Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

this is what they should be teaching in schools

Good game. The shop aspect is great. The dungeons are surprisingly addictive despite not being the main part of the game, although the dungeons become the main part in the post game. For the positives, this game is charming and has a good sense of humor. I would say the difficulty of beating the game is just right. If you know what you're doing it's easy, if you go in blind it's quite challenging but not punishing. It doesn't overwhelm you with complexity but you get more things to manage over time. Doing a dungeon dive here and there can help keep things interesting. Without spoiling anything too bad for those that want a blind playthrough, the 1 piece of advice I'll give is to take Tear's advice with a grain of salt. There's 1 tip in particular that she gives you that is terrible advice. I'll leave it at that. I like the adventurer roster, it does an excellent job of giving you options so you can go with one that suits your play style. Tielle's my favorite. Your first adventurer is Louie and he's pretty solid, which is good because I would argue that the next 2 ones you get have the biggest learning curve. Anyone who has recruited Charme and went straight into Amber Garden without even getting the merchant levels and/or money to buy better equipment knows exactly what I'm talking about. I hope I don't get too much hate for it but I argue that the game isn't perfect. The music isn't amazing. It's quaint, but honestly I just turn it off and put my own stuff on which is fine. The controls are not Celeste-level tight and good-feeling. Using a controller can help, but has it's own problems. Half of your roster can dash, which means you need to use the d-pad and at that point so you should stick with the keyboard anyway. Where dungeons felt the best was playing Tielle with a controller. Even then it still doesn't read button presses perfectly all the time (maybe my controller sucks?), but things are more forgiving with the controls when using a ranged character. Also holding down the attack button constantly with Tielle aggravated my arthritus here and there, I don't know what they were thinking when they designed this game. Coupled with the extreme difficulty of the final dungeon, the sub-optimal controls are a recipe for frustration. I'm seeing yellow ropers in my nightmares. I read somewhere that they nerfed ropers too, I find it hard to fathom what the Crystal Nightmare must've been like prior to the nerf. I don't consider this all bad though, it makes the game quite memorable. Another negative is the drop rates. Or rather, the sheer amount of dungeon you have to run through hunting for specific monster types. Add onto that the fact that sometimes you're hunting for higher quality mats and it gets even more punishing. Although, on the positive side quality is never required but it's just a nice thing to have. Overall though, as far as ingredients go it's really only a couple of them that are problematic. The big one is fire crystals. Boss drops end up being less problematic because you can do boss rushes, but darkness crystals are pretty rough. So the big problem is chests. There're so many fusion items that are chest-dependent, and the crystal nightmare is aptly named and is unfortunately the most efficient way to get better chest loot. Then when you actually get some good items from chests, it might not be for equipment for the adventurer that you want. In my case I had a period where my best weapon was for Elan, I mean he's enjoyable to play but he struggles pretty hard against the tougher bosses and in the Crystal Nightmare. Then I got good equipment for Griff who's pretty good, but Tielle's my favorite. I see this as both good and bad. I often found myself using the adventurer that I had good equipment for, so it encourages switching up who I use based as that. You can target ingredients for fusions for the specific adventurer that you want to get better equipment for, although even in that case the game will more than likely give you drops for other stuff you didn't want as much. But the chests, you have no control over that at all. I don't know if you can call it a negative, but in the postgame running the item shop isn't interesting. It doesn't force you to open up your shop when you don't want to, other than to occasionally replenish your coffers and grind for more merchant levels. I found myself opening shop even when I didn't want to though because it just felt wrong not to open shop for multiple days in a row. I also made the mistake of starting a new game cycle to get another adventurer's true card. It locked me out of doing the Lapis Ruins dungeon for a month. I could've skipped some days to get through it faster but as I mentioned, that would've felt wrong. In summary, this game is at it's best when you're beating your initial playthrough. I love getting new items and reading the item descriptions, watching all the cut scenes, and advancing the story by unlocking all the adventurers and getting through all the dungeons. It feels great when you make a debt payment with money to spare, and when you get another merchant level and are able to upgrade your shop, or when you get that last ingredient for the fusion you wanted and are able to make your chosen adventurer stronger. Dungeons can be rough, but they're not mandatory.

Great little economic sim. Not too complicated, but more so than most simple ones. Completely family friendly too.

a great shop simulator, with some dungeon diving that you can get pretty deep into if I had one criticism it's that the game teaches you to haggle. DO NOT DO THIS. your goal is to get it as close as possible to the customer's expected price on the first attempt.

I got this game when it came out, so many years ago. It gave me an itch that no other game has been able to scratch since then. Fun little diversion!

アイテム屋経営SLGと、ダンジョン探索RPGの複合ゲーム。基本的には前者が主で、販売や合成に使うアイテムを後者で集めたり、逆に前者で資金集めや買取などをして集めたアイテムを後者に持ち込んだりも出来る。 メインストーリーの目標は借金返済であり、週1程度でノルマの返済を進めていき、5回程度でクリアとなる。返済に失敗するとゲームオーバーとなるが、商人レベルや持ち物などを引き継いだ状態でチュートリアル直後からの再開となるため、実質的に強くてニューゲームとなる。よほど下手な動きをしなければいつかはクリア出来ると思うが、反対に一発でクリアするのはそれなりに理解度が高くないと難しいように感じた。 メインストーリークリアまでプレイして8時間程度。個人的には、クリアだけを目標とする場合、ダンジョンに潜る部分のメリットがほぼ感じられないのが一番気になったところ。RPGパートはお世辞にも面白いとは言えず、持ち帰った素材の合成もパッとしない、ドロップアイテムもそこまで質が高くない、失敗すると実質的に全ロスに近い、ターン経過は重いなど、リスクとリターンがまるで噛み合っていない。クリア時の会話では全アイテム収集まではプレイすることを推奨され、恐らくダンジョン探索でしか手に入らないアイテムが多数あるのだが、とてもそこまでプレイする気にはなれなかった。平成の同人ゲームにありがちな雑バランスなので愛嬌はあるが、終盤はひたすら店番をして売買を繰り返し、品薄の商品が出てきたら市場に買い出しに行く程度の引きこもり生活になってしまったので、目先の効率を見るタイプのプレイヤーには上手く楽しめないゲームである可能性が高い。 キャラの掛け合いなどは本当に平成の同人ゲーム！という空気感で、当時を懐かしむには丁度良い作品だった。[spoiler]ビックハシのお嬢様の「貧乏人が働いていますわ！」[/spoiler]が好き過ぎる。 後半が繰り返し作業になるのはやや面倒だが、そこまで長丁場にはならないので完全にダレる前には終わる。一方で、想定された遊び方できちんと遊ぶにはそれなりにボリュームはありそうと、どの層のプレイヤーでも一定ラインは楽しめると思う。強くオススメする作品ではないが、手持ちにあったら週末でプレイしてみるには良いだろう。

Kinda sucks actually. There's no point haggling because if you don't make a deal on first try you get penalized. The dungeon part of the game is extremely boring. The rest of the game is good but that's already a lot wrong with it.

game of all time

I AM BECOME JOOS, DESTROYER OF ECONOMY(ONE ADVENTURER CITY AT A TIME). [b] CAPITALISM HO! [/b]

Very dull mechanics from yesteryear