RECETTEAR〜アイテム屋さんのはじめ方〜
- Filed under: Articles, Games
- Date: Apr 21, 2008 02:53 JST
- Tags: Dojin Soft, EasyGameStation, PC Gaming, Recettear, RPG
I recently revisited this charming game after the latest patch. For those that are not familiar with RECETTEAR〜アイテム屋さんのはじめ方〜 (Recettear: How to start an Item Shop), it is a fantasy business RPG, produced and published by dojinsoft outfit EasyGameStation. It is really very good – read on for my thoughts and plenty of screenshots.
Without introducing any spoilers, the basic plot is that the protagonist, Recette, is left with a mountain of debt after her father abandons her to become an adventurer, and dispatch debt recovery fairy Tear is sent in to seize her assets. However, rather than take the meagre house, she has Recette start an item shop, of the sort familiar to anyone who has ever played a fantasy RPG, so as to pay off the debt in full. Through this charming tale of entrepreneurship through adversity, you can make various friends and rivals, expand your shop, and of course loot dungeons and craft items for sale.
Your business rival, but she is also your greatest customer as she will pay way over the odds.
This cheeky little fairy drives a very hard bargain. Some customers will be more or less prone to haggling down prices; if you tire of this you can always install vending machines at the cost of lower margins.
This shyster interrupts your selling combos with her outrageous offers.
The gameplay in the dungeons is quite simple, and not too taxing. You can clear your debt without ever setting foot in them, but you do not get to progress through the character events and gain access to new adventurers if you do so.
The adventurers you meet also become your customers, so it is helpful to unlock them; they will also equip items they buy from you, although getting them to buy useful items is a bit hit and miss. Fortunately, you can lend them gear at the cost of reducing the space available for loot brought out from the depths.
You can alter your customer demographic by changing your décor, although it seems that appealing to the masses is usually the best way to go. Eerie purple unfortunately does not yield enough big spending sorcerous customers to make up for the loss of little girls and housewives. Fancy and gorgeous is the way to go, but also the most garish.
After the main story is finished, you can play on indefinitely to make even more money and explore the backgrounds of the various side characters through events and dungeons.
Most of the balance issues present in the prepatch version seem to have been solved, so the master strategy should no longer be geared towards filling your shop with stew dispensing vending machines; this is a relief. The patch also expanded the game a fair amount. The developers certainly deserve credit for continued efforts to support the game, often the bête noire of even professional PC game developers.
The game still refuses to run on my main computer, but will run on my laptop, so this is not optimal to me personally, but the blame partially rests on my obscure and 64bit choice of OS, so I am not inclined to be too critical over this.
The only improvement I would be desperate for is fully voiced character dialogue, however this is not really a reasonable expectation of an independent developer producing such a reasonably priced game; the production values, particularly art style and dialogue, are faultless for a dojin game. With plenty of events and game modes, it is long lasting too.
