes against him is because he's the most interestingly difficult challenge for them to overcome, and because his more orthodox playstyle is less fun to watch.
• World's Strongest Man: The highest leveled player in New World Online at over level 60. His stats and skillset are enough to put a dent in Maple's otherwise impenetrable defenses.

Dread

Voiced by: Takumi Yamazaki (Japanese), Mike McFarland (English)

Second-place winner of the first event, a knife wielder specializing in speed.

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• Dual Wielding : Wields two knives in reverse grip as his weapon, not unlike Sally.
• Fragile Speedster: Much like Sally, he has good attack power and blisteringly fast speed, but any direct hits will take a lot out of him. Though really, this is relative, given the absurdly high level of the officers of his guild. He might be fragile compared to the Walking Fortress Maple, but he somehow possesses "Stout Guardian", allowing him to take a hit before being taken out. Mai and Yui found this out the hard way. Granted, it left him easy pickings when the rest of the guild game back.
• Go Out with a Smile: Does this during both of the times he's defeated by Maple during the 4th Event. The first time, it's due to him knowing that even if he dies, he knows the location of Maple Tree's base and will be able to come back there next time with the rest of his guild. The second time, he is like Payne and accepts being defeated by Maple in her Atrocity form.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the novel, when he meets Sally in the guild war for the first time, he instinctively knows the latter is really dangerous. Later, when Sally successfully parries his attack while on "Godspeed", he monologues about how Sally gives off an aura similar to Payne & Maple and feels dread.
• Super-Speed: In addition to the "Super Speed" skill, he also has access to the "Godspeed" skill that practically makes him invisible to the average player. In addition to this, he has "Top Speed" and all three of theses speed boosting moves stack, making his speed faster than lightning, as demonstrated against the electric catfish boss in the eighth event.
• Xanatos Gambit: His attack on Maple Tree's "Guild War" base during the first night of the fourth event. Had Maple not returned to the base on time after saving Sally from Frederica, he would have been able to steal the orbs that Maple Tree was guarding. Even if he was defeated by Mai and Yui, he would still know Maple Tree's location during the event, allowing his fellow Order of the Holy Sword members to mount another attack later on. In the end, not only does he gain the knowledge of Maple Tree's location, but he also manages to discover that Maple is still vulnerable when she uses the Loving Sacrifice ability.

Frederica

Voiced by: Ayana Taketatsu (Japanese), Lindsay Seidel (English)

A mage who gave Maple leveling advice at the start of the game.

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• Deflector Shields: Can use Barrier to put up a force field to block attacks, and can also upgrade it into Multi-Barrier to create a multilayered shield.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: During one of her duels with Sally, Frederica tries to use the mystery of who her partner is as a way to play on Sally's fear of the undead, hoping it'll give her an edge by scaring her. What happened instead was Sally's "super serious" mode activating in order to avoid triggering her trauma, resulting in a Curb-Stomp Battle so fast that Maple wasn't even finished waving goodbye before they were already back.
• I Let You Win: Frederica pulls off one in her first duel with Sally when she chooses to surrender before she reveals too many of her skills, though she was unknowingly Out-Gambitted by the latter.
• Long-Range Fighter: Is capable of rapidly firing lethal spells at long distance, but doesn't seem to have much to defend herself at short range save Barrier.
• Not the Intended Use: During their battle in the fourth event, she uses Multi-Barrier to surround Sally in shields to restrict her movement.
• Playful Cat Smile: Befitting her catty personality, her upper lip has a permanent cat-like dip.
• Red Mage: She possesses both potent offensive spells and buffing moves.
• The Rival: Following the combination of her first duel with Sally, realization of being Out-Gambitted by her, and loss to Maple Tree in the fourth event, Frederica became absolutely obsessed with dueling Sally every chance she gets, hoping that one of those times she'll finally beat her.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Her simple act of stopping to give Maple advice on where to hunt monsters is what sets Maple on the path to becoming the nigh-unstoppable juggernaut she is now. When looking at it in hindsight, even Frederica is amused by this.
• Spam Attack: Her special skill allows her to cast spells multiple times in rapid succession, which adds Multi- in front of their name. This allows her to do things like fire a Magic Missile Storm or set up multi-layered barriers.
• Squishy Wizard: aside from her Barrier spells, she’s got absolutely zero defense.

