Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

One of the best loops out there. Great for a casual but enough depth for a player to get multiple playthroughs in. It's one of those games you come back to every year or so.

I got this game when it came out, so many years ago. It gave me an itch that no other game has been able to scratch since then. Fun little diversion!

Good game. The shop aspect is great. The dungeons are surprisingly addictive despite not being the main part of the game, although the dungeons become the main part in the post game. For the positives, this game is charming and has a good sense of humor. I would say the difficulty of beating the game is just right. If you know what you're doing it's easy, if you go in blind it's quite challenging but not punishing. It doesn't overwhelm you with complexity but you get more things to manage over time. Doing a dungeon dive here and there can help keep things interesting. Without spoiling anything too bad for those that want a blind playthrough, the 1 piece of advice I'll give is to take Tear's advice with a grain of salt. There's 1 tip in particular that she gives you that is terrible advice. I'll leave it at that. I like the adventurer roster, it does an excellent job of giving you options so you can go with one that suits your play style. Tielle's my favorite. Your first adventurer is Louie and he's pretty solid, which is good because I would argue that the next 2 ones you get have the biggest learning curve. Anyone who has recruited Charme and went straight into Amber Garden without even getting the merchant levels and/or money to buy better equipment knows exactly what I'm talking about. I hope I don't get too much hate for it but I argue that the game isn't perfect. The music isn't amazing. It's quaint, but honestly I just turn it off and put my own stuff on which is fine. The controls are not Celeste-level tight and good-feeling. Using a controller can help, but has it's own problems. Half of your roster can dash, which means you need to use the d-pad and at that point so you should stick with the keyboard anyway. Where dungeons felt the best was playing Tielle with a controller. Even then it still doesn't read button presses perfectly all the time (maybe my controller sucks?), but things are more forgiving with the controls when using a ranged character. Also holding down the attack button constantly with Tielle aggravated my arthritus here and there, I don't know what they were thinking when they designed this game. Coupled with the extreme difficulty of the final dungeon, the sub-optimal controls are a recipe for frustration. I'm seeing yellow ropers in my nightmares. I read somewhere that they nerfed ropers too, I find it hard to fathom what the Crystal Nightmare must've been like prior to the nerf. I don't consider this all bad though, it makes the game quite memorable. Another negative is the drop rates. Or rather, the sheer amount of dungeon you have to run through hunting for specific monster types. Add onto that the fact that sometimes you're hunting for higher quality mats and it gets even more punishing. Although, on the positive side quality is never required but it's just a nice thing to have. Overall though, as far as ingredients go it's really only a couple of them that are problematic. The big one is fire crystals. Boss drops end up being less problematic because you can do boss rushes, but darkness crystals are pretty rough. So the big problem is chests. There're so many fusion items that are chest-dependent, and the crystal nightmare is aptly named and is unfortunately the most efficient way to get better chest loot. Then when you actually get some good items from chests, it might not be for equipment for the adventurer that you want. In my case I had a period where my best weapon was for Elan, I mean he's enjoyable to play but he struggles pretty hard against the tougher bosses and in the Crystal Nightmare. Then I got good equipment for Griff who's pretty good, but Tielle's my favorite. I see this as both good and bad. I often found myself using the adventurer that I had good equipment for, so it encourages switching up who I use based as that. You can target ingredients for fusions for the specific adventurer that you want to get better equipment for, although even in that case the game will more than likely give you drops for other stuff you didn't want as much. But the chests, you have no control over that at all. I don't know if you can call it a negative, but in the postgame running the item shop isn't interesting. It doesn't force you to open up your shop when you don't want to, other than to occasionally replenish your coffers and grind for more merchant levels. I found myself opening shop even when I didn't want to though because it just felt wrong not to open shop for multiple days in a row. I also made the mistake of starting a new game cycle to get another adventurer's true card. It locked me out of doing the Lapis Ruins dungeon for a month. I could've skipped some days to get through it faster but as I mentioned, that would've felt wrong. In summary, this game is at it's best when you're beating your initial playthrough. I love getting new items and reading the item descriptions, watching all the cut scenes, and advancing the story by unlocking all the adventurers and getting through all the dungeons. It feels great when you make a debt payment with money to spare, and when you get another merchant level and are able to upgrade your shop, or when you get that last ingredient for the fusion you wanted and are able to make your chosen adventurer stronger. Dungeons can be rough, but they're not mandatory.