Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

The Good
Running the shop in an RPG is a very fun idea.

Visuals are very pretty.

The Bad
Mechanics flat-out don't work well enough.

Action-RPG stages are too unforgiving.

Putting players on a timer is never comfortable.

Too few different customers.

Too much talking.

The Bottom Line
Story

In most of our favorite role-playing games we take on the role of the stalwart hero of the land; we play as the daring men and women who venture out into the unknown to perform quests and wage wars against evil. However, we never seem to keep in mind what kind of impact rushing off on adventure has on our character's friends and family. What will Uncle Bob do now that his farmhand traded in the boring pitchfork for a mighty blade?

Recettear seeks to answer that question by putting the player in the role of a hero's little daughter. Players take on the role of Recette, a young girl from the city whose dad left on an adventure and never returned. Even worse, our "hero" in this story had to get a loan, and now that he is presumed dead, paying back all that dough falls upon his daughter. In order to cough up the money, Recette teams up with the sympathetic loan shark "Tear" to open an item shop.

Recette and Tear make for a very entertaining partnership; Recette is a ditsy and energetic girl and Tear is a fairy who wants to stay focused on business. It would have been a very standard setup (two characters whose personalities clash), but the fact that Tear is occasionally presented as a genuinely sympathetic person makes up for that. The rest of the cast of characters is more one-dimensional, such as the amateur adventurer Louis who is always hungry or the entitled daughter of a rich family who shows up as a competitor to Recette.

The story in management games/simulators is usually not that interesting, which makes this setup a nice change of pace. What I didn't appreciate, though, is the fact that most of the story comes from optional events that continuously appear on the town map. As the player, you want to discover as much of the story as possible, but going out of your way to seek out these optional bits means leaving the store. In other words: in order to experience the story, you have to handicap your progress.

Gameplay

The most interesting part of the game is, of course, the store that you are supposed to run. What I like most about the store is that new mechanics are constantly being introduced once the game has reason to believe that you have grown familiar with the older ones. At first you can only sell items and put them up on display, but as the game goes on you'll also learn how to buy items, redecorate the store, take orders, fuse items together and more. These new mechanics usually come into play once your "Merchant Level" increases, which you can achieve by successfully dealing with customers (stringing together successes gives you more experience points).

In an ideal situation, this would mean that the game has a lot of depth, but after unlocking most of the mechanics, the game literally broke on me. I very clearly recall the moment when it happened; a single man got stuck in a loop of selling me an item and immediately buying it back, dozens of orders came in at the exact same moment and the items I had on display were all seemingly ignored as every customer suddenly wanted stuff I never advertised. Suffice it to say, it was pure unplayable madness and for that reason alone I would deduct some serious points from the game. It's a shame too, because I was having a lot of fun before everything went bananas, but after that I couldn't enjoy the game anymore.

Aside from working in the store, there is also an action-RPG side to the gameplay. The idea is that you can hire an adventurer to take you into a dungeon and use him to gather loot for you. Since monsters don't charge money for being killed, it allows you to get some pretty neat stuff for free and sell it at an attractive price. You unlock more adventurers as you play, but they all have one basic attack and one special move that consumes mana. Additionally, the dungeons are randomly generated and contain a number of random events that vary from traps to entire bits of story.

Sounds pretty damn awesome, right? Well, you're wrong.

There seems to be a very obnoxious glitch that keeps respawning enemies randomly throughout each dungeon floor, so if you're like me and you want to get all the experience and loot possible, then you'll find yourself running around the same floor for way too long. It also has the Secret of Mana problem where 50% of the chests turn out to be traps, which is just downright mean. Also, your adventurer doesn't regenerate health unless you feed him stuff, and once he dies, you'll have to bail on the dungeon and can only take one of the items you found back with you. This also includes items you borrowed to the adventurer, so if you gave him valuable armor and a sword, then one of those will have to be left behind along with the rest of the loot.

Of those three problems, I'd say the dying is probably the worst, since you are put on a timer in this game. Each week you have to pay back a part of the loan and the amount increases drastically each time. I think that timers are almost always a poor idea for a game, since it puts stress on your players and that is something they can definitely do without. In Majora's Mask however, you can reset the timer whenever you want and in other Tycoon games you usually have several years to reach your goal, which greatly reduce the stress. Recettear's weekly milestones only serve to encourage save-scumming, since failing dungeons and poor business decisions are just too much to deal with when you're still 10,000 Pix short and the clock is ticking.

Presentation

The game combines a classic 2D top-down perspective with modern sprite-art and it look pretty damn nice. I believe there is a serious lack of top-down role-playing games nowadays and titles like Recettear and Evoland thus dominate the entire niche. I know that engines have improved over the years, but since these games are easier to make, it allows the art-style to be a lot more developed. The atmosphere is furthered improved with the soundtrack that actually consists almost entirely out of shop themes. Everything has a very uplifting tone to it; It's also cute that the designers decided to implement brief conversations in the ARPG part of the game, that are entirely in Japanese. Without spoiling too much of the surprise, Recette's voice is exactly what you think it would be.

There is, however, too little variety. Aside from specific characters that are introduced through the story, there are only four different customers that will appear in your store; a man, a woman, a little girl and an old man. This means that on some days you will have four of the exact same grandfathers walk into the store. Enemy variety is a little better, but the game relies heavily on recoloring enemies without actually changing the tactics for beating them, which makes the action part of the game feel even more stale.

Replay-value

Oddly enough, this game tries to be a rogue-like by increasing the difficulty to levels where you are likely to fail on your first time playing. When this happens, the game then allows you to start over, but with your previous merchant level and items. It's a nice way to give you a boost after failing, that I admit, but the mere act of failing alone is enough to remove any will to keep playing, especially when you keep the depressive Game Over cut-scene in mind.

Why should you get it?

The idea of running an item shop in an RPG is very intriguing and it's worth owning for the novelty alone. Selling and buying items are both very engaging mechanics and the game knows how to pace itself. If you can forgive some of the larger flaws and soldier through it, then you are left with an experience like no other.

Why should you skip on it?

Parts of the core-gameplay just don't work or are prone to breaking, which is inexcusable. Losing the game because I only get customers who want to sell things for three days straight is downright unfair and I feel the game would have benefited greatly from just giving me a financial milestone to reach and having me build towards that myself. It would have created a better management game in which I make the decisions I want to make, instead of one where I diligently save every few minutes in fear of making a slight mistake.