Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale (PC)

Recette is a bubbly and outgoing girl who believes the best in everyone and says silly things like “Yayifications” when happy, but when her father disappears and leaves her with a debt that totals in the hundreds of thousands… she remains just as unflappably optimistic as ever. Immediately jumping into the task of paying it off with an unusual amount of enthusiasm, she even ropes in the fairy named Tear who came to collect the debt to be her assistant at their new joint venture: an item shop called Recettear.

 

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is primarily about running a store in a medieval fantasy world that sells items to the adventurers out fighting monsters in dungeons as well as the citizens of the peaceful town of Pensee. While “item” is a broad term, much of your inventory will consist of things like food, weapons, and equipment, the goal being to earn enough of the game’s currency called Pix to stay afloat as you not only need to pay off some of your debt each week, but the amount you must pay back is higher each time. The debt amount thankfully isn’t crushing but also feels like it usually demands a good amount of business sense and time management to avoid going out of business, and the game offers many save files just in case you don’t want to start from square one if you do fail to meet these benchmarks.

Managing the small item store is fairly simple on its surface though. Recette has a certain amount of counters she can put items out on, some near the window to serve as display items. When you open the store for business, people will funnel in and browse, the display items working as a draw but anything on a counter can be brought up for a potential sale. However, there is no sticker price, each sale a quick haggling exchange where you’ll need to propose a price and hopefully work your way into a tidy profit on the item. The game does display the standard price the item is expected to go for, but pushing the boundaries on how far you can haggle is a more complicated system than merely increasing its price by a certain percentage. Customer types have certain preferences and limits; a little girl isn’t going to be willing to pay as much as the man running the merchant guild, and recognizable named characters have personalities you can figure out that influence their buying habits. Charme the thief wants a deal that feels like a steal, but the golem Arma is still figuring out commerce in the first place and is a bit easier to squeeze high payments out of. Gradually getting a feel for the limits of these customer types is one of the big parts of being successful. You don’t want to send people storming off with absurd demands nor will you succeed if you’re too careful in trying to find people’s upper limits, and this all can apply to item acquisition at times too as later on people will enter your shop looking to sell you goods, haggling well still key to a useful turnaround.

 

You don’t need to rely on customers to sell you all the goods you stock though, as there are places in town you can pop into and quickly buy more items. There’s no haggling at the Market or Merchant’s Guild so you’ll need to spend Pix wisely and haggle smartly back at your shop to ensure these kind of purchases pay off, but there are other factors that can influence both how well you can haggle and the prices in town. Eventually you’ll start getting news updates about things like market trends, so the price of items of a particular type can rise or fall giving you a chance to buy low or sell high. There is still some interesting risk involved, you don’t know when a price might recover so you overinvesting can leave you struggling to pay off the weekly debt, and rather smartly there is no set course of events for a day’s market trends or customer behavior. If you fail to make a big sale or didn’t have the sweets in stock to handle a sudden rush on the store as demand surges, you can’t just load your save file and expect it to happen again. Save files are good insurance, but you can’t really know the future and remain subject to economic trends for good and for ill.

 

As you make sales in your item shop, Recette will gradually grow her Merchant Level, this starting to unlock more options like the ability to fuse items or customize the shop’s atmosphere that can draw in different types of customers. Making frequent sales can earn experience faster, but level growth can be slow going and the upgrades for each level can often be a bit limited in their impact. What’s more important to consider for growth is time management, each day divided into four chunks and certain actions take up different amounts of time. You can open your store four times a day, but you’ll need to go out and spend some time acquiring stock too. Only so many people will approach Recette when the shop is open and you can’t ever be absolutely sure of what will sell that day, these extra considerations definitely adding some more depth to how you manage your business even if after a while you will probably find a pretty consistent rhythm and learn the boundaries involved in haggling. In fact, Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale does start to edge a bit near stagnation when you start to get a grip of the systems at play and how to please store regulars, but beyond new items and trends appearing as you get further into the game, there is also one additional activity that adds something to do beyond sitting behind the counter or shopping at town: fighting monsters.

