I forgot it's name at the time so I didn't include it, but "Bofuri" was what I was thinking of when I listed treating min-maxing as a new discovery. Like no one in the fictional dev studio or supposedly massive playerbase of jrpg fans thought to ask "What happens if ssomeone dumps all of their stat points in one place?" Until some random girl shown to barely know how to use a computer tried it.
And I might as well add "totally 1 of a kind items that are actually one of a kind" (and therefore cease to exist the second a player quits the game, possibly from having their account repeatedly hacked by thieves), and "pain feedback that actually hurts" (best case scenario the game gets taken over by BDSM enjoyers) to the list.
Yes I know I'm using a lot of anime for this but western media thinks video games are the cause of (insert current decade societal issue) and the non-mainstream creators are more interested in Lit-RPGs that I'm sure already got brought up here at least twice because I was one of those times.
The Bofuri light novels do go into that, but I don't know how much of it was in the anime. Especially since from what I recall, the Bofuri anime has the messageboard chapters flash through each episode in maybe one second of footage, so
all the other minmaxing done by other players gets relegated to that one second of screentime.
The protagonist of Bofuri is special partly because she lucks into odd skill interactions, partly because her guild helps cover for her weaknesses, and mostly because she is willing to spend
hours on end doing stuff that appear to have little to no apparent gameplay effect.
After the first public event of the game, when the protagonist becomes famous, other players try the same idea of dumping all their stat points into one stat, but they gave up because the disadvantages were too great for someone who just wants to play a game. The twins who join the protagonist's guild also dump all their stats into one place (Strength), and they were on the verge of quitting and rerolling their characters before the protagonist met them and offered to be their pocket tank.
Other members of the guild include a genius puzzle-solver boy and a ridiculously athletic girl, who carry their RL advantages into the game. The "normal" member of the guild is also considered overpowered, because he got his skills from grinding normally, including
dying so much the game gave him an achievement skill for it.
This kind of continues with other characters seen in the story. Players who just want to play a game can do so without minmaxing or bothering with skill interactions. Players who explore deep into the game mechanics can become just as overpowered as the protagonist, proportional to the effort they put in. Content for the game appears to be easily and trivially produced, since various characters (including unnamed side ones) have stumbled upon the one-of-a-kind items and dungeons themselves, and posted about it on the messageboard.
And in possibly the most realistic part of the story, a lot of this is
unintended behaviour, and the devs are just as desperately trying to fix and balance the game while it's going on, hampered by their desire not to be seen as targeting the protagonist's exploits specifically. Part of the reason the devs let the protagonist be is she's good for marketing the game.
