A shopkeeping RPG game? What will the Japanese think of next?
Hopefully all of you had a nice Thanksgiving weekend. As for me, I was planning on spending a lot of time on my Xbox 360 this weekend catching up on my backlog but Steam’s Thanksgiving Weekend Sale changed my past weekend’s gaming schedule significantly. On Thanksgiving Day, I bought Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale for $4.99 (bundled with some other Indie titles) and now find myself on Sunday night, wondering where the weekend went. Apparently, this little Japanese PC game has an interesting combination of Japanese RPG goodness, Animal Crossing, and Diablo – making it very difficult for me to stop playing. Hit the jump to learn about the game that came out of nowhere and basically occupied all of my gaming time this past Thanksgiving weekend.
Some Background Info
Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is a title that I had never heard of until Steam put it on sale Thursday. Apparently, it was developed by a Japanese company called EasyGameStation back in 2007, and was translated into English this year by indie studio Carpe Fulgur. Recettear is the first independently made Japanese PC game released on Steam, and follows the tale of a little girl named Recette and a fairy called Tear as they run an item shop. The name of the item shop is Recettear – a combination of the two primary characters of the game.
The game starts out with the fairy, Tear, visiting Recette to inform her that her father incurred a lot of debt and “ran off to be a hero” without paying it off, so Tear suggested that Recette start an item shop in order to make money to pay off her father’s debt. As Recette becomes more successful, the item shop grows, stocks more items, etc. I’ve played dozens of Japanese RPGs, so it’s very interesting to be on the other side of the counter with Recettear. Those crazy adventurers – just waltzing in and wanting to buy my gear without so much as a hello and off they go. Now I understand how they feel!
Setting too high of a price for an item may lead to haggling with the customer.
The Shopkeeping Japanese RPG Part
For anyone that enjoys classic Japanese RPG games (not the newer stuff like Final Fantasy XIII), you will feel right at home with Recettear. Recette has a Merchant Level, starting with Level 1 and maxing out at Level 99. As she completes successful transactions with customers, she gains experience points that level her up. Nearly every level unlocks additional bonuses, expanding the game. Hitting some levels allow her to stock more advanced and exotic items, while other levels allow her to decorate and even expand the size of the shop.
There are several aspects to running the shop successfully, with the most important being the stocking of your store. Throughout a day (which is broken up into 4 sessions), Recette has the ability to go to visit wholesale suppliers that will generally sell her various item types for about 70% of item’s “base price” (the Costco of the game, if you will). Every day, you will need to decide what you want to stock at your store – a good variety ensures a steady stream of customers.
What also makes the game even more interesting is that each day has different random variables occurring. Certain item types may see drastic shortages across the village, shooting their value up to twice the amount, enabling you to make a killing in profit on them if you have them ready to sell. The opposite can also occur, where certain item types may suddenly drop in value that day. The most amusing daily random variable that I have come across is when you find out how a certain customer type suddenly finds something trendy. If you manage to stock your store with plenty of that item (ensuring that they show in your store window), a throng of that particular customers will rush in that day all looking to buy those items (not unlike the Justin Bieber crazy with little girls these days). There is a certain strategy of stocking and selling items at the right time which greatly appealed to me.
The second aspect of the game is haggling. When a customer wants to buy or sell something, they ask you how much. You can see the listing for the base price of the item, and from there make a decision how much to mark up/down the cost of the item to that particular customer. If you mark it too high, it will anger the customer and they will walk out, but if you mark it only a little higher than what they expect to pay, they will ask you to bring it down. If you can successfully bring it down to what they want to pay, you will complete the transaction successfully.
There is a certain trade-off with haggling – the only reason haggling occurs is if you are trying to charge a price worse than what the customer expected, and you are given a chance to make it right in their eyes. But if you can suggest a price that they will take without even wanting to haggle, this means they will automatically buy it item right away. Every time you successfully complete a transaction with a customer without having to haggle, your combo meter builds up, so you get an experience point bonus that goes up exponentially. Suffice to say, keeping a combo going gets you more experience points faster, allowing you to level up faster, but haggling with a customer generally ensures that you make the maximum amount of income possible from each customer. It is entirely up to you whether you want to go with leveling up faster or making more money faster.
