Recettear: An Item Shop Tale

 

MY FATHER IS DEAD. …better open an item shop!

 

I’ve been looking forward to this one for a couple reasons. Firstly, I’ve played and 100%-ed this game’s… *ahem* “sister” game “Chantelise,” a game that features a young girl Chante and her fairy sister Elise who rent out a room from a woman who runs an item shop. Noticing the pattern? Anyway, reason 2 for my interest in Recettear was that it came highly recommended to me by more than one person. Reason number 3 and perhaps the most exciting, is that this is one of the few times I get to write a review following a review of Lepcis’s. This naturally brings about a certain air of… conflict… and it makes me happy to see that our opinions clash on this one–a feature that helps me both understand myself as a writer and as a game reviewer.

 

 

To avoid stewing out the epic climax, I rate this at a Tier 1 level of a game and, as you may know, Lepcis marked this at 3. Quite the distinction, if I may say so, which helped me realize one key point about Lepcis and I… but I will get to that in a moment. First, let’s go over Recettear’s basics. Your dad is gone and a loan collector wants you (Recette) to pay off his debts. Problem is, you’re a broke-ass kid and you have no equity aside from your house. You could either allow the repo-man to take all your stuff, or you can force your way into the world of capitalism in order to make enough money to pay off your father’s loan. Moving forward with the latter, this makes it your job is to not only run an item shop, manage inventory and haggle with customers (I can hear Lepcis cringe) but also sponsor the occasional adventurer to raid a dungeon for a piece of the profit (or all the profit really). To keep you on your toes is the ever-encroaching shadow of your next loan payment which only increases as time goes on.

 

 

Precognizant of Lepcis’s complaints about the flimsy barter system, I steeled myself for an artificial system that would be the worst. I… actually liked it. Maybe it’s because I tend to personify myself as the characters I play as too much, but I found myself quickly forgetting the “sell everything for 30% rule” and instituted the mercantile law of Chezni: all prices begin at 40% above value and then depending on how angry you get, Chezni will cave all the way to negative 10%! No seriously. I dropped the price of a piece of bread down to the flat price I paid for it because someone called me a “meany-head” (or some similar equivalent) and for the little girl that was buying a gift for her mother, I sold her a shirt for 90% of the price. Truly, I am an entrepreneur king.

 

 

The dungeons are simple as Lepc pointed out already, but I found that to be a bonus–it was something lightweight and exciting enough to get my mind of off price grinding for a bit but made sense within the story. It would get old if that was all there was to do in the game, but since it’s not I felt it added a fun bit of lore surrounding the town and the events within it–the lore being that the town is becoming popular for the dungeons surrounding it. I mean after all, why *are* so many people buying rusty swords and scrap mail? After a bit, I took a look at this and tried to figure out exactly why Lepc’s and I’s opinions differed so greatly. I mean, this wasn’t a bad JRPG at all–in fact, I think this one is probably better than Chantelise, although Chantelise did do a few interesting things (and the boss battles were brutal). But that’s when it hit me, and I believe I can explain it.

 

 

At it’s core, Recettear is a great JRPG that happens to feature capitalism simulation. And that’s precisely the key point that I’m about to make; it’s a JRPG first and a capitalism simulator second. If I know Lepcis, he probably went into this wanting a solid capitalism simulator and the JRPG part he could give or take as it’s not exactly a genre he spends a lot of time in. From that perspective, Recettear would seem like an incredibly shallow pool of numbers upon which every time he would dip his hands into their thin bowl, his fingers would press against the hard metal basin that contained them as he tried to push things out further. You see, to the average shmuck who has a vague sense of “buy things to sell things to get more things” (aka me) the satisfaction of reward is instant. “Hey! I sold a thing! 120% is more than 100%! I’m an entrepreneur!” Then, some shifty eyed programmer, knowingly worried that his audience is used to swinging oversized swords at flimsy and brightly colored enemies that spill out loot when they die, pipes up and says, “Hey. H-hey. There’s a dungeon over there.” To which we squee over and slash away in excitement.

 

 

It’s sort of like riding the Mine Cart ride with your kid brother instead of the Screaming Eagle coaster with your friends. True, the Mine Cart ride is somewhat amusing and your brother loves it, but you have surpassed this sort of simplicity and desire greater things. So, if you are a simulator enthusiast, don’t be fooled–Recettear isn’t going to be your heavy-weight number crunching commercial salve. For someone who’s spent most of their life playing JRPGs however, it’s a lot of fun to play one that doesn’t put you in control of a spiky-haired youth whose town just burned down, traveling with his enormously breasted child-hood friend and obligatory mascot character while you plot on Excel sheets the most efficient way to grind for the 0.1% item drop that you need.

Steam Link