Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

Each time I hear the *CHING* sound I receive dopamine and lose three braincells.

虽然有点年代感的画面，但总感觉自己在玩一种很新潮的游戏 （阅读文本彷佛在做阅读理解，可能在那个没有AI，甚至没有翻译软件的年代，也许游戏真的就是在学校找的老师在翻译八）

15 years and no Recettear 2 is a shame. This is a game where you run a shop and have to dungeon crawl to get items to sell. You have a few ways to run the shop but not as many as I'd like. Game is still great and holds up. I wish there were more ways to customize the shop or even have an outdoor area to work on, and the combat needs an update for sure. Its still fun with a lot to do and a lot of choices to make. Capitalism ho!

CAPITALISM HO

Capitalism, ho!

I’ve played a different title from this company’s catalog thinking it was Recettear. I kept thinking that the shop was going to pop up after beating the first dungeon and when that didn’t happen is when I finally sat down to google what kind of game Chantelise was. Apparently, it was some kind of dungeon crawler grindfest, not an item shop sim like I was hoping for. My interest waned after finding that out and the game quickly got uninstalled and shoved on to my never playing that again list. Thinking I wouldn’t have the same issues with Recettear that I had with Chantelise made a fool out of me. Both games were designed around repetitive gameplay that overstayed its welcome, relied on hardcore difficulty to pad out the game length, and dungeons populated with copy and paste enemies. The plot and characters were probably groundbreaking in the year 2007, but presently, they’re nothing more than cardboard cutouts that can be easily listed as bullet points without missing a beat. The only edge that Recettear had over Chantelise was being a top down dungeon crawler and being able to go up a floor without having to wipe out the entire floor’s population of enemies. And even that edge couldn’t encourage me to stay in the world of Recettear due to its own mechanics being poorly explained. The game insisted on repeating the beginning tutorial that told you to sell high while buying low at least twice without acknowledging another key mechanic. Said key mechanic ended up being explained better in a guide than the actual game itself. They broke the rule of sell high, buy low by having different customer wallets for each type of customer, which only increased by selling within their allowed price range. Oh, you couldn’t look at them because the game didn’t have them displayed in game for reasons. At least the playerbase of Recettear stepped up to the task and wrote some guides to help anyone struggling through the game. People have praised the writing which I could see how it was groundbreaking back in the day of 2010 compared to the numerous third party developers who basically did the bare minimum of translating a game to English before shipping it out to get their money back. But reading a line like so much rumor and seeing how the word, glee was misused revealed that the script was written by two members of Something awful forums, who were new to the translation scene. A quick rundown for people that managed to not know about Something Awful. A forum created by super nerds and for super nerds, who breathed and submerged themselves in nerdy, niche interests, which allowed them to not venture out into the real world unless they absolutely had to. Choosing super nerds, who never exposed themselves to the literary traditions of English and French created a lackluster translation. If your best line out of your entire script was chosen by your audience and nothing else, but that line to describe your work then you managed to not write as well as you should have. But it’s written for the meme, gamer talk that we loved to our deepest core of being was justification for shoddy work. They couldn’t be bothered to do better which is why merde ended up being used for kuso every single time along with yayifications and yepperoni being spoken in a French speaking, middle age fantasy world. There’s only one best line in the game’s script, not several, or so many of them that players carefully consider which lines should be considered the best part of the game or for the emotional highs or lows of the narrative. Nothing, but the words “Capitalism, ho” to capture the essence of the game to be distilled in a meme for anyone curious of the game, Recettear. What a shame. Tolerance of a weak script, standard character types, dated gameplay and hidden, poorly explained mechanics with outside help required by using guides made a frustration experience tolerable before being put away for good. Not worth your time nor money unless you were a super fan of Moonlighter and needed that itch relieved right now during a sale. And I even considered that to be a bad idea since there’s talk of a mythical remake allegedly coming to Steam after it was supposed to be released last year in its country of origin. Remakes/remasters were the solution to badly or outdated game designs and should be bought before the original game. But hey, it’s your choice in playing something that came from a company that refused to evolve beyond the first game it developed and continued on the same bad choices when developing their second game.

Very endearing, fun, and simple game. I wasn't interested in playing past the main campaign, but I had a great time leading up to that. I recommend it very, very much! If you think this game looks fun, this game is going to be worth the price you paid for it [strike]unlike some things I sold to some people in the game[/strike]