Drag

Voiced by: Nobutoshi Canna (Japanese), Jarrod Greene (English)

Player who ranked fifth in the first event, an Axe Fighter with high-power attacks.

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• The Berserker: His fighting style involves always running in axe swinging.
• Close-Range Combatant: A specialist in melee combat and short-ranged but ruinous attacks.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Ground Lance is a limited example, jabbing the ground and creating, well, lances from it to impale foes. He gets a much more versatile version of this after acquiring his monster companion Earth the earth golem, which can directly manipulate the ground to create barriers and other uses.
• A Dog Named "Dog": His monster companion is an Elemental Embodiment of earth, to which he decided to name it... Earth.
• Flaming Sword: His Burn Axe skill ignites his axe with intense flames that he then swings to engulf several enemies.
• Flash Step: To make up for being a Mighty Glacier, his Stampede skill temporarily boosts his speed to plow through enemies.
• Mighty Glacier: It's quite clear from how he fights that he's both strong and resilient, but outside using Stampede his speed isn't much, though still leagues faster than Maple and the twins.
• Shockwave Stomp: His Fissure skill has him slam the ground to create a balance-disrupting earth-shattering tremor.

Kingdom of the Flame Emperors

One of the contenders for the strongest guild in NWO, they are a large guild with over a hundred members in the light novel. They are centered on the charismatic leadership of Mii.

Mii

Voiced by: Rina Sato (Japanese), Terri Doty (English)

Leader of the Flame Emperors, a powerful fire mage with overflowing charisma. Ranked fourth in the first event.

