Review: Recettear ~ An Item Shop’s Tale

UPDATE 3/10/2010: It’s on sale now, on Steam, Impulse and Gamer’s Gate, go get it. The current pre-order offer is $17.99 which is a steal for this!

Most player characters do not empathize with the struggle inherent in running an item shop. They want to hawk off the ridiculous gold beholder statue they found in the nearby dungeon for 100% of its price so they can then immediately buy a +2 Sword for the party Fighter and that is the end of it. But Recettear ~ An Item Shop’s Tale puts you on the other side of the counter, so you can finally see what an economical disaster your characters have been all along. Also you’re a little girl and a fairy loan shark is after your property.

Recettear is a little indie video game created by Easy Game Station in Japan and localized in America by a small group called Carpe Fulgur, who deserve your money. You can download a demo here, and since your PC can’t possibly be as crappy as my PC I’m sure you can run it. You might be thinking “oh no, anime, I will break out in hives if I play this!” but you’d really be missing out if you do. This little game, even just the demo, is simple, addictive and fun. I like the cute atmosphere personally, but even if you don’t the game is still just a lot of great fun to actually play and the story and characters are very humorous. Not only that, but it is also 100% family friendly. Not all indie japanese games are eroge!

Recettear is the story of Recette, a little girl who’s father ran off to be an adventurer and left her alone in heavy debt. One day, a fairy named Tear from the Terme Finance Group, who loaned her father the money, appears to collect the debt from Recette. Recette, of course, can’t pay it back. But Tear offers to help her so she will not have to resort to any absurd methods to pay them back. Such as trying to sell her organs. Tear suggests that they open an item shop together, with Recette managing the customers and shop, and Tear offering her economic knowledge and advice. Together, the two will have to bravely face the ups and downs of shopkeeping, including god forsaken children who expect everything to be sold far too cheaply, as they try each week to scratch out a payment for the loan.

Should Recette fail at the end of each week to make a payment, she will have her house taken away by Terme and have to live in a box. The story is treated in a very light-hearted manner although there’s some off-color humor in there (“Will I be able to live with only two organs?”) that can catch you by surprise. The localization does a good job of localizing, which might sound like a given, but a lot of times these games are brought over with stilted anime-isms in the dialog and obscure jokes that are difficult for an audience to relate to (or at least an audience that doesn’t watch anime fansubs and read manga scanlations every day like I do). Recettear’s localization manages to be accurate, funny and always appropriate, which is quite admirable. The game is very immersive because of this.

The game has two major modes of play. In Shop Mode, Recette is running around inside her shop, putting items in the shelves and decorating the store. The gameplay is universally controlled using the arrow keys and the z, x, c and v keys, or you can configure a joystick or gamepad (xbox 360 controllers also work for those of you who use them). Recette walks around using the keys and with the Z key (“primary button”) she interacts with things. She can interact with the shelves to stock them, or if she sits down in her chair, she can open the store for business. Recette can also exit her store through the door to go look through the town. Though this is limited in the demo (obviously) later in the game the store can be configured to give off different sorts of “atmosphere” which will attract customers looking for different items. Also, putting items on the display shelves near the window makes them “eyecatch” items that will attract wandering customers into the store. Putting your best items near the window is a must for attracting more customers.

This is what it looks like when someone wants to buy something. Here, the demonic little monster child who NEVER BUYS ANYTHING FOR A REASONABLE PRICE is looking to buy a raincoat I put on display. The system of buying and selling is simple at first but has a good amount of depth for you to explore. Your beloved fairy friend has a few tutorials to get you up to speed on how it works. Basically, every item has a base price. You will want to sell the item for more than its base price, usually 30% more. However, customers have a price in mind when they select an item, and will try to haggle you down to it. You will want to set a starting offer that is high enough that when haggled down, you’ll still make the profit you want, but not too high or the customer will just refuse to talk and go home. If you make sales, you earn not only money but also merchant XP. If your merchant level goes up, the kinds of things you can do in the store and the kinds of interactions you can have with customers also change. For example, at Merchant Level 2 customers can sell things to you, so you want to haggle them down so you can buy low and sell high.

Most customers are pretty reasonable, but I found these little girls to be pure evil. See that raincoat? I tried to charge her 390 pix for it, which was 130% of the base price. Then she pretty much ragequit. The next time I saw her, I tried to charge her 360 pix for it. She said it was too expensive and wanted to haggle it down. By the end of the week (SPOILERS I failed and Recette is in a box by the end of this review) I needed someone to buy a statue worth 4500 pix for at least 5000 pix so I could pay off my loan. Long story short the little girl was the only customer interested in the statue and wouldn’t have it for my price, which was only 113% of the base price. THESE LITTLE GIRLS ARE MONSTROUS DEVILS.

