Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale

Recettear is not the game I expected it to be, and I say that because it hurts the experience. What initially attracted me to this title was its shared concept with Chapter 3 of Dragon Quest IV. For those unaware, this chapter is spent raising money to purchase a store rather than rescuing anyone, and the hero of it (Torneko) is a fat merchant instead of a traditional RPG fighter. Chapter 3 was always one of my favorite parts of that game, not because it broke formula, but because the twist served the larger game’s narrative. Everything advances like the rest of the game has; the player just has an abnormal short-term goal. You also develop better methods of gaining money as the chapter progresses, and because it is a brief section, Torneko’s tale comes off as a lighthearted peek from behind the other side of the shop counter, adding a sense of depth to the often questionable economics of RPGs.

Dragon Quest IV was released in the early 1990s, and its system’s limitations prevented Yuji Hori from taking the concept too far. Flashing forward to 2010, the developers ofRecettear had the opportunity to make an interesting RPG/shop-keeping simulation hybrid, but the end result just feels like an offline MMORPG. The game promises that you’ll learn how to approach various types of customers, your haggling will have a mathematical method to it that you must master, and the side dungeon content will help to expand your shop’s repertoire. In theory, the idea of the shop-keeping taking the wheel and dungeons being off to the side is a good one, but I don’t care for its implementation. The dungeon section feels like a pointless grind, and yet it’s the more exciting part of the game, simply because managing the shop is not very thrilling.

I suppose one could argue that’s realistic, but effectively the game promises depth in the store management and delivers on very little. Characters come in to buy things, but don’t show much consistency in their habits beyond ‘little girls only buy cheap things’–the promise of adjusting to customers’ spending habits and learning to sell to them is thus a lie, at least if my experience with the game says anything. The game tries to mix off the uniformity of items by having certain types ‘trend’ in popularity over time, but really this has the opposite effect of highlighting how otherwise similar items are. There is no point in building a shop geared toward a certain thing, and since (as far as I was able to tell) the available dungeons get maxed out early on, there is also no point stocking up on a variety of arms. A game like Recettear could be something fantastic, but Recettear does not try to be. It’s content being a shallow numbers game with a mediocre RPG attached and ‘moe’ graphics to attract an audience without offering them something of any real quality. The game makes for an entertaining time waster, but with no aspirations of being anything better.

5.5