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• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: She came to be the guildmaster of Flame Emperors because she was such a badass through her impressive magic power and well-spoken speeches that numerous players felt compelled to follow under and support her... which ends up deconstructed because, while she's a badass and knows it, she feels crushing pressure over being propped up as a perfect leader thanks to said badassery.
• Authority Sounds Deep: Her usual voice is low and commanding, befitting an inspirational and charismatic leader... but she's intentionally invoking this. Her real voice whenever her "badass leader" facade cracks or she's interacting with people that know her true personality is much higher.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: She took to being The Roleplayer with a Lady of War image, doing so to compliment her skill as a fire mage, because she wanted to have people look at her as a cool badass. When people started gathering around her and revering her as a peerless leader, she got more than she bargained for and is constantly at her wits end maintaining that "cool badass" image, out of the fear that revealing her true self will turn her into a Broken Pedestal for her guild.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: She'd rather use Self-Destruct than let Maple kill her.
• Bespectacled Cutie: The loadout she uses when she visits the 4th Layer's cat cafe and a couple of her outfits in the Line Wars game feature her sporting glasses, hinting that her real world counterpart wears them as well. True to the trope, they make her look absolutely adorable.
• Broken Ace: While to the public she gives off the appearance of a boisterous and confident commander and fighter, with her having genuine power and skill to back it up, it's all a facade she puts on to hide her massive insecurities and provide morale for her guild, with her beating herself up over her failures and considering herself unfit for leadership whenever she is out of earshot of anybody else.
• Despair Event Horizon: During Maple Tree's rampage of the guilds with Maple's Atrocity skill, she and the whole Flame Emperors guild held out The Siege of the other guilds, who were also avoiding Maple Tree, trying to take their spot in the top 10 until Maple Tree decides to go into their direction. Mii almost slips out her real personality until Maple Tree starts attacking the guilds laying siege to the Flame Emperors guild, rescuing them and preventing her from despairing.
• Godlike Gamer: While Season 1 of the anime focuses on her being Overshadowed by Awesome, Season 2 goes out of its way to demonstrate that she's a powerhouse rivalling Payne as one of New World Online's top conventional gamers. They even get into a brief duel that looks surprisingly evenly-matched before they're interrupted and distracted by Maple's bizarre antics.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Her fire attacks specialize in laying waste to large areas of foes at once.
• Hero of Another Story: Like with Payne, Mii's rise to becoming the leader of one of the largest guilds in NWO could easily be its own story.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: The first episode of season 2 has Maple catch her in a Fluffy Friend play area, cuddling the catlike critters in her true persona.
• Lady of War: She deliberately invokes this by bearing the appearance of a courageous leader who fights with grace and confidence in order to inspire her guildmates and maintain their morale, but when alone she instantly folds and reveals herself to mostly be a large bundle of nerves who is constantly terrified about anybody finding out what she's really like.
• Limit Break: Her Flame Prison, which eats up almost all her MP and channels for a long time in order to trap a foe in a flaming cage which deals heavy Damage Over Time. It was even able to damage Maple, although she broke out of it soon after.
• Logical Weakness:
  • While her firepower is overwhelming, and capable of wiping out entire lesser guilds in one go, she also burns through mana extremely rapidly to do so, requiring regular use of potions or other methods to keep her MP replenished.
  • Since her powerset is that of a fire mage, she naturally would have difficulties facing fire-elemental monsters that possess innate fire resistence, such as those found in a volcano area.
• Magical Incantation: Her strongest spells, such as Flame Prison and Volcano Explosion, require her to recite incantations that take around 50 seconds to complete without any interruptions, leaving her completely vulnerable when casting them, meaning she needs her allies to keep any enemies at bay until the casting is complete.
• Magnetic Hero: Her overwhelming charisma and talent for roleplaying has allowed her to amass a huge amount of loyal followers.
• Nervous Wreck: It's not noticeable normally since she maintains the image of a Lady of War with a strong stoic mindset, but anytime she gets a moment alone, it's shown the immense pressure of living up to everybody's expectations of her as leader of Flame Emperors has caused her to become a Broken Ace who is constantly on the verge of experiencing a mental breakdown, with her utterly terrified that she might turn out to not be the best leader and end up massively disappointing her teammates.
• Oh, Crap!: When Maple manages to break out of Mii’s Flame Prison using her Humongous Mecha, Machine God, the look on her face (along with Misery and Marcus) says it all. Followed mere SECONDS later with an even bigger Oh, Crap! for Mii by Maple activating another barrage style attack and WIPING OUT everyone else in Mii’s guild (not named Marcus, Misery, or Shin, who wasn’t there at the time).
• Painful Persona: Mii usually plays the role of the strong-willed, charismatic leader of the Flame Emperors guild whenever she's playing New World Online. When she's by herself however, she's quick to drop her low voice and reveal a squeaky-voiced, almost timid girl who, while still capable of kicking ass, is a constant mess of insecurities.
• Person of Mass Destruction: As the most powerful fire mage in the game, she's basically a walking nuke, capable of wiping out entire armies of monsters with a single spell. Other players may be better at one-on-one combat, but when it comes to wide-area destruction, she can't be beat.
• The Chains of Commanding: feels she needs to keep up her badassed persona lest she lose the respect of her guild
• The Phoenix: Mii's monster companion is a phoenix she names Ignis. In normal form, it's small enough to sit on her shoulder like a trained falcon. When Mii has it use Megamorph, it becomes a Giant Flyer capable of carrying at least half a dozen of Mii's guildmates on its back, while Mii herself stands on Ignis' head.
• Playing with Fire: Naturally, as the leader of the Flame Emperors, she is an expert at fire magic.
• Recoil Boost: Has the skill Flare Accel, which allows her to use explosive flames to boost her movement.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: A single person variation of it. Mii's usual look as the charismatic leader of the Flame Emperors is red. However, when she goes incognito to enjoy lighter activities like visiting a cat cafe on the 4th Layer, she switches her avatar to one that sports a blue jacket.
• The Roleplayer: Mii is introduced as a player who makes a grand speech about honor and valor to recruit others into her guild. She sells herself as a tough but noble and heroic spellcaster well because of her talent for inspirational speeches and her natural charisma. She even changes the tone of her voice to make her tough, no-nonsense image more believable.
• Taking You with Me: Her Self-Destruct skill is a Suicide Attack that costs no mana but causes immense explosion damage, implicitly designed for when the caster is mana-less and thus on the verge of defeat. After failing to stop Maple, Mai and Yui's advance (and later Maple single-handedly thrashing her entire guild) during the fourth event, she tries to use it on Maple once her teammates are dead and her MP exhausted. It doesn't work. Maple practically quotes the trope by noting she's "taking me with you".

