• Go for Broke - Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale
  • by Jimmy Lee
Recettear might be the only game my mom ever stopped to watch me play.



It happened innocuously enough. As she was passing by, I stopped to explain the gist of the game to her - the equivalent of an elevator pitch trying to sell her on the idea that videogames could possibly teach me how to be a shrewd businessman. In Recettear's case, it's mostly about how much of a unscrupulous, bottom-line obsessed racketeer you can be. It's even in the name.

Recettear is an indie RPG created by Japanese developers EasyGameStation, and localized by a few friends aiming to start up their own localization company by name of Carpe Fulgur. In it, you are tasked with running a typical JRPG item shop, stocking equipment, food, and the occasional knickknack in order to sell it back for obscene amounts of profit.



You don't really have much of a choice - at least, the game's protagonist doesn't. Recette has never worked a day in her life, and wakes up one day to find a fairy (Tear) attempting to collect on a loan that Recette's father took out and never did manage to pay back. The plot's contrived, but the motivation is no less urgent for it; every week, you're expected to pay up a not-insignificant sum in order to repay your father's debt. Failure means foreclosure.

For a game that was released in its Japanese version way back in 2007, it seems eeriely predictive of the realities faced by many homeowning Americans merely a year later. But the dire reality of Recettear's immediate concerns is offset largely by a lighthearted, humorous translation by Carpe Fulgur - this is a game in which the protagonist dives headlong into every sale with "Capitalism, ho!" as her battlecry.



Goods are typically procured from the market or the guild merchant's association - on occasion, you can recruit an adventurer to plumb the depths of a nearby dungeon in a Zelda-esque action-RPG to find rare and lucrative items to be sold later on. Selling involves haggling with customers - you get two tries to make an offer before they scoff at you and move on. On occasion, customers will also try to pawn off stuff they don't need - an easy way to obtain some of the pricier items on the cheap. Customers will also occasionally ask you to recommend an item for them, so you're not limited to selling items that are only on your store shelves.

There's a perverse pleasure to the act of increasing your profit margins. It's also an art. One needs to build up a rapport with the customers, and as you play, they'll all develop particular shopping habits. As I played, I bellyached to my strangely enraptured mom about certain customers - the penny-pinching elderly gentleman, the bossy little girl - who wouldn't buy anything unless I drastically lowered my standard margin of profit. It's a moment to moment drama seeing who will take you up your offer on a grossly overpriced sword, or if a customer is willing to part with a piece of sweet potato for merely a quarter of their offered price.



All this takes place amidst a rapidly approaching deadline, and the pressure can be intense at times. My first playthrough was plagued with people pawning off statues that nobody wanted to buy, so I barely managed to scrape through my weekly payment with just enough coin to stop Recette from living in a box. And I will admit this freely; I punched my fist in the air and let out a whoop as the scales tipped in my favor, as the prospects of homelessness were averted for just one more week - and then the demo ended.

When I asked my mom later about why she was so interested in the game, I half-expected a response about how interesting the gameplay looked. My dad, who was nearby, said something to the effect of "she wanted to see if you had street smarts".

My mom concurred. "You once said you wanted to open a shop", she continued, "where you wanted to sell everything at 110% of the purchasing price." This went unspoken, but she had a look that plainly said "yes, you were that dumb once."

And they say that videogames never taught me anything.




You can download a demo of Recettear here.
Recettear is available on Steam, Impulse and Gamersgate starting September 10th.
  • TAGS:Recettear, review, capitalism, indie, RPG
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    • About the Author
    • Programmer by day, game journalist and overthinker by night, Jimmy Lee is a regular contributor to TK-Nation and a proponent of intelligent, thoughtful writing about videogames. He likes what happens in them, and he likes what happens outside and around them even more. In the rare event that he's not thinking about games, he's probably busy trying to keep up with new music and/or wasting too much time pretending he's a tauren shaman. Or something. His favorite games include Gunstar Heroes, Rez and Vagrant Story.
    28 comments so far add a comment
    • On , Klaius #60 said,

    • Whoa, Recettear's been translated?

      Never expected a doujin game to be localized. It's on Steam, even.

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    • Yup, it has been translated indeed by the good people of Carpe Fulgur. Speaking of the good people there, we're sort of working with them for our next 'sort-of-giveaway-challenge-thingie' but not quite so you might want to stick around to see if you're interested in that game. ;) Ahem. All right. Done hijacking this article.

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