Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan (3DS)
The story of WorkBane is not one eagerly told by bards. It is drab, and features fewer heroes and anti-heroes than a fifth grader’s spelling test. There is nothing for the audience to root for, nothing to hold their attention beyond the opening chords. The story of WorkBane is poor and empty.
Fortunately, it is rarely asked for.
But if you do ask, supper on the tongue as you return from a long week’s work in the Cloudy Stronghold or Windy Plains, then the bard might acquiesce, might take out his harp to spin it as a song, might prepare for you a limerick, for there is surely no better form to tell the tale of the guild so devoid of legend, worth, or exploits than one made of joke and rhyme. Or he might tell it to you plainly.
The guild of WorkBane is filled with five of the least motivated, most uninteresting adventurers that ever were hired by the Adventurers’ Guild. And none of them are less motivated or more uninteresting than their captain, Michael the Sniper. He’s roguish, handsome, but any positive qualities worth speaking of beyond that would be lies. His guild is appropriately named: work is the bane of his crew’s existence. They’ve never finished a job, never saved a world, never done anything more important than drop a deuce.
Michael claims himself a sniper, but he’s barely killed more than a couple dozen Tree Rats, because he was hungry and the local tavern was too expensive. The resulting food poisoning led to that aforementioned deuce, and his infamy spread throughout town, doing rounds with the street corner’s gossip.
Dr. Studd, the crew’s resident Medic, did what he could to cure his captain of his predicament, but he’s got fewer degrees than a thermometer in Iceland, and so what concoctions he did cook up were more soup than medicine, and did Michael’s stomach no aide. But the man knows how to clean up, and his almost casual hair hides a keen eye to style. His dream was to be a hair stylist, but hard times forced him to take up the adventurer’s mantle to make a living.
Allura the Fortress was once a well-known rookie in the field, before she got involved with the WorkBane guild, erasing her renown and removing her name from the pages of history. But even her shield and heavy armor could do little to protect Michael from his own stomach, and as the guild snuck guiltily out of the tavern, knowing they would never be able to return again, Allura questioned, and not for the first time, her life decisions that had led to her current position.
Foreigners King-Mun the Runemaster and Lia-Rhi the Landsknecht hailed from different lands, and the language barrier between they and the WorkBane guild caused them to follow captain Michael for months, believing falsely that WorkBane would bring them to the city’s mayor to discuss the terrible calamities befalling the kingdom. Unfortunately, the days spent on the airship, meandering the skies in search of excellent food or an alleviation to their boredom, have yet to translate to a meeting with the mayor.
There are no tales to tell of the WorkBane guild, for their exploits are few. They accidentally took credit for saving a bestial race from a terrible monster, stumbling upon its corpse when one day lost in the woods. The Bushi that found them assumed they the monster’s slayer, unknowing of their mistake for seven months, before scientists revealed that the monster had indeed died of a rare form of foot disease. And it is said they saved a girl who was kidnapped by a dastardly aristocrat, but it turns out they thought to hold the girl for ransom, so desperate they were for money to fill their mouths with delicious food.
WorkBane has done nothing of note in all their years of existence, just as their forefathers in Etrian Odysseys before them. But such is the curse of these intrepid adventurers- no matter how good the game, no matter how lush its world, how addicting its exploration, our heroes will simply never amount to anything at all.