Ore ni Hatarakette Iwaretemo (“I’m not going to work just because you tell me to”) is a 2012 online-only PSP adventurer management sim made by e-smile. It did well enough that it was remade as Ore ni Hatarakette Iwaretemo Otsu in 2013 and then ported to PSVITA, iOS and Android in 2014. Just because a game gets ported doesn’t always mean it’s good, but Ore ni Hatarake is one of the good ones, so chances are either the original or the upcoming sequel will get localized someday. Wishful thinking? I sure hope not.

Story: MC is a shut-in who hasn’t paid his rent for three months because his parents stopped sending him money. His landlady offers him a choice: either get a job or slave away in my inn till I get my money back. MC would rather die than do either, so he works out a solution: make easy money by running an adventurer’s guild from the comfort of his own room. His landlady helps out by handling the face-to-face business while he handles all the other stuff like hiring and firing and training and equipping and dispatching recruits. You have 6 months to get out of debt or it’s game over.

Main Menu:

Since MC never leaves his room, all business is transacted through this menu. Top to bottom:
Schedule – Tell your adventurers what to do every day. Usually training or dungeon-crawling, one of the two.
Adventurers – Hire and fire adventurers, check their stats and abilities, group them into teams.
Email – Your chief means of communication. Most emails are trivial but sometimes a unique adventurer writes to ask you to hire him/her. Also a few times a month some adventurers will ask for a pay raise. Ignore them and they’ll leave your employ forever.
Quests – Keep track of quests and requests.
Aldebaran – The town you live in. You’re supposed to develop it as part of your contract with the landlady. Use this option to upgrade your inn and build things like item stores, stone quarries, etc.
Items – Sell and develop items. Outfit your adventurers from the item/weapon/armor store. They use their own salaries to buy stuff, so it’s usually in your best interests to give them pay raises.
Data – Financial statements, Item/monster lists, achievements
System – Save, help, Config, buy DLC
Sleep – Sleep the day away. There’s an achievement for sleeping for a month, apart from that it’s a mostly useless option.

Above: 3 different views of Rodon, my first adventurer who later dumped me to go marry his girlfriend. Not that I’m bitter, mind you. If you want to keep him on the team, don’t put him in the same party as Salyx no matter how much he begs. The point of the screenshots is to show you an adventurer in more detail. Not all the stats are important though. Some of them, like preferences and hobbies, are just there for flavor text.

Salary is moderately important. Good to know when you’re trying to decide whether to fire someone or not. Personality is most important when appointing team leaders for dungeon exploration. A careful leader will take it slowly and heal at every step so they’re less likely to get wiped out, but they’ll also cover a lot less ground every day. A bolder one will dart around at random and hardly ever heal, but they’ll move faster and kill more enemies so you get more money. It all depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

Unique characters like Rodon will join you when certain conditions are met. All other adventurers will show up for hire every week, or you can put out a recruitment call and specify the class, level, salary, gender, etc. you are looking for.

Rune Knight	Servant
Priest	Dragon Rider
Miko	Rune Knight (alternate design)

 

They come in standard classes like Wizard, Ranger and Cleric, but there are also more unusual classes like Servant, Miko, Executioner and… Penetrator? (I don’t want to know). When you level the basic classes up high enough, they can change classes. You get to choose, will you make your cleric a monk or a priest? Will your ranger become a sharpshooter or a troubador? Right now I’m going for one of each for completion’s sake, but I’d say in general the more firepower your party packs, the better, i.e. offensive magic and attacks seem to be more important than supports and healing. But then again I’ve only been playing for 43 hours, so what would I know?

Back to adventuring, here’s what the world map looks like at the start of the game:

More dungeons show up later. Each dungeon dive takes up a full day no matter how far or near the dungeon is, but the farther the dungeon the higher the transportation costs. Dungeons also have weather effects, but I’m not sure how exactly that affects gameplay. Maybe it affects movement? Anyway, maps start out blank, but as the adventurers explore them they get filled out like so:

On the top right you can see the levels of the monsters. The bottom-right gives a blow-by-blow account of everything the team does in the dungeon – the monsters they fight, the traps they step in, the items they forage. On the bottom left are the vital statistics of the party in question. All battles are fully automatic. You can’t help them at all once they’re out there, but there’s a lot you can do to prepare them in advance.

For that reason it is vital to keep tabs on what happens out there. That way if they fall prey to certain status effects, you can make sure they’re packing antidotes next time. If they’re getting hit too hard or not doing enough damage you can upgrade their equipment or add a healer or paladin to the party. If they’re not exploring thoroughly enough you can change the leader or give them different directions at the start, etc. A full log is given at the end of the day so you don’t necessarily have to watch them in real time, though.

And now to the main reason why you’re going through all this trouble: your sweet landlady who shows up every month to demand her pound of flesh:

You money-grubbing little cutie, you. This is from my first, failed playthrough, and as you can see I was massively in debt and hopelessly doomed to a life of servitude. I expanded too far too soon and couldn’t keep up with my rent payments. Not good. A restart and a more patient approach paid off. Now my team of crack mercenaries bring in almost 2,000,000J a month, so I’m basically rolling in it. And now landlady-chan is all deredere towards me and stuff. Oh, so predictable.

So that’s Ore ni Hatarakette Iwaretemo Otsu in a nutshell. Send adventurers out, sell what they bring back and make your living that way. It seems a bit complicated at the start, but it’s really quite simple. Simple, and addictive. I never knew sitting on your butt and letting others work for you could feel so good. Capitalism ho!

But what exactly is so much fun abut it? I’m hard pressed to say. I guess it’s the micromanagement aspect? Hiring, equipping, monitoring adventurers, watching them go through adventurers, seeing what makes them stumble, bring them back, tweaking parties, making even better equipment, decking them out again, send them back out, and on and on and on. It’s everything Brave Company should have been and wasn’t. There’s a lot of trial and error involved in beating the trickier monsters too. Those 43 hours have passed in a flash, and I haven’t even unlocked all the dungeons yet!

It’s not a flashy or visually impressive game by any means, but it’s just plain fun to play. No major complaints after 43 hours (see, I’m totally not mad about Rodon’s desertion) but if anything changes between now and when I finish the game I’ll be back to file another report. See ya!