Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

It's super charming and cute and fun, but consider waiting for its HD release if you're thinking of picking it up.

Played on Linux via Proton Hotfix

Recettear is a 2007 japanese doujin shop management game, and one of the most influential of all time. It follows the tragic story of Recette, a very young girl who one day wakes up and finds out she is being forced to pay for her father's huge debt to a shark loan. Then begins her saga of child slavery trying to pay the ever increasing weekly debt.

The gameplay loop is pretty fun, with you having to juggle time, money and materials. Unlike Moonlighter, another shop management game, the actual shop management is the most important part, as failing to pay the weekly debt means game over. The dungeon aspect is important and pretty fun too, with many resources only available when entering the dungeon. In this regard, combat is probably Recettear's weakest point. Moonlighter did an outstanding job with their animations and combat gameplay inside the dungeon.

9/10 f*ck capitalism, ho!

This is a cute, smartly-written, remarkably fun simulation RPG that's well deserving of its cult hit status.

Recettear is a masterpiece, albeit a bit of a repetitive one. CAPITALISM HO!

store manager, and dungeon crawler optional. its just a fun game, really. hd release will be nice. will totally support that for nostalgia purposes.

really fun little shop game <33

CAPITALISM HOOOOO!!!

Fond memories of this game. Could not bring myself to play this in the 2020s.

Awesome game, can't wait for the upcoming HD release this year.
Very cute and funny.
I just wish the shop mechanic was a bit more complicated, the game becomes a bit too easy when you figure out how the pin system works.
Don't look up any guides for this game, that kills half the fun.

Capitalism HO! I heckin' love this game.

A cast of lovable characters, genuinely funny writing and an interesting premise make this, gameplay-wise, rather simple action RPG / merchant simulator an instant classic.

Yes.

Capitalism ho!

I don't understand why this game is so highly rated. It's not bad, but it's rather mediocre. You start out as a young girl whose father disappeared one day to become an adventurer. (There's no mention of your mother.) A fairy loan-shark soon drops by and threatens to foreclose on your home and throw you out into the street if you don't pay back your father's loan. So you start an item shop to make money.

Every day is basically the same: go to the market, buy stuff, take it back to your shop, and sell it for a profit. It's extremely easy to make money in this game, since people don't really mind if you buy something from the market for $100 and then sell it to them for $150 or $200. But the real way to make more money is to make less money... which is rather unintuitive. You see, by not haggling and by selling items cheaply with less profit, you level up faster as a merchant, and when you level up, new, more expensive items appear on the market for you to buy. So instead of buying a hat for $100 and selling it for $200, you can eventually buy a hat for $10,000 and sell it for $20,000.

Sometimes people try to sell you stuff, which is a way to get items at below-market price, but it's ridiculous and often annoying. Some guy will come in and say "my wife's been bugging me to get rid of this thing", and then he'll try to sell you a bowl of soup. Or somebody will try to sell you a bread roll which you totally don't want cluttering up your inventory but feel forced to buy lest you lose your "chain" bonus; there's no way to politely decline to purchase something. Often a guy will sell you something for $500 and then immediately turn around and buy it back from you for $1000. Yay, profit, but it's nonsense.

You can also go walking around in a dungeon looking for items, but it's very simplistic. The items you find are rarely of much value - the real value comes from things like slime, bat wings, dried lizards, and other weird items, which you can combine with regular items to make them more valuable. But you'd almost certainly make more money just staying in your shop and selling stuff, so dungeon-crawling is entirely skippable, which is good because it's not much fun.

There's very little in the way of story to break up the monotony. You meet a couple new characters as you level up, like a spoiled rich girl, a robot girl, and a thief, who have slightly different flavor text when they come shop in your store, but it's thin gruel. Overall there's very little variety. Ultimately I only kept playing for the hope of some kind of story pay-off at the end. I expected my father to return, or if not, I expected to at least find out if he was alive or dead. But no, there's no real closure to the story. Your character hardly even seems to care if her father is still alive; I can't recall her even mentioning him once after the introduction. The game just transitions to endless mode where you can do the same stuff forever, but why would I want to do that?

Also, the graphics are low-resolution and the sound effects are very repetitive. As best I can tell, people like the game because anime.

A cute relaxing game about capitalism.