Marcus

Voiced by: Akira Ishida (Japanese), Aaron Dismuke (English)

The Trapper of the Flame Emperors. Ranked eighth in the first event.

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• The Eeyore: Every time he's on screen he's in a somewhat depressed state, expressing how he thinks that he's pretty much worthless and that his class isn't very cool or badass.
• Head Pet: His partner, the chameleon Clear, is almost never seen off of his head.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Frequently looks down on himself because his expertise lies in laying traps instead of being out on the front lines like Mii. Misery is quick to point out that despite this, his work is incredibly effective. Not to mention the fact that he ranked in the first event, meaning he was capable of beating thousands of players with his traps alone.
• Inconsistent Spelling: Some translations spell his name as Marx.
• Logical Weakness: Due to the fact his build relies on either setting up traps in advance or creating disposable Remote Traps in order to have any potential use in combat, anybody who can bear through said traps will find that he's pretty much dead weight in regular one-on-one fighting.
• Trap Master: Pretty much the name of his build, he specializes in setting up a variety of traps in anticipation of what his opponents might do. These include explosive mines, vine snares, stone walls, and hidden poison bogs, to name a few. He also has Remote Traps that allow him to instantly set up and activate traps in the middle of battle.

Misery

Voiced by: Yuko Minaguchi (Japanese), Morgan Garrett (English)

The Cleric of the Flame Emperors. Ranked tenth in the first event.

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• Cleavage Window: She has a pretty decently-sized chest, which her outfit is designed to show off plenty of from the top.
• Combat Medic: While she's a support specialist, she has her fair share of offensive techniques if she needs to assist her guild's firepower.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Her cat summon, Bell, has a skill called Last Prayer, which allows it and Misery to sacrifice themselves to provide invincibility and recovery to her teammates over a wide area.
• Ironic Name: She's the primary support for her guild and a fairly kind person, and yet her character's name is Misery. Though on the other hand, it's quite an apt name in Latin and other Romance Languages, considering that misericordia means 'mercy' in Latin.
• Ms. Fanservice: In a series where the majority of other characters are mostly fully-clothed (aside from Sally and Maple's insistence on short skirts/short-shorts and thigh-highs with their armor), Misery meanwhile is a tall, busty healer in an extremely revealing dress.
• Nice Girl: One of the nicest characters in the series, she keeps Mii's secret and serves as the loyal White Magician Girl of the Flame Emperors.
• Secret-Keeper: Mii mentions in the first episode of season 2 that Misery is the only one of the Flame Emperors that has some knowledge of her real personality.
• Support Party Member: While she's capable of casting holy-damage type spells, she primarily provides support to her teammates, whether through magic or her large stock of mana potions. A few players even lament that the reason fighting Mii is impossible is because Misery acts as a mana battery to fuel her spell barrages.
• Team Mom: Putting aside her...sizable assets, she is a kindly figure to the other members of the guild and is the one to offer uplifting words to Marcus when he delves into self-deprecation.
• White Magician Girl: She acts as a caring motherly figure for the guild, and her Cleric class specializes in holy magic along with various support-type magics, such as healing and antidotes.

Shin

Voiced by: Kappei Yamaguchi (Japanese), Derick Snow (English)

A member of the Flame Emperors known as the Split-Sword for his unique combat style. Ranked seventh in the first event and seems to knows Kasumi personally.

