Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

Here are the things I liked about Recettear (and no this won't be one of those pros/cons reviews):

1. The running. It feels so good. The speed is just right and the animation is jerky in that Japanese way that gives your movements real impact. I spent a fair amount of time in this game running and I enjoyed it.

2. The young male customer. He's the nicest.

3. Decorating your store looked like it would be fun, but I stopped playing before that.


Here's what led me to questioning the 97% steam rating:

1. There is a lot of dialogue in this game and, while it's certainly well written for a translation, not much of it is very interesting. The characters aren't anything to care about and it's mostly a way of over-packaging tutorial instructions. Sometimes it was kind of funny, I guess. A tool-tip would have been nice, instead.

This said, I did have the sound turned off so I might've missed some quality voice acting, but I don't think it would have changed anything. I just ended up skimming all of the text after a couple of days.

2. The dungeons at first seemed like the most appealing part of the game, but the combat isn't fun and none of the mechanics ended up working. I didn't know what I was doing for most of it and gave up on them after a couple tries, which it turns out is the best way to go if you want to win (according to some guy).

3. If you just initiate at 130% and drop to 120% you will close every transaction. I mean, it's possible that the better strategy would be to go higher or something, but since I was haggling every customer at 130 I can't imagine you could go much higher. I didn't win (I gave up at Day 12), so I don't know if this will always work but it seems like it.

At first I thought there was something to "reading" the customers and determining how high they'll go, but I'm pretty sure they just have set responses that are either "too high" or "yeah good". And even if you could read them, who could read that woman? Her remarks were so vague I couldn't tell whether I'd closed the deal or she was walking away. That old guy could be a dick, too.

4. I have no idea how to play this game. I died at the first bill and for the next couple days I couldn't even tell I had died. (Yeah, it does say Game Over but right after that the characters are back to talking to each other like nothing ever happened. And your items are still there!) My second time around I looked up a guide (thanks again to some guy, noted above) which said the best way to play if you were just going for income was to ignore the dungeon and sell low, but even with that I barely scraped $8000 for the first bill. I think there are choices I should be making that I just can't see. Like, should I be buying only a few expensive items, or lots of cheap ones? Should I leave gaps in the windowsill to avoid putting cheap items there? I didn't even know you could scroll through items in the shops my first time. I think my brain just isn't wired for this game. I haven't haggled or stood behind a shop counter once in my life. Yeah, that would explain it.

Or maybe it's supposed to be hard - but you wouldn't pick it, would you? A "relaxing" indie game with cute images and not much in the way of strategy, so far as I can see. But hey, you might enjoy it more than I did. You'll probably do better than I did. Why listen to me, there's definitely lots of happy customers in the Steam reviews. I'm just some shitty old man with a moustache and a cane or something lower the damn price girl