Recette and Tear meet new characters throughout the game that they can befriend.
The Animal Crossing Part
Recettear drew me right in and at times I felt like there were certain similarities to Animal Crossing. Just like in Animal Crossing, you are trying to make money to pay off your debt (which increases in amount you have to pay back as time goes on for both games). However, while in Animal Crossing you are paying your debt back to Tom Nook, the wily raccoon that also runs the general store, in Recettear – you are basically Tom Nook running the store.
In Animal Crossing, you would interact with various animals that lived in your village, and the ones that you formed close bonds with would stay there while the animals that you didn’t care to befriend would move out, making room for new animals. In Recettear, you are also cultivating friendships with your customers. As you start your item shop, the more you successfully sell to customers, the more they keep coming back, and you begin to learn their general dispositions and how much you can get away with when haggling with them. Continuing to successfully complete transactions with your customers increases your relationship with them, enabling them to buy even more expensive items.
Recette and Tear cannot fight through a dungeon on their own – they must accompany a willing adventurer.
The Diablo Part
Recettear could have simply been only about running an item shop, and the game would have still been quite successful. I spent most of my game time running the shop just because I enjoyed making bank – but for adventurers that want a little more variety, Recette and Tear are able to travel with some of the different characters they meet in the village. When going into one of the randomly generated dungeons, the player controls the adventurer while Recette and Tear follow along.
The various adventurers have different personalities, different equipment needs, etc. It’s quite enjoyable to see the different adventurers come into your store looking for a new weapon, and you are able to sell it to them so they can use it when they take you into a dungeon. In a sense, it is not beneficial at all to try to rip off the adventurers, since you want them as geared up as possible in order to make their lives easier when they take you into the dungeon.
The Diablo aspect of the game is more like “Diablo-lite” in that the dungeons are randomly generated. However, Recettear lacks all of the crazy equipment drops of Diablo, making this game a little less addictive. the primary aspect of navigating through the various dungeons of Recettear (besides advancing certain storylines with various characters) is to find various reagents that different enemy types randomly drop. Back in town, one of the vendors has the ability to craft very exotic weapons through a process called Fusioning. These exotic weapons cannot be acquired through any other means besides combining existing weapons with monster reagents, so if you are interested in acquiring all of the rarest weapons in the game, you’ll be spending most of your time in the dungeons looking for these raw reagants.
It’s a great feeling to see customers walking through your store and buying your merchandise!
Final Thoughts
As you can probably tell from reading this, I heartily enjoyed Recettear. Of course, it had gameplay aspects that I loved to begin with, so it wasn’t hard for this to keep me hooked. While the game seems somewhat simple and straight-forward, it has that “one more turn” addictive quality about it where I found it hard to stop just because each new day brought new random shopping trends to the market that I had to account for in order to capitalize on the day’s sales. I wanted to keep making money, and I wanted to continue seeing and pleasing my repeat customers.
I can see why some people say they’ve spent 60-80 hours on this game. I however will most likely not be one of those people. Being able to fully pay off my father’s debt is enough for me to say that I’ve beaten the game, but for completionists that want to find every item in the game and deck out all of the various adventurers they can take into the dungeons, they can easily spend dozens more hours.
I would love for this game to have been portable on the Nintendo DS or the PSP – it is such a perfect commuting game. But alas, at least I can play it with an attached gamepad on my PC – it’s definitely better than playing the game with the keyboard. I highly recommended Recettear for JRPG fans, as the story, humor, characters, and feel of the game is perfect for those that can appreciate it. There are lots of little touches that JRPG fans and anime fans will love. For non J-RPG gamers, this game may be a little bit too out there, and it’s hard for me to recommend to those that have not grown up playing Japanese games. The game is worth its $19.99 asking price on Steam for fans like myself, but I still recommend waiting for the next time Steam puts it on sale (which it inevitably will) so check out the free demo in the meantime.
Final Grade: B+
