Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

Released on September 10, 2010 by Carpe Fulgur LLC

Developed by EasyGameStation

Recettear is the story of an item shop, the girl who lives in it, and the fairy who turned her life upside down. Recette Lemongrass finds herself in charge of an item shop built into her house, in order to pay back a loan her father took and then skipped out on - and Tear, her newfound fairy "companion", won't take no for an answer! As Recette, you have to decide how you'll get your stock - either through playing the markets in town or going out into the wild with an adventuring friend and thrashing beasts until they give up the goodies - how much to sell things for, what the shop should look like, and how to best go about getting the money Tear needs to pay off the loan. If you can't come up with the money... well, hope you like living in a cardboard box.

Key features:

Manage all aspects of an item shop – from stock to interior design!

Explore randomized dungeons – never quite the same twice!

Multiple adventurers to choose from... [Read All]

A Quest from the Other Side of the Counter

http://www.carpefulgur.com/recettear/about_3.jpg

Ever notice how, in your garden-variety RPG, the shopkeep gets to sit behind a counter all day while you quest up and down the countryside slaying monsters and looting dungeons... yet the shopkeep seems to be the one to wind up with all your gold by the end of the game? Ever wanted to switch places for a day?

Meet Recettear. This game is all about the business end of the RPG world. You get to manage stock, decide which of your wares to showcase, haggle over prices, and, pay off an outstanding debt. Nope, not even kidding - paying off the debt, in fact, is the main storyline of the game. In a nod to traditional dungeoneering, you do get to hire adventurers to explore... Read All Ever notice how, in your garden-variety RPG, the shopkeep gets to sit behind a counter all day while you quest up and down the countryside slaying monsters and looting dungeons... yet the shopkeep seems to be the one to wind up with all your gold by the end of the game? Ever wanted to switch places for a day?

Meet Recettear. This game is all about the business end of the RPG world. You get to manage stock, decide which of your wares to showcase, haggle over prices, and, pay off an outstanding debt. Nope, not even kidding - paying off the debt, in fact, is the main storyline of the game. In a nod to traditional dungeoneering, you do get to hire adventurers to explore procedurally-generated dungeons for you, and you get to control them (while your actual main character tags along behind, invincibly, to do the beancounting), but the big moments of the game happen while you're behind the counter.

This is a *very* Japanese game. The translation to English was done just fine, maybe even better than most imports, but the culture was preserved. For example, nobody is "slightly" anything. The game's "broke adventurer" fellow isn't just hard on his luck; he's found in the park trying to suss out which plants are safe to eat. The game's "rich snob" makes a special trip to your shop to explain how she's going on an excursion for the express purpose of eating foie gras. Your character berates herself every time you fail to make a sale; the sound effects and visuals would be right at home in any manga or anime piece you could imagine, and so on and so on and so on.

It's a fairly easy game. I won't go into spoilers here, but I will say that there's only so bad that the game will let you be. I've "beaten" the game - yes, I'm sure, because the characters actually broke the fourth wall and thanked me for beating the game on behalf of the studio - but they also point out that there's a lot more content to be enjoyed in the game's "endless" mode. To that end, I don't feel qualified to fully evaluate the story... but I will say that when I beat the game, there were some pretty glaring loose threads that none of the characters even really felt like acknowledging. I'm not sure if that's reserved for a Super Special Secret Plus Plus Plus Hooray ending, or if the characters are just like "whatever" about these points, but I was definitely left waiting for something that never came.

All in all, I'd give this one a 7/10. I don't know that I'll ever play it all the way through again, but I feel like I enjoyed my time here. And the next time I fork over 100,000 gold for a Diamond Sword, I'm going to hesitate just that one moment longer. Now I know for *sure* this shopkeep's job isn't as hard as he's making it out to be.