The item shop has often been a staple of RPGs, a place where you can go to stock up on new weapons, armor, and survival items for the challenges that lie ahead. But despite being so instrumental to many RPGs, you spend very little time in them and know only scant few details about their operation. Recettear decides to invert that idea, letting you be the owner of such a store. Set in an anime style high-fantasy world, you take the role of a little girl named Recette, guiding her efforts in managing the business and acquiring new products. While it’s primarily a ’market sim’ where you manage inventory, negotiate with customers, try to capitalize on economic trends, and so on there is also a decent action segment when it comes time to explore dungeons. By merging these two fairly basic ideas, the result is surprisingly fun and a great way to spend some time.
It start off slow by necessity; while the game’s controls and operations are simple, there are a lot of concepts to take in and Recettear does a good job of explaining them as you go. Since your character starts the game in massive debt and has only limited capital to get her business going, much of your early game is going to be spent on low-volume, low-cost transactions. Once you’ve done enough of these, customers will begin to trust you and are more willing to pay the market average for merchandise which makes things much easier. You can’t spend too long building a relation with them however, as you must make payments on your debt at regular intervals and you lose if you can’t cough up the cash on time.
Debt repayment results in an interesting balancing act where players need to keep plenty of cheap stock to offload to customers easily so they feel like they’re getting bargains at your store, but you also have to move enough high-cost items at enough mark-up to pay the bills in time. Fortunately you have several things working in your favor, such as market trends causing item prices to fluctuate (buy stock at low costs, sell them when a boom occurs for profits easily upward of 300% or more) and the ability to hire adventurers to go into dungeons to get stuff for you. The adventurers lead to the second part of the Recettear experience, one that provides welcome relief from what would otherwise be a very repetitive game.
Exploring dungeons is done through an overhead view where you guide an adventurer through randomized stages, fighting enemies and bosses along the way. The controls are simple, able to be managed using either the arrow keys and a few keyboard buttons or a gamepad, and most fights are easy enough that you don’t have to be an outright expert at games like the older Zelda titles or Illusion of Gaia to handle them. While it costs some money to hire an adventurer, each with their own methods of attack to learn, their fee is cheap compared to what they give you in return; so long as you complete the dungeon safely you get every item they pick up for free, resulting in almost pure profit from these ventures. This makes them not only a good idea for your business, but also a fun thing to do on the side; you can alternate between dungeon segments and market play to keep things fresh.
Recettear is a game that succeeds by combining two basic modes of play into one cohesive whole, able to keep you busy for hours on end in a relaxing way. $20 is a perfectly fair price for what you get, and the idea of running an RPG item shop is novel enough to be worth a look in any case. Light-hearted, easy to play, and genuinely engaging, Recettear is a game you should definitely check out.
