Honestly, I'm sort of on the fence about this one, and I could see myself giving it either a thumbs up or thumbs down. Ultimately I guess I'll go with thumbs down because the game has two broad categories of gameplay, one of them being selling things and the other one being combat, and neither one of them is really that amazing.
[h1]Combat[/h1]
The main focus seems to be on selling things, which means that combat almost feels like an afterthought and feels like something the game only included as an obligation because some executive out there said, "Of course it's gotta have fighting in it. It's a video game; that's what they do. Fighting is what makes games sell. Go put in more fights so we can make more money."
The combat honestly feels extremely plain and basic, like they were going for something that wouldn't be too much for a grandma who just wanted to play a cute little game about running a shop to handle, and it's by no means horrible, but still a tiny bit plain, and the combat just "feels" slightly stiff and slightly slow in a way that's hard to describe and just kind of has to be felt.
It does have a couple of basic elements of a theoretical good combat system in it, e.g., there are a variety of enemies that are meaningfully different (E.g., it's not just "Use a water spell against the fire enemies and a fire spell against the grass enemies" or something where it's all really the same with just a different skin thrown on 15 versions of the exact same game mechanic) and require different tactics to defeat them (Try to back the bunnies against a wall because they hop away when you attack them, be mindful of which side you attack the knights from because they can block from the front, etc, etc), but overall it just feels very much like they only did the minimum to be passable because in the end combat just wasn't the focus here, which is not to say that this makes it bad because the minimum [b]is[/b] the minimum and passable [b]is[/b] passable, and so the combat is, like, fine, but why should you play a game that's fine when there are plenty of games out there that are incredible you could be playing instead?
[h1]Selling Stuff[/h1]
I'm gonna be honest, the idea of selling things is neat for a short while, then it kind of gets old fast.
Basically all you do is memorize which customers will buy things at which markup (The merchant guild leader buys high, that little girl buys low, etc, etc), and then you just offer them that price, and then that's it, you've officially mastered everything you need to know about selling things and the rest of the game is just inputting whatever number goes with whatever face is presented to you and it honestly gets really monotonous after a while. I actively avoided selling things after a certain point if I could help it just because it was so mind numbingly repetitive.
Of course, I was probably ultimately using kind of a simple strategy to sell things, and maybe the game would have been more interesting if I had done stuff like, say, 100% optimizing the atmosphere of my store to bring in the most profitable customer base possible or whatever, but the thing is, why should i bother? Why should I bother being 100% efficient when being 75% efficient takes 10% of the effort but is still enough to beat the game? 100% efficiency would only matter if I was doing a speedrun or something or trying to break world records for longest time lasted in survival mode or something, but in casual play it doesn't matter. Ultimately all that would have done was given me a slightly larger number in the oodles of spare cash I had lying around once I reached the point where I could buy anything I wanted and money no longer mattered, but it would have made no actual difference in any meaningful regard. When people play [i]Halo,[/i] they don't bother being 100% efficient in how much ammo they use, but they just spray the aliens until they die and call it a day, because there's more than enough ammo available even when you aren't being 100% efficient and in the end it doesn't matter if you finish the game with 200 spare bullets left or 1 because once it's over those spare bullets aren't doing you any good. The only reason to use fewer bullets is if you're doing some kind of self imposed challenge, and so by extension the only reason to bother optimizing my store 100% in [i]Recettear[/i] is if I want to challenge myself to see how efficient I can make it, but a game shouldn't require you to put challenges on yourself to make it interesting, but it should just be interesting in its own right.
One minor thing I want to say about selling things, though, is that I've played a lot of RPG's in my time, and in every last one of them the merchants are totally unfair and they'll sell you a broken stick for 48 million gold and then turn right around and buy The Ultimate Blade Of Heroic Destiny from you for about 8 coins, and the amount of "merchant advantage" they have in the buying and selling prices of goods is insane. My expectation going into Recettear was that such a system would make the game way too easy and so the amount of merchant advantage [b]you[/b] get as a seller would be greatly toned down, but actually, no, I was pleasantly surprised to find that you actually [b]can[/b] sell goods for, like, 4 times the price customers will sell them to you, and it honestly felt nice to just get to [b]be[/b] the ridiculous unfair merchant for a change.
[h1]Plot[/h1]
Honestly, I feel like the plot is sort of lacking. It sort of feels like a bunch of things happen and then it just sort of doesn't go anywhere. The most obvious example I can think of is that [spoiler]at some point we see Recette's missing father, the game just sort of says, "Let's not talk about him; let's just move on", and then that plot thread just sort of never gets brought up again.[/spoiler] I'm honestly not sure to this day if I might be missing something. Maybe there is more of a resolution to everything and I just don't know where to look for it, but I honestly looked through a series of YouTube videos of what I think was a 100% playthrough of this game just to see if there were anymore cutscenes after that point detailing what happened, but I don't think there are. The videos ran dozens and dozens of hours in total, so I only skimmed them looking for important content, but I don't think I missed anything(?). It really might just end like that.
But it's not just that, there also loads of adventurers you can recruit throughout the game, and they all kind of have backstories and junk that [b]feel[/b] like they should be going somewhere, but it's just sort of... nothing.
That being said, I did find that the game had some moderately interesting worldbuilding in it that I don't really want to spoil too much ([spoiler]mostly just the stuff about how this society is really kind of awful when you really look at it, and especially the idea that apparently humans only see a subset of fairies who specifically have been trained to get along with humans. That really makes me want to know, what do most fairies do that humans hate so much? Also, does this mean Prime is one of the LESS annoying fairies, for real?[/spoiler]), but I just thought it was neat.
[h1]Final Verdict[/h1]
Overall, I'd give this a thumbs down, and you should probably find something better than this to play because it's just okay, but this isn't a [b]strong[/b] thumbs down, and if you really, really wanted to play this game just because you thought Recette was cute or something and aren't that concerned about gameplay really, then you may as well play this because it won't be a horrible time by any means. I had a decentish time playing this game, and I probably won't bother playing any of the loads of Recettear clones that I think exist(?) because this game wasn't that stunning, but I don't necessarily regret playing this either.
