If you're a man, you gotta see your decision through to the end!
Authors: Author(s) : Maji Manji , Aisako Light novel released in the west in 9/14/2022. Manga released in the west in 03/22/2023.
Yuri, The Protagonist, is a very, very unlucky high-school boy, leaving him borderline suicidal in depression. Until he came across the VRMMO Blade Skill Online and used what he gleaned from the official company strategy website to set up his character. Unfortunately for Yuri, the game devs are brilliant programmers, but otherwise are complete idiots and left the website unsecured, so trolls put blatantly false information on the strategy website and Yuri's character build is set based on that information. Sick and tired of being kicked around in reality by his misfortune and bullies, he's not going to let himself get kicked around in a videogame too, so he's determined to make his luck-exclusive summoner+archer build the best in the game or burn out trying, and succeeds by finding some rather niche synergies and Flaw Exploitation. The devs, rather than use Yuri's success as a lure for the game, are butt-hurt that their incompetence and ineptitude is on display and become actively antagonistic, looking to tear down Yuri by any means possible, even if they trash their own game in the process, which only serves to fire Yuri up even more!
Compare and contrast with Bofuri: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense. where the main character chooses a Crippling Overspecialization in defense rather than luck and the devs eventually become pragmatic and make the Main Character their mascot rather than their Designated Villain.
Associated tropes:
- Achievement System: The biggest reason the top players of Blade Skill Online are the best players is that they get titles, skills, and other mechanics based on their in-game achievements that translates into boosting their chosen play-style. Yuri's Luck-based build succeeds at taming rare and powerful monsters, including dungeon and raid bosses, which the devs obviously never intended, because they Nerf Yuri every chance they get.
- Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: Yuri and her allies just want to play the game by the rules and enjoy themselves, with genuine camaraderie, kindness, honesty, fair play, and all sorts of virtues. The devs lie, cheat, move the goal posts, rewrite the rules on the fly, and even eventually hire the top players from alien VRMMO with completely bizarre game mechanics as assassins, just to try and alienate Yuri to make him Rage Quit because they can't handle the fact that Yuri's game-play is a beacon of their own incompetence. Yuri's the villain of the story, while the devs, and their hired (in game) assassins are listed as "heroes."
- Black Comedy: The most enjoyable aspect of the story is seeing the elitist devs, who all went through an elite ivy-league college, touted as "geniuses" since they were old enough to walk and talk, but never had to work a day in their lives for it, and having no clue how to do anything other than academic theory, go totally postal because they made a VRMMO with a real-money-trade option, but never bothered to put enough money in the bank to cover players who decide to cash out their earnings and Yuri decides to cash out, after getting huge amounts of cash because he did something outrageous. It's also immensely gratifying to watch a person, or group of persons, go after Yuri and he rampages in response, cackling like a madman, and having an internal monologue where he genuinely believes he's the good guy, and has solid moral foundations to back that claim!
- Did Not Think This Through: The game developers, as is often cited in the story, are excellent programmers, but in everything else are complete and total morons, and never consider the long-term consequences of their whims or designs. It's only when Yuri comes along and exploits their loopholes that it registers and that only serves to make them go postal and place on the blame on him, trying to drive him out of the game even if they destroy their own company in the process. Eventually, even their own hired hitmen smack them upside the head with their own ill-conceived actions and trigger the end-game content long before the devs are ready to release it!
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: More like Dirty Coward can't comprehend Spirited Competitor. The devs go ballistic trying to ramp up the difficulty in Yuri's gameplay, trying to make the protagonist Rage Quit, and the double standard is glaringly obvious, but this just makes Yuri more determined to beat them at their own game, which utterly baffles them. Because they're total morons and cowards who hide behind anonymity and software, never playing their own game or fighting their own fights.
- First-Episode Spoiler: The fact that Yuri, who chose the weakest possible combination of job, weapon, and stats will become the strongest player is given away in the very first page of the manga, and the synopsis of the web novel.
- G.I.R.L.: Uninentionally. Yuri is a guy who has a very effeminate face. The game avatar software went with Yuri's face and the "Random Edit" mechanic gives Yuri a very attractive and busty female avatar, which he's stuck with unless he completely resets his character, but that's just not how he rolls.
- Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: The devs, for a good while, could justify trying to nerf Yuri every chance they got, in the name of game balance, because he tamed dungeon bosses that entire guilds of players couldn't stand a chance against, due to luck-based victories and One In A Million Chance mechanics, but when they decide to stop playing fair and decide to hire (in game) assassins with game mechanics and abilities coming from other VRMMO without warning, borrowing the latter's servers and software to make it happen, it alienates the entire fanbase, including said assassins and the assassins in question betray the devs first chance they get.
- Killer GM: The devs, being total morons, decide to dump all the blame for their incompetence on Yuri and go out of their way to try and drive him out of the game, by any means, eventually even going so far as to hire the top players from other, completely alien, VRMMO and instituting the alien game system mechanics from those other games in their own, just to try and trip Yuri up, to hell with their own fanbase!
- Quantity Versus Quality: The most common conflicts between players in the story amounts to Yuri, who has raised his avatar and his allies with care, facing off against a much larger group of randos that have rarely, if ever, worked together before and just played the game for fun, rarely giving much thought to actually optimizing their builds.
- Short Title: Long, Elaborate Subtitle: The full name of the novel is "Blade Skill Online: With Trash Job ‘Summoner’, Weakest Weapon ‘Bow’, and Rotten Stat ‘Luck’, I Rise to Be the ‘Last Boss’!" while the name of the manga is only "Blade Skill Online."
- Spirited Competitor: The entire player base of Blade Skill Online lives for fighting, purely for the thrill of the challenge, the top players especially. The devs just can't understand this.
- Troll: Of the internet variety. The reason Yuri chose the lackluster "Summoner" job along with the besmirched bow weapon and a luck-based character build is that internet trolls overwrote the official website to list that build is actually the strongest found by the beta testers, when in fact the devs and the testers found that to be the weakest possible build, but Yuri proves them all wrong, as listed in manga's chapter 1, when the In Medias Res has him go by "Demon King" Yuri and wipe out an entire arena of players, single-handed.
