There are some things you can say that Etrian Odyssey 5 is. A video game, for example. An installment of the Etrian Odyssey series, naturally. A product being sold through the 3DS. A dungeon crawler. A way to spend a few dozen hours of your time.
But 1 of the things you can’t say that Etrian Odyssey 5 is, is a story.
Perhaps riding high off the mild success of the previous installments, the developers of EO5 gambled that their audience had by now been trained, over the course of the preceding 4 titles, how to play an Etrian Odyssey through to the end purely by habit and muscle memory. Figuring that they’d use Pavlovian instinct to their advantage, the creators of Etrian Odyssey just decided to forego writing an actual, present narrative for the first 4 of the main game’s 5 dungeons. I mean, there’s a bit of a subplot--and I do mean a bit, certainly no more than that--in the third dungeon regarding a side NPC and the duty of her heritage and whatnot, but certainly there wasn’t any story leading to that moment, nor any in the dungeon after it.
The EO series is not, of course, known for its strength in storytelling. I realize that. Still, the previous installments in the series DID actually HAVE a narrative sequence of events to drive the game’s actors forward. Etrian Odyssey 2 had that stuff with Arianna’s quest and the rituals and Overlord and so on, EO4 had a running story with the empire and the different races connected by the world’s history and all that jazz, etc. And I actually kinda liked EO1’s story; it was nothing unique, but the characters were decent and the story with M.I.K.E and the righting of past mankind’s wrongs and whatnot was pretty good. In each game previous to the fifth,* you had a reason to be exploring dungeons. Etrian Odyssey 5, however, just lazily decides that exploring dungeons is its own reason, and leaves it at that for 80% of the title.
Oh, they did try to be sneaky about it, I’ll admit. Shameless though they were about the matter, the game’s writers at least gave a halfhearted effort, at the end of the game, to seem at least slightly less transparent about their sloth, and shot for a retroactive “THIS is what it was all about, all along” deal. Unfortunately, though, this ain’t Startropics 1, and what, in the hands of competent writers and ideas-men, added a welcome and surprising gravity to a game that comported itself with levity and cheerful adventure in the early days of games as narrative vehicles, does not suffice in the hands of the inept and lazy for an RPG that acts like it takes itself seriously during an age in which RPGs have an established history and expectation of storytelling. EO5’s Arken is just not equal to the role of Startropics 1’s Argonian children.
Nor does she have the significance and weight of personality that allowed Rucks and Subject Not Found to function adequately as the sole voices of Bastion and Transistor’s story and lore. Arken is the closest thing to a character of plot significance in this game, and yet we learn nothing of her until the absolute end of the game, nor hear any thoughts or impressions of substance from her during the entire long, long lead-up to that point. You can’t just have the only character who knows anything important to the story or directly connects to the core purpose of the game be a complete, blank unknown for 85% of your work! And even when, at the end of the main game’s course, Arken finally does open up to any degree, she’s mostly just spouting exposition at us--a much-needed trickle of information after the long drought that is more than 4/5ths of Etrian Odyssey 5, to be sure, but she doesn’t have any personality to speak of, so we still can’t form a connection with her, and thus we as an audience still have no stake in anything we do in the game.
With only 1 character who really matters and presents any real plot, and with that character being closer to an impassive Wikipedia plot summary page than to a personality, the act of beating Etrian Odyssey 5 is about as exciting and rewarding an accomplishment as successfully doing one’s laundry.
Now, of course, Etrian Odyssey does love its post-game extra super dungeons, and EO5 is no different. And since Arken decides to join you on your journey through this sixth dungeon, you’d think, naturally, that this is where EO5 is gonna turn it around, develop her as a proper character, get some actual storytelling going.
Nope! Arken may be with you the whole damn time you traverse the sixth dungeon, but she’s only going to say stuff a few times throughout the whole trek. Mostly just when you reach each new floor, in fact. Just about the only reason you’ll remember she’s there at all is because she pops up to let you know she’ll be waiting in the dungeon every time you leave to resupply and heal back at the town. The most noticeable presence Arken has as a character boils down to a parting “See you soon!” message.
It’s completely baffling! First of all, the sixth dungeon in EO5 is an even longer and more tedious pain in the ass than the usual Etrian Odyssey post-game slog, so a more active speaking presence by Arken would have been a pretty positive countermeasure to the inevitable boredom. And if she’s not going to do anything to entertain you, why not at least have her take part in battles as a guest character? The tagging-along-guest-fighter bit was done earlier in the game, during the technically-part-of-the-main-game-but-in-reality-basically-just-amounts-to-a-sidequest stuff with the necromancer king. They already had the mechanics in place for something like this, and Arken’s lived in the monster-infested fifth dungeon for a bajillion years so she must know how to throw a punch. At the very least, you’d think she’d help with the fight against the Star Devourer. The thing destroyed Arken’s entire species; you’d think that’d be personal enough to at least warrant her throwing a rock at it, or something.
Although she didn’t seem to dwell all that long or deeply on the news that her race was wiped out in a single stroke. Maybe they were banking on her aloofness being a selling point of how alien she is, or something. I dunno. Still seems like a hell of an under-reaction to the situation.
Someone explain it to me. If the character isn’t going to speak or interact with you for more than 5 collective minutes over the course of as many hours of exploration, and those few minutes of interaction still don’t result in much character development even in situations where they should, and she’s not going to assist in combat or have any other effect whatsoever on the gameplay...then what was the point of her even being there at all?
I don’t get Arken. And I don’t think anyone who made Etrian Odyssey 5 gets RPGs. She’s the only mouthpiece and actor in the game’s “plot,” so-called, yet only materializes in the last 20% of the game. She’s supposed to function as the single, solitary character of importance to what is ostensibly a narrative, yet has no personality and rarely speaks even once she’s finally shown up. Then, post-game, they have her accompany the party through a long, frustrating dungeon that desperately needed some factor of distraction to make it more palatable, and which had a difficulty high enough that a guest party member would have been welcome...and yet squander the chance to enrich her lacking character, add purpose to the game, make the tedious sixth dungeon more tolerable, and give players a token helping hand with especially difficult battles, by having her almost never speak, say and react very little when she does, and contribute nothing in any gameplay capacity. I don’t know how much potential one can honestly say Arken had to begin with, but one can say, with certainty, that Atlus utterly wasted all of it.
* I think. I actually haven’t played EO3 yet. I suppose it could also be meaningless crap like EO5. I guess I’ll see sooner or later.
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