Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

What is Recettear about? Simple, it's about getting your house repossessed by a loan shark because you get saddled with your father's debt needs to be repaid and you don't have a cent to your name. But you do have the house (for now), and the loan shark suggests turning it into an item store to repay your debt! Real talk, the game is a lot of fun, though an initial playthrough won't take you very long if you get the hang of the game quickly. There's a mechanic where if you get a game over by failing to pay your debts, it restarts you at day 1 with all your items, making your next attempt that much easier. But if you meet all your deadlines, the game is probably around 10 or so hours, though there's an absolute trove of post-game content to get through. Let's talk about the gameplay in two parts, starting with the obvious: The item store. It starts of very simple, you place items on your display in order to sell them to your customers. You can haggle with the customers as well, and each customer has a particular range they're willing to pay for. In addition, you earn merchant EXP which unlocks a ton of new features, making the game more complex as it goes on. You'll unlock the ability to buy items from customers, to take orders in advance, and even use a vending machine for sales. The utility of merchant levels goes far beyond unlocking features, as it's also how you get a lot of important upgrades, such as new items for sale at the shops in town or more space for your own shop. You earn an EXP bonus for making sales on your first haggling attempt, and that bonus gets multiplied by how many sales you make in a row, so you have to decide how far you're willing to push each sale if you want to keep the level ups coming. Another core part of the game is dungeon crawling, somehow... While both Recette and Tear are inept in combat, you can hire an adventurer to fight in your stead. Essentially, you provide the adventurer with pay, equipment, and safety, and in return you get... literally all of the loot. Like all of it. Doesn't seem like a fair trade if you ask me... Anyways, it's a very simple action dungeon crawler. Most of your time will be spent spamming basic attack and walking out of the way of enemy attacks, though there is enough variety in both your adventurer's abilities and your enemy's attack patterns to make it more interesting. Each adventurer controls differently, with different stats, spells, and passive abilities, and you can unlock more spells by leveling up. That said, dungeon crawls can still get... tedious. Some of the dungeons can get pretty long, and your bag space is limited so a lot of time is spent throwing items on the floor to pick up new stuff, only to throw THOSE items on the floor because the chest held an item worth a whopping 100 pix. The shop and dungeons connect in the obvious way, that being you can sell what you find, but the ingredients you'll most often pick up aren't worth much. They're better used in fusion, which can get you more powerful equipment that sells for more. And speaking of equipment, the adventurers you hire can also turn up in your shop! If they purchase an item they can wear, and it's an upgrade to what they're currently wearing, they'll equip it. This saves you inventory space on gearing up your adventurers yourself, letting you carry more home with you. Sadly, there's very little in the way of influencing your party members to buy what you specifically want them to buy, so unless they come to you with an order, you just have to hope they pick up something useful off the display case or ask for the equipment type specifically. With all that being said, you can just... ignore the dungeons entirely. I wouldn't recommend it, as a lot of the story is tied up in those dungeons, but it might actually be easier to make money without spending time in the dungeons... As for the story, there's not much more to the primary plot than I discussed at the very start, but there's a lot more going on in town than one item shop owner struggling with her debts. As you progress through the game, find new adventurers, explore new dungeons and so on, more events unlock within the town. While it technically takes time to watch these events, it takes no time at all to zip from one part of town to the next (exempting the Adventurer's Guild), so if you had business in the town anyways like picking up inventory, you can watch them "for free." Events trigger based on a number of conditions, like how far along you are in a particular character's plotline, what time of day it is, there's even an event that only triggers if you have a certain amount of pix in your wallet. These scenes are where a lot of the games charm comes from, so I'd recommend trying to see them if you can spare the time. They can even give gameplay benefits from time to time, such as unlocking new adventurers to hire for dungeoneering. All things told, Recettear is a charming game about a charming young girl burdened with crippling debt that she just might be able to pay off with the help of her fairy friend and enough effort. While not the most realistic story, games don't need to be realistic, and sometimes it can be nice to just watch Recette's infinite cheer in spite of her situation. The game itself is fun more often than it's not, and you do get a sense of accomplishment from earning enough money to make your payments on time. So, yeah, I like it. Wish I liked other games in the "shopkeep with a side hustle" genre as much as I like this one. Maybe I'll try Grand Bazaar sometime...

Honestly this is one of the best shopkeeping games I've ever played. It has just the right amount of variables and details to make the game exciting, but not overwhelming.

One of the best games ever made. And an absolute must play even if you don't like weeb trash like myself. (Works like a charm on modern systems with the widescreen fix!)