Recette and Tear wouldn’t last long against even the simplest of monsters in their world, but with so much of their inventory going towards supplying adventurers, they can start to get chummy with them and eventually earn their trust. Once you have interacted with an adventurer enough times, either through special events about town or even inside dungeons, they’ll soon be willing to head out into dungeons for a fee, Recette and Tear tagging along to scoop up the loot that monsters drop when defeated. For these segments you’ll actually find yourself controlling the hero instead of the merchant and her fairy friend, the adventurers having distinct yet simple attacks. Much like a day’s events, the shape of a dungeon changes each time you enter and more importantly, you can’t save or leave a dungeon until you reach certain floors. If you find excellent loot down there, you’ll want to survive until you can escape with it, the player initially only able to salvage one item if the adventurer does fall in battle. You also have a limited amount of items you can carry at all in a dungeon, so you’ll have to make decisions on what to keep and if you’ll bring things like helpful equipment and items for your adventurer to use. Luckily, you can also sell things to an adventurer in town to improve their gear and you might even want to cut them a deal to make them a better partner in battle, adventurers even leveling up the more they battle for you.

 

It can take a while to clear out dungeons and cause new ones to appear, some of them not even appearing until after the game’s main story is complete. These much longer and harder dungeons are useful for the extra modes though, the game offering two ways to keep going after the plot has ended. Endless eliminates debt concerns and lets you just keep running the shop as you like with no worries of going out of business while survival instead adds a new continuous debt with the goal being to keep up as long as you can, but however you aim to continue the adventure, the day to day does mostly stay pretty similar save for new benefits from increased merchant levels plus the dungeons rolling out some new content. A few story threads only get resolved in this post-game content albeit not ones that feel conspicuously unresolved if you don’t pursue these extras, and more importantly, even normal adventuring during the plot will still lead to many monsters and boss types that behave in different ways. Most every boss encounter has something to figure out that makes their fight a touch deeper than hitting it hard and fast. While the limited fighting mechanics can make regular exploration repetitive and you will come to recognize many creatures as you adventure through regular dungeons, the fact a run can go so awry makes the danger they present still pertinent even if they have a simple tactic like running into you or popping out of the ground. Adventuring is technically optional too depending on your business acumen, so if this segment of the game that plays more like an action role-playing game is too far a break from the business management play, you don’t need to dive in unless you’re interested in goods you don’t have to directly buy.

THE VERDICT: While the item shop management could have gone much deeper, Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale still realizes an addictive system where sales goals and random shifts in fortune help to keep the work exciting. Haggling and dungeon runs still hold value even when they start to seem a bit samey because there are other factors in play like watching market trends or trying to keep your helpful hero alive so you can keep all the loot you’ve uncovered together. A bright and friendly atmosphere and plenty of little considerations like what to lay out on the counters each time you open shop pull you in and seeing your hard work pay off is definitely gratifying, it quite easy to get caught up in a business routine that is hard to pull away from.

 

And so, I give Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale for PC…

A GOOD rating. Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is a humble indie game in some ways despite it being a surprise hit when it was the first Japanese indie game to get a release on Steam, but while its scope lead to dungeons with many monster recolors instead of frequent new threats, its systems don’t feel shallow and the item shop management has enough layers that it never truly becomes rote. You will eventually get a solid feel for certain elements like the exact limits on haggling with repeat customers but the game doesn’t become empty once you’ve finished that experimentation, new characters and systems coming along just often enough and the push to find new valuable items in dungeons or to exploit market trends keeps you coming out from behind the counter to take interesting risks. The friendly atmosphere of Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale’s world also keeps things pleasant and moving at a gentle pace, the debt of course a lingering concern but you can survive a failed dungeon run or go out and speak with people in town without having to fret that you’ve squandered too much precious time to survive. Admittedly the importance of dungeon work buoys some action RPG combat that might otherwise feel pretty basic, but the punishment for failure feels an appropriate way to inject some energy into it as you can’t be too careless and continuing to face monsters instead of fleeing is often about figuring out the value in doing so, an appropriate element for a game more about commerce than combat.

 

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale still has room for refinement in both the combat and the shop keeping, but the item store management works so well that it even buoys up the action that ends up working because of its purpose rather than inherent parts of its design. Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale does take some time to have fun and get silly with a gradually growing cast of characters, but its heart remains at building up a business and it puts systems in place that make that manageable but still a challenge. Paying off the debt feels well-earned because the game doesn’t spare you from the lows nor does it easily grant the highs, Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale perhaps not complex enough to keep its mechanics exciting on their own merits but they all hold together in an experience that makes smart and entertaining use out of them.