Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale Reviews

Fond memories of this game. Could not bring myself to play this in the 2020s.

After failing the first 2 attempts, I went online and read a guide, things made much more sense and I managed to clear the story. Though graphics are outdated, but still a fun concept and game. (save file says it took 17hrs to beat)

Awesome game, can't wait for the upcoming HD release this year. Very cute and funny. I just wish the shop mechanic was a bit more complicated, the game becomes a bit too easy when you figure out how the pin system works. Don't look up any guides for this game, that kills half the fun.

Recettear is a masterpiece, albeit a bit of a repetitive one. CAPITALISM HO!

I don't understand why this game is so highly rated. It's not [i]bad[/i], but it's rather mediocre. You start out as a young girl whose father disappeared one day to become an adventurer. (There's no mention of your mother.) A fairy loan-shark soon drops by and threatens to foreclose on your home and throw you out into the street if you don't pay back your father's loan. So you start an item shop to make money. Every day is basically the same: go to the market, buy stuff, take it back to your shop, and sell it for a profit. It's extremely easy to make money in this game, since people don't really mind if you buy something from the market for $100 and then sell it to them for $150 or $200. But the real way to make more money is to make less money... which is rather unintuitive. You see, by not haggling and by selling items cheaply with less profit, you level up faster as a merchant, and when you level up, new, more expensive items appear on the market for you to buy. So instead of buying a hat for $100 and selling it for $200, you can eventually buy a hat for $10,000 and sell it for $20,000. Sometimes people try to sell you stuff, which is a way to get items at below-market price, but it's ridiculous and often annoying. Some guy will come in and say "my wife's been bugging me to get rid of this thing", and then he'll try to sell you a bowl of soup. Or somebody will try to sell you a bread roll which you totally don't want cluttering up your inventory but feel forced to buy lest you lose your "chain" bonus; there's no way to politely decline to purchase something. Often a guy will sell you something for $500 and then immediately turn around and buy it back from you for $1000. Yay, profit, but it's nonsense. You can also go walking around in a dungeon looking for items, but it's very simplistic. The items you find are rarely of much value - the real value comes from things like slime, bat wings, dried lizards, and other weird items, which you can combine with regular items to make them more valuable. But you'd almost certainly make more money just staying in your shop and selling stuff, so dungeon-crawling is entirely skippable, which is good because it's not much fun. There's very little in the way of story to break up the monotony. You meet a couple new characters as you level up, like a spoiled rich girl, a robot girl, and a thief, who have slightly different flavor text when they come shop in your store, but it's thin gruel. Overall there's very little variety. Ultimately I only kept playing for the hope of some kind of story pay-off at the end. I expected my father to return, or if not, I expected to at least find out if he was alive or dead. But no, there's no real closure to the story. Your character hardly even seems to care if her father is still alive; I can't recall her even mentioning him once after the introduction. The game just transitions to endless mode where you can do the same stuff forever, but why would I want to do that? Also, the graphics are low-resolution and the sound effects are very repetitive. As best I can tell, people like the game because anime.

A truly unique game that's not overly simplistic nor terribly complicated. The dungeon crawling is a bit boring once you've gotten characters to wear decent equipment, but you're not even forced to interact with it if you don't want to. I truly hope more games like this get made.

Capitalism HO! I heckin' love this game. A cast of lovable characters, genuinely funny writing and an interesting premise make this, gameplay-wise, rather simple action RPG / merchant simulator an instant classic.

store manager, and dungeon crawler optional. its just a fun game, really. hd release will be nice. will totally support that for nostalgia purposes.

This is a cute, smartly-written, remarkably fun simulation RPG that's well deserving of its cult hit status.

A fun not so little game about running an item shop and maybe going adventuring, but more on that later. As the title implies, the main gameplay loop involves buying and selling items to pay off a loan. Over time you get a feel for how much you can highball different customers and they become more willing to spend larger sums of money in your store. As the game goes on new mechanics are introduced such as clients requesting items that aren't on display or placing orders 2-3 days in advance. Eventually, prices start fluctuating at which point you can speculate the market or get punished for over-relying on a single item category. The game features decent presentation and surprisingly charming writing. You can also tell it's a fantasy game right away because it features a money lender who still possesses a sliver of soul, emphasis on the sliver part. You'll see what I mean if you miss a payment. Finally, there's adventuring. You can hire NPCs to and go dungeon crawling with the usual elements such as monsters, treasure chests and bosses. I didn't like this part very much because the gameplay is serviceable, but nothing special, and the whole affair is less profitable than reselling things from the market/guild. Not to mention it provides no merchant experience which is what actually unlocks new things to play around with. Adventurers can visit the store and purchase equipment when off-work but regular citizens have an uncharacteristic desire for weapons and armor as well so this isn't much of an advantage. To conclude, for this review I replayed the game after about 7 years or so because the last time I didn't engage with the post-game content. This time around it's not any different, I feel satisfied with a regular playthtrough. Recettear is a fun game with a lot of charm but most of the post-game content is adventuring related and I don't care for it.