Volatile Markets, Ho!

Recettear has a pretty catchy premise: running an item shop, supporting adventurers, and pursuing the almighty quest for dollars. Unfortunately, the various mechanics and game systems it applies in this pursuit have fairly mixed results.

The fundamental game loop works well enough. Protagonist Recette has to go out and get items, then sell them to people, to make Tom Nook-style loan payments. "Getting" items typically involves shopping at the Merchants' Guild (which supplies adventurer items like weapons and armor at wholesale), or at the town Market (for food, clothes, and other commodities). The Adventurers' Guild also provides an option for getting items by dungeon-crawling (more on this later), and sometimes shop-goers will want to sell an item to the shop ... for some reason. Then Recette has to place these items on the shelves and serve interested customers, using a basic haggling system. Buy low, sell high -- pretty simple.

As Recette serves customers and gains shopkeeper experience, she "levels up" and new mechanics unlock. (And some new mechanics also appear after playing for a certain number of in-game days.) These additional mechanics, unfortunately, start to take the game off the rails. Random market price fluctuations might seem like a cool feature, but these fluctuations have too-dramatic of an effect - either doubling or halving effective prices - and can be too broad, like crashing the market for all weapons. Customers requesting unstocked items is neat at first, but I got unreasonably incensed by people continuing to ask for hats, well after I established that I don't have any hats! And for every time a customer was willing to sell me a sweet item, there were a dozen more times that all they wanted to sell was some insignificant waste-of-my-time garbage.

The dungeon-crawling mode should be a good way to break the monotony of customer service, but it is a comprehensive disappointment. The controls are terrible, the content isn't interesting, and the rules by which items can be transported back out of a dungeon are pretty wacky. It plays like Evoland's dungeons, which is not a good thing.

The technology and presentation of Recettear, which is otherwise unremarkable for a doujin game, gets a pretty serious boost from its clever localization. The game's clever and imaginative translation lends it a cheery personality, and an offbeat sense of humor that helps it stand out among other Japanese amateur games.

As neat as Recettear's basic merchant mechanics are, and as entertaining as its localization is, these shallow pleasures are ill-served by the game's disorienting complications and lackluster adventuring mode. I admire the game's design, and I had some fun for the first couple hours, but I'm not really jazzed about soldiering on with it.

Progress: Made the second loan payment.