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• Cool Sword: Possesses a golden segmented sword that can divide into ten flying pieces.
• Flechette Storm: His split-sword pieces can further divide in two, allowing him to control twenty blades at once.
• Friendly Rivalry: He has a friendly relationship with Kasumi, to the point he wanted to ask her to join Flame Emperors when guilds became a thing until Maple got to her first, and even when fighting her he has a Spirited Competitor perspective on his losses.
• Logical Weakness: Shin's attack speed and AOE are unmatched, but really tanky enemies can straight up ignore his onslaught, meaning his team needs to pick up the slack.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Due to having no weapon when his sword is divided, he carries a shield to block incoming attacks.
• Master of the Levitating Blades: His combat style involves splitting his sword into ten flying pieces that he remotely controls. This allows him to control each one independently, striking repeatedly from every direction.
• Not Quite Flight: After being inspired by Maple's unorthodox playstyle, he experimented a bit and found he can use his flying sword pieces as levitating stepping stones, allowing limited aerial movement despite him lacking true flight capacity.
• Spirited Competitor: Views Kasumi as a rival of sorts and is eager to eventually surpass her.

「thunder storm」

In General

• all lowercase letters: The guild name is written this way.
• Early-Bird Cameo: In the anime, the guild is listed in the standings for both the Third and Fourth Events.

Velvet

Voiced by: Ayako Kawasumi (Japanese)

The leader of thunder storm.

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• Actor Allusion: Who better to voice a character who resembles Saber than her voice actress herself, Ayako Kawasumi?
• Shock and Awe: Battles using a pair of electric-based gauntlets

Hinata

Voiced by: Minami Shinoda (Japanese)

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• Creepy Doll: Her weapon, which she uses to cast magic with, is a plush bunny whose left side consists of a piece of a teddy bear head (including an eye and ear) stitched onto it.

Rapid Fire

In General

• Early-Bird Cameo: In the anime, the guild is listed in the standings for both the Third and Fourth Events.
• Faceless Eye: A giant variation of this serves as a summon partner for both of them.
• Tag Team: How Lily and Wilbert tend to battle, as one person takes the offensive while the other provides support, with the two switching roles depending on the situation.

Lily

Voiced by: Shizuka Itō (Japanese)

One of the co-leaders of Rapid Fire.

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• Ninja Maid: When providing support for Wilbert, she is dressed in maid attire.
• Power Dyes Your Hair: Her hair is dark purple while in her maid form, with it changing to pink when she switches to her "queen" form.

Willbert

Voiced by: Atsushi Tamura (Japanese)

One of the co-leaders of Rapid Fire.

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• Battle Butler: Dresses as one when providing support for Lily.
• Man of Kryptonite: With his battle form consisting of him as an archer, he is one of the few characters that can actually do legit damage to Maple, with him causing her to utilize her Stout Guardian ability during the 10th Event after he hit her with an arrow charged with Fortress Breakthrough.

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Others

The Recurring Players

Six recurring side characters whose first appearances each involved being crushed by Maple Tree. They are Christmas Rose, the Three Blazing Brothers, and a nameless sibling duo. By Season 2 the first four have joined Order of the Holy Sword, while the duo joined Kingdom of the Flame Emperors.

