Someone was lying through their teeth when they posted a help wanted ad for druids.
Help Wanted ads often have little or nothing to do with the actual job or necessary qualifications, but nowhere more than in videogames. It's hard to imagine that Mario wasn't a little sore about what was expected of him when he showed up for his first day as a plumber.
From what I've been led to believe, Druids are essentially pointy-eared park rangers. Except they're actually worse dressed, have the kind of reverence for nature usually reserved for Native American stereotypes, and can turn into bears, granting them the awesome power to perform one-man reenactments of Yogi cartoons. Also, unless Spinal Tap was lying to me, there should be henges involved in some way.
In MMOs, however, Druids spend 99.99% of their time kicking nature directly in her balls. Which is apparently OK if it's for a quest. "Welcome, Akual'ung Forestfriend, child of the earth mother and initiate of the Order of the Prancing Fern! For your first task you must take this consecrated hitting stick and beat the ever loving shit out of every living thing you see. Especially bears. Because seriously, f**k bears. May the Goddess smile upon your bastardry."
For a guy graced with the single best weapon in the entire sprawling Mega Man series, Metal Man is stuck with a bizarrely lame job description. It's like Dr. Wily had very specific roles in mind for every single one of his goons, but needed one more to bring the total up to a nice round number and didn't feel like thinking up any more stupid themes. The guy who showed up to the interview just happened to be really overqualified. They could have called him Throws Craploads of Saw Blades Man, Annoying Conveyor Belt Man, or maybe Kill Me First Man. Anything would have been better than Metal, which is probably the least remarkable thing he has going for him. Every robot rusting in Dr. Wily's back yard is made of metal, with the exception of Wood Man, who my 12 year-old self informs me is made of erections.
She may be a really excellent cook, gardener, skydiving piano tuner, and practitioner of whatever other skills have been explored in her games, but one thing we've never, ever seen Mama actually doing is parenting. Given that motherhood is a significant part of her persona it's more than a little odd that she's managed to keep her progeny completely under wraps. It'd be understandable to hide them away from the prying eyes of the press, but this is a level of reclusiveness that would embarrass Michael Jackson and hints at dark, unspeakable secrets. Despite her skills as a chef I can't help suspecting that at the end of the day she just flings some fish heads down the basement stairs for her pale, blind babies to fight over in the darkness.
I'm probably just bitter because I want to see a Nintendo game about making babies.
Have you ever played a videogame with a ninja in it? How did you know? Because if you saw ninjas, somebody wasn't doing their job very well. I've yet to see a ninja game box cover that displays an empty room, so it's safe to say that I've never actually played a real ninja game in my life. Which is fine, really. Sub-par ninjas probably make for far more entertaining gameplay. A true ninja title would showcase scenes of normal soldiers or whatever wandering around, and when you push a button one of them would appear to spontaneously drop dead or do that cool slowly-sliding-apart thing that the recently ninja-killed seem prone to doing. As gnarly as that sounds, it's hard to imagine it holding the interest of a non-psychotic for more than an hour.
There are an awful lot of bounty hunters in videogames, but I've seen precious few of them who ever actually hunt bounties. Samus Aran is probably the most famous person in this profession, and I've never once seen her take someone in for skipping their space bail. Granted, bounty hunting is a job whose description can overlap somewhat with assassination and mercenary work, but there's just no way that "capture fugitives for a monetary reward" can be interpreted to mean "explode the hell out of entire planets for personal reasons." Sure, maybe she does some actual bounty hunting on the side, but its pretty far from her specialization. Her first job is blowing shit up. Bounty hunting, if she ever actually engages in any, is just sort of a hobby. Calling her a bounty hunter is like introducing Stephen Hawking as a prominent botanist because he owned a house plant once.