The cute little town has a lot of places to go to in order to talk to characters, trigger special events and purchase stock. The merchant’s guild will likely be your first and a frequent stop, since you can buy basic items to stock in your shop there. The market also sells things like bread and candy that can be bought cheaply and then sold for profit. The Adventurer’s Guild, however, will be of utmost importance to access the other part of the game. That’s right! Not only do you run an item shop, you can also crawl through dungeons for loot! As you go through the game you will meet and unlock adventurers who will accompany you to dangerous dungeons. At first you have Louie, a rookie with a sword, but if you’re awesome at the game (I’m not) you can unlock Charme, a female rogue, in the demo version. Due to the time limit on the demo version (I believe it lets you play through the first week of the game’s events, which is actually a really good chunk of gameplay for a demo) it is a bit tight to try to unlock, but I know it is possible as I’ve known people who did it.

At the guild, you can rent an adventurer to go crawl with you through some dungeons. The object of crawling the dungeon is to open chests to get items. You move around in real time and have two attacks, a normal attack and a special attack. Monsters you fight have a little health bar at the top, and the monster’s facing will change how much damage you do. For example, attacking from behind will deal more damage. You have a very useful minimap that will show red dots for monsters and blue dots for entrances and exits to other floors.

The dungeons are very old school D&D (through a cutesy anime filter) in a way. There are traps, monsters everywhere, and you don’t have enough HP (to withstand damage) and SP (for special attacks) to fight everything there is. Fighting will of course level up your adventurer and give him or her more HP and SP, as well as the lifesaving boon of refilling your lost HP and SP for free. You want to pick your battles carefully, be ready to run away from trapped chests, and gather as much good loot as possible and run for an exit. Exits can be found every five floors, usually guarded by tougher boss monsters. If your adventurer is knocked out, you can run away with one item you collected, so it won’t be a total loss. But you want to be able to leave with as many items as possible, because everything you pick up is free and you can then stick it in your store and make pure profit.

I need more practice at it, but I only just started playing three hours ago.

The graphics in the game are cutesy and fun and fit with its atmosphere. The controls are simple and responsive and if your computer is terrible you can change settings to get it running smooth as butter. The game has a Japanese voice track only, because Carpe Fulgur can’t afford voice work. To me, that’s for the best. A lot of times the English tracks in these sorts of games (which don’t really need much voice work at all) just add to the cost of localization without much of a meaningful impact on the game’s content. Or worse, they might annoy purists. So if the japanese voices annoy you, go to Options and turn Voice to 0.

All of the game’s events are skippable, if you just want to get to stocking and selling and dungeon crawling and forget the story even exists. The game passes time on its own depending on the actions you decide to take. Time is divided into a “pie” and each action takes up a little slice of it. So you start off in the morning, and if you open your store for business, that advances the clock one slice. However, some actions, typically walking to places in town, don’t take up any time, so you can do all your shopping and return.

The only very minor complaint I have is that the game never really prompts you to save your progress at any point. To do so, you can hit the Esc key and save. But with the way the game operates, this is kind of easy to forget. The game has a very engrossing pace. After the first tutorial, you’ll be buying and selling and wandering around and haggling with people in no time. I went a whole cycle of the game without saving, so when I failed at the end and got my game over, it was back to the beginning of the game with me! But these are really very minor nitpicks. I think the worst complaint I have right now is that I crave giving Carpe Fulgur my money for a full version of this game, and there’s currently no way to do so as they’re still, I believe, dealing with distribution agreements.

Ultimately my dreams of item shop owning came to an end, that is until I started another save file, actually saved my progress this time, and started playing again. I foresee I will be playing again, and again, and again, ramming my head against the end of this demo for days. This demo is packed with gameplay and I’m sure this game, when it releases, will be packed with content. This game is cute, simple and fun. The shop management has a surprising amount of depth and just enough randomness to keep you on your toes, while the dungeon crawling is simple but challenging. It is overall a very entertaining game, and I think it has a great market not just for anime fans or RPG gamers, but for casual gamers, young PC gamers (great way to brush up on some math) and especially for the female gamers. This game is very family friendly, everyone can play it. Even your grandma.

If I gave numerical reviews this one would get a perfect. Instead, it gets a MAXIMUM RECOMMENDATION. That doesn’t really mean anything, but it does. I’ll see around when I come up with some way to regain my house from that loan shark fairy…

SPECIAL NOTE FOR MAC USERS: WINE is perfectly capable of running Recettear! I just tried it with Crossover Games, so I’m sure regular WINE could probably do so as well. For Crossover Games, unzip the Recettear demo and put it in your Users/Applications/Crossover Games folder. Open Crossover Games and then select the RUN command from the programs menu. Run Recettear and Customs exes and save each to your programs menu. The only thing is that there’s no sound in WINE/Crossover Games for this game. But that’s okay for me. If you really want to, the BGM is a bunch of windows media files you could copy out, turn into MP3s and play for yourself. But really, it’s a minor loss for the ability to play it without booting into Windows XP/Vista/7 or using a VPC.