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• Butt-Monkey: These player have most of their appearances involve suffering comically, including being on the bad end of Curb Stomp Battles, being rendered in Stunned Silence by Maple gaining new crazy skills, and being Jobbers who never get to actually hurt enemy monsters, getting scared off or No Selled by their foes and needing the major players to fight in their stead.
• Large Ham: Just about everything Christmas Rose spouts has a bombastic and dramatic flair to it.
• Mauve Shirt: The anime features a couple of nameless "generic" players (two Flame Emperors casters and two Holy Sword warriors), who get all of two lines between them but nonetheless manage to make it through the 8th Event and stay with the other Recurring Players to guard the base. Especially apropos in the case of the two Flame Emperors, since their guild uniform makes them literal Red Shirts.
• No Name Given: Despite having notable presence as Recurring Extras, the sibling duo that were crushed by first Sally then Kasumi never get named, not even a group moniker.
• Recurring Extra: These characters mostly exist as recurring characters to be on the bad end of a Curb-Stomp Battle by Maple Tree, yet still get enough screentime to not be background characters. Rather interestingly, in Season 2 Christmas Rose and the Blazing Brothers join Order of the Holy Sword while the sibling duo join Kingdom of the Flame Emperors, resulting in them getting increased story appearances as near-secondary characters, even if it's still of them being overshadowed by the major players.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Three Blazing Brothers are based on the Black Tri-Stars from Mobile Suit Gundam. Christmas Rose (who usually works alongside them) bears a fair amount of similarity to their flamboyant Sissy Villain boss, M'Quve.
  • Christmas Rose's summon is "Aboshi frog" (aka Motsu), a creature that has appeared in two of Shin Oonuma's earlier works as a series director: Pani Poni Dash! and Negima!?
• Sibling Team:
  • The Three Blazing Brothers always fight as a unit, especially their Combination Attack-focused fighting style, and when one of them was at risk of dying in an event, the other two maintained a No One Gets Left Behind attitude about making sure the three always fight together or not at all.
  • The nameless sibling duo are always seen fighting together, though unlike the Blazing Brothers they don't engage in any team attacks.

New World Online Chat Room

A chat room where Chrome and various other players anonymously give their thoughts on all the different things happening in the story.

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• Greek Chorus: They comment on the events that are going on in NWO.
• Instant Fan Club: Several in the chat are clearly fans of the crazy things Maple gets into.
• Once per Episode: Every episode ends with a quick glimpse at the chat talking about things that happened in that episode, though some episodes have a second one that comes up at the halfway mark.

Drazō

Voiced by: Sakura Tange (Japanese), Monica Rial (English)

The Mascot of New World Online who acts as the host for the various player events.

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• Cartoon Creature: While it's likely a dragon given the head wings, scales, and name, it looks so different from any other dragon in the game that there might be a few other creatures mixed into its design.
• Mr. Exposition: Usually is the one to give out the information and rules of upcoming tournaments.
• Series Mascot: Is the representative cute mascot of NWO.
• Verbal Tic:
  • It starts and/or ends each of its announcements with a cutesy "ROAR" to get everyone's attention.
  • Season 2 has it start tacking on "-dra" at the end of most of its sentences.

New World Online Administrators

The developers of New World Online, who oversee what players do in order to develop new content and balance gameplay, with Maple's breaking of the game being a constant thorn in their sides.

Voiced by: Tesshō Genda (Administrator A), Misaki Kuno (Administrator B) Chika Sakamoto (Administrator C) Yasuhiro Takato (Administrator D), Junko Takeuchi (Administrator E) Ami Koshimizu (New Secretary) (Japanese), Apphia Yu, Ben Phillips, David Wald, Luci Christian, Sonny Strait (Administrators), Molly Searcy (New Secretary) (English)

