Recent reviews by shkm

I was too lazy to do the dishes so I cleaned a house virtually instead.

The first kind-of-roguelike I've been addicted to since Isaac.

Greater dog inches closer.

I'm not a big fan of anime or the clichés tied to it, but Recettear does, on the surface, rather look like a game made to appease the clique of rabid otaku. This served as a deterrant for me, but it's only skin-deep: the try-hard cutesy voice acting is minimal and can be disabled, the story doesn't involve an overly emotional hero with amnesia, and there is no harem of scantily-clad children. That's the usual suspects taken care of.

Recettear places you in the shoes of a girl named Recette, in a fairly typical JRPG setting. It turns out that Recette's father — who is now probably dead, which is beautifully glossed over — accrued a significant debt, and she's to pay it off by turning her home into an item shop. Your primary goal is making money rather than story or dungeon progression, which is quite a twist from the norm. The story doesn't try to do too much, and gets out of your way pretty quickly.

Items can be acquired at the local wholesalers or in dungeons. Yep, dungeons: you can hire an adventurer, kit them out with your own gear, and take them dungeon crawling. They even have their own levelling system and skills, though the combat system is fairly basic and uninteresting. Then there's crafting, in which you discover new items by combining others.

But you own an item shop, so you should be selling items. This process involves judging your customers' budgets, haggling, buying from customers, keeping up with item trends, taking pre-orders and appropriately stocking your shop. Speaking of the shop, it's customisable through a range of carpets, counters and wallpaper. Your shop can even be expanded and the furniture can be moved around.

There's quite a lot to Recettear, but you're not thrown in at the deep end: everything is revealed at what I can only call a perfect pace. Just as I was getting used to one mechanic, a new one popped up. Once the main game is completed — that is, once you've paid back the debt — New Game+, Survival and Endless modes are unlocked, with plenty more items left to discover and levels to gain. To gauge just how much content there is here, I completed the main game with only 33% of items discovered and a merchant level of 19 (of 50).

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this game and will probably be playing a little Endless mode, in which there is no looming debt to repay, for some time.