AL･FINE Reviews

Semi decent game but its a cheap copy of Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale(recommend you play that first before this) If you fix the annoying bugs will be a lot better Bugs: Cant full screen Will randomly switch languages Textures bug out and will go black requiring game restart

A very annoying game to play, Needs a lot of quality of life improvements (like fullscreen!? or at least change resolution, sound volume etc) . It somehow requires you to have your hands on both sides of the keyboard and the mouse to play so I'm constantly having to move. Just play reccatear instead.

Lack of fullscreen and controller support is annoying but it could have been saved if it felt unique and charming. Sadly it just seems to be a budget Recettear clone. It is not something i would recommend.

I think this is a fun enough game Idk why everybody's tripping out. You run a shop, dialogue's pretty cute. Not recommending this because Recettear exists is like... ok??? Is there only room in this world for one of those types of games? Recettear and Shop Heroes were slightly better imo but this game was fun and worth the cost to me as I love these types of games.

tl;dr - I can't recommend this game at it's current price for the content it provides. It's like a more technical and casual form of Recettear. I would recommend trying Recettear first before trying this one out. The story is very similar to Recettear as well, both Main Characters start up their family shops to pay off a debt. It's still a fun little tycoon game. I would recommend getting the game when it's on sale and when the vram error issue is fixed, because it can ruin many in-game days of progress in an instant if you haven't saved before it just randomly happens. The vram error issue becomes more frequent the more I had progressed into the game making it almost unplayable. I played the game on Hard for a challenge and it wasn't an impossible task to get to day 99, except as for my first time there was no way in hell I was going to beat Ornate Brand with the RNG like buyers. I could be bad at the game and there is probably a how to guide, or not. Edit: 12/12/2016 The game is still filled with bugs, like the game having all the UI Text turning back into japanese and the store missing textues so it's just a black void, but maybe someday the port will be fixed. Still no trading cards available and it would make this buy a bit better if there was.

Mediocre. No real dungeon exploration mechanics. Like Recettear except uniformly worse in every respect, whether by gameplay, graphics, or repetitive, unpleasant music. No fullscreen option. If you love this sort of game, you will like it. If you only like this sort of game when it's done well, you won't.

If you enjoy Recettear, you'll probably enjoy this. It's cute, funny, and has some mechanics (food spoiling, for e.g) that give it an interesting take that make it different enough from Recettear. I'm only 2 hours in, and I can see myself playing this a lot.

It's like Recettear, but with (even more) waifus. Edit: WAIT A MINUTE THIS GAME IS A CRAPPY PORT THOUGH: - No configuration screen: No muting the repetitive music. - No Full screen mode: Enjoy squinting at your 800x600 box - Occasional texture fart: sometimes the background, walls, floor etc will be pitch black until you restart the game. I know some of you hate these kind of half-baked ports, so you are hereby warned.

Al Fine is a shop management game similar to Racettear, but is unfortunately inferior to in every way. Many mechanics are similar: - Each day is broken up into 3 time segments: morning, day and night. You can spend this time either opening shop, or choosing to visit one of the town's locations. - Locations are exactly same as Racettear - town center, market, pub, adventure and merchant guilds. Access to each location are restricted by the time segment of the day (ie pub on accessible at night). - You obtain goods to sell by either buying from market, or obtaining through dungeons. Unlike Racettear, there is no combat or RPG element. You just hire the adventurer and send them off. They'll return 3 days later and bring back loot. - You can upgrade and redesign your shop to change the mood and type of customers that visit shop. - Every 10 days you have to pay a fee to keep the store open. The differences - Weather and seasons. These affect the number of customers but in reality the effect is only cosmetic. Even on a bad weather day, with nothing else to do, you are still going to open the shop regardless, just means you make a little less profit that day. It does not affect your decision making hence I describe it as cosmetic. - Commerce battles. You have to make more profit than your rival within x days. This is also cosmetic since you're still going to sell things and make profit anyway. The battles dont change your course of normal actions. Poor implements: - cant change resolution. there is no fullscreen option, so the game at 800x600 (i think?) is just a tiny window. - The game allows you to speed up time, but you have to manually restock shelves. If you speed up time, by the time you notice the shelf is empty and click on the shelf to restock, the store is already closed. So you can either watch the slow shopping process and be more efficient in restocking, or you can fast forward the boring parts but possibly miss out on sales. I don't understand why restocking isnt an automated process. - unlike Racettear where all customer types will buy pretty much everything, but have individual preferences towards price of certain goods, Al Fine customers will only buy the items they are designed to buy. It is not fun to see alot of customers walk in, look around and not like anything then walk back out and waste your time. I also encountered a game crashing bug where an error message popped up and said something like "out of VRAM unable to load scene". Game does not autosave, and I lost all progress. Its another game where I wish there was a neutral button. I'll hit recommend but really Racettear is the same but much better.

Only recommended if you've already played Recettear and desperately want another shopkeeping game. If you haven't played Recettear, it's a superior experience for just $5 more. Al Fine involves too much clicking and not enough thinking. The market you buy your items from has infinite stock and their prices rarely change. Exploring dungeons consists of selecting an adventurer and waiting 3 days for the game to tell you whether he succeeded or failed. And selling your items basically consists of setting the same items out at default price 98% of the time and occasionally clicking their shelves to restock them. The biggest change of strategy is during one of the 4 Commerce Battles in the game, where the easiest way to make a bigger income (not profit; spend as much money as you like) than your competitor is to sell all the expensive loot you've stored from the dungeons at a 10-20% discount. It feels like they cut a lot of corners with this game: it only gives you information on the buying preferences of less than half of your customers, all of the information about the other stores in the Top 10 list (not to mention the Top 10 list itself) is worthless, and there's a persistent bug where after an hour or two of playing it, it'll start maxing out your VRAM and refuse to load textures (and also switch to Japanese). The story itself is too bland and light for its own good. All of the characters are caricatures that barely get any development and the only major conflict is a plot to monopolize the town's economy that only takes up 10 days of the 100-day duration. The other 90 days basically involve the meek main character deciding he wants to be a merchant and making friends to help him. Nothing is really done with the 3 different races or the floating island setting. It took me 14 hours to finish the game. I wish I hadn't invested that time (or my money) into it.