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• Author Avatar: Both the manga and anime give them somewhat interesting-looking appearances for when they're checking over the game. The manga has them be mouthless round blob people wearing suits, while the anime turns them into Cartoon Creature stuffed dolls.
• Didn't See That Coming: Most of Maple and her guild's antics invoke this reaction in the Admins. Special mention however goes to Maple Tree, Holy Sword and Flame Emperor forming a team during the 8th event, as they had balanced the event rewards around a low clear rate, and their alliance now means that more players than expected are going to make it through the full event.
• Just Ignore It: At first, the fact Maple kept breaking the game so much made some of the Admins want to just ignore her, getting frustrated when someone points out she did it again. Following the 4th event, however, they've all taken a deliberate stance of leaving Maple be, since her overpowered build and entertaining way of playing has gone on to draw greater numbers of players into the game just to see her in action, with many of those newer players developing their builds in the hopes of possibly fighting Maple, and more importantly increased micro transactions in the game, rolling in the dough for the devs. Plus they've come to find watching her a fun ordeal if they stop trying to find ways to nerf her.
• Logical Latecomer: Season 2 introduces a new, more serious and professional developer as a newhire, with her taking the Maple situation extremely seriously compared to the original devs, who have gotten used to her antics after everything she did in Season 1. Her status of being more serious and straightforward than the rest turned out to be to her detriment, as dealing with the insanity of Maple caused her to go through Sanity Slippage that made her gradually more accepting of her than even the original devs, to the point she promises to have the top brass of the company provide higher pay and more employees to lessen their workload, especially with all the money Maple has made them as their unofficial mascot.
• Overworked Sleep: One of the Admins states that because Maple keeps breaking the game they haven't gotten any time to relax from fixing the balancing issues, with him stating that he's looking forward to falling asleep in the bathtub.
• Tempting Fate: The overall group has a bad habit of exclaiming during most of their appearances how they've finally figured out a new, most-definitely surefire way to keep Maple from becoming more overpowered, only for them to shortly afterwards find out that Maple has already powered through their efforts and become stronger anyway.
• Trolling Creator:
  • The web novel reveals that they attempt to be this through some of the quests that they place in the game. Unfortunately, between Maple and the twins' minimaxing, Sally and Chrome being veteran gamers, and Kanade's intelligence, Maple Tree ends up beating what they think should be impossible.
  • This is pointed out in the anime as well, wherein putting what they thought was an unbeatable boss at the top of a snow-covered mountain (which most players wouldn't bother climbing, instead going after low-hanging fruit) was literally described as 'giving it crazy abilities just to mess with players'. It might have worked, too, if not for Maple and Sally's teamwork (and insane luck). And it certainly bit them in the collective tail.
• Wild Mass Guessing: Because Maple keeps pulling off such crazy things they now play a game of guessing what crazy thing she is doing at that time.

New World Online Bosses

The various enemies faced by Maple and her guild that allow her to become more and more unstoppable.

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• Because You Were Nice to Me: For trying to cure it of its corruption rather than default to killing it, the Machine King gifts Maple with one of its gears so that she can have the power to put a stop to its insane rampage.
• Beef Gate: Every level has a boss that must be defeated in order to open the way to the next level.
• Climax Boss: The Machine King faced by Maple in episode 8 is the last boss faced in season 1 of the anime, with the last 4 episodes dealing with the NWO fourth event.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: Some of the bosses meet their ends differently in the anime to how they do in the web/light novel. For instance, the boss of the tower's 2nd floor is defeated when Sally uses an unseen strategy that she supposedly concocted to defeat Maple herself, whereas the light/web novel has the boss unintentionally destroy itself by using its stolen 'Loving Sacrifice' skill, which takes a huge chunk out of its HP.
• Eldritch Abomination: Code Alpha, the final boss of the eighth event, which is effectively an Evil Counterpart to Atrocity Maple, taking the Monstrous Humanoid look, adding a Cthulhumanoid face, and upscaling it to proper Kaiju size. It's such a monster that it took the combined might of the top three guilds to take it down.
• Humanoid Abomination: The boss that gives Maple her Atrocity form is a humanoid monster with purple wings wearing armor, with the loss of said armor causing it to open it's chest and sprout several arms which it uses to pull Maple into its stomach.
• The Marvelous Deer: The boss guarding the second floor is a deer covered in trees, with it even bearing fruit. Said fruit is also its weak point.
• Monster Clown: The 3rd boss faced in the story during the second event is a monstrous harlequin. It wields a club and has a disproportionately big chest compared to its puny legs.
• Oni: The Superboss Maple faces on the 4th floor which grants her the "Pandemonium" skill is an oni that looks mostly human except for his Pointy Ears, prominent lower fangs, and gravity-defying giant long hair. He's a Blood Knight who compliments Maple after their fight and asks her to rematch him any time, and spends most of the post-battle relaxation drinking from a giant sake cup.
• Poisonous Person: The poison dragon, which grants Maple her poison-based skills such as Hydra.
• Zero-Effort Boss: The Sea King, which Maple just uses Hydra to pollute the sea it's in until it's dead. (In the anime, anyway. While it still went down easily in the novel and manga, it took a bit more effort than that.) Can also qualify for any boss blocking the path to the next layer, as they can easily be taken out by Mai and Yui.

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