A fun not so little game about running an item shop and maybe going adventuring, but more on that later.
As the title implies, the main gameplay loop involves buying and selling items to pay off a loan. Over time you get a feel for how much you can highball different customers and they become more willing to spend larger sums of money in your store. As the game goes on new mechanics are introduced such as clients requesting items that aren't on display or placing orders 2-3 days in advance. Eventually, prices start fluctuating at which point you can speculate the market or get punished for over-relying on a single item category.
The game features decent presentation and surprisingly charming writing. You can also tell it's a fantasy game right away because it features a money lender who still possesses a sliver of soul, emphasis on the sliver part. You'll see what I mean if you miss a payment.
Finally, there's adventuring. You can hire NPCs to and go dungeon crawling with the usual elements such as monsters, treasure chests and bosses. I didn't like this part very much because the gameplay is serviceable, but nothing special, and the whole affair is less profitable than reselling things from the market/guild. Not to mention it provides no merchant experience which is what actually unlocks new things to play around with.
Adventurers can visit the store and purchase equipment when off-work but regular citizens have an uncharacteristic desire for weapons and armor as well so this isn't much of an advantage.
To conclude, for this review I replayed the game after about 7 years or so because the last time I didn't engage with the post-game content. This time around it's not any different, I feel satisfied with a regular playthtrough. Recettear is a fun game with a lot of charm but most of the post-game content is adventuring related and I don't care for it.

They made the face of capitalism as a cute anime girl and its working

love the game,funner than you'd think for a store selling game!!!
was recomeed by josh's gaming garden!

buy and sell as high as your costumer can buy, nothing works better (just my preference of course)

CAPITALISM, HOOOOOOO!!!!

I've played this since I was 20 and I cannot stop.

A truly unique game that's not overly simplistic nor terribly complicated. The dungeon crawling is a bit boring once you've gotten characters to wear decent equipment, but you're not even forced to interact with it if you don't want to.

I truly hope more games like this get made.

capitalism ho

Great game!

After failing the first 2 attempts, I went online and read a guide, things made much more sense and I managed to clear the story.
Though graphics are outdated, but still a fun concept and game. (save file says it took 17hrs to beat)

10/10 Capitalism, ho!!

capitalism...

Despite having a library of almost 2,000 games, I keep coming back to this one. A rare gem.

fun

part simple dungeon crawler, part shop manager. There is something oddly engaging about managing a storefront and haggling prices over vendor trash you collect in the dungeons, play it for the novelty

I believe I was duped to buy this game.

Capitalism, ho!

Recettear is exactly the cozy game I didn't know I needed. Simple, cute, and nostalgic, balancing dungeon-crawling with resource management in a visual-novel-like format.

The voice acting, dialogue, and character designs all call back to early 2000s kawaii-core fantasy with a hefty helping of goofiness. I laughed out loud several times--the localisation team clearly knew their stuff.

After months--no, YEARS--of overcomplicated open-world games like Genshin Impact, Rune Factory, and recent Fire Emblem titles, Recettear feels like a refreshing breath of air. A game you enjoy NOT because there's a limited-time event and you're going to miss it if you don't play 5 hours a day. A game you enjoy NOT because all your friends are playing it and apparently the plot is "actually really good". A game you enjoy not even because Waifus and Husbandos.

No, Recettear is enjoyable because it is simple, clean fun. It doesn't pretend to be a masterpiece, but it's an honest title that is genuinely relaxing and sure to make you smile while also presenting a moderate challenge. It's a good way to kill a few hours, and you'll know when to put it down and move on. I, for one, am really loving it. For such a great price, expecially compared to Triple A titles, it's 100% worth your dollar.

snes like goodness in a modern rpg/shop sim/dunegon crawler

Haven't got into it yet but I can tell it's incredible.

the goat

Capitalism ho!

Lovely game, style & charm galore...but...golly god. That midi-trumpet store tune almost made me blow a gasket

CAPITALISM, HO!

I played this game like 15 years ago, but I'll try and remember enough to write a review, Bahahaha: there's a rat with a crowbar 10/10. But seriously, this game paved the way for Moonlighter, it might've been the first shop genre game, IDK. Pretty chill.

The true godfather of the "Running your own shop" simulator style games, going out on adventures to find things to sell or just buying products to mark them up at a premium. I've actually done an entire playthrough of finishing the game where I didnt go out to adventure at all, i'd just buy products from stores or from customers looking to sell and then sell them at a premium. Its criminal that this game has no true sequel all these years later as the game which influenced a genre

Capitalism, Ho!
Pay off that debt!

peak

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.

Combat

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 is the minimum and passable is 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?

Selling Stuff

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 Halo, 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 Recettear 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 you get as a seller would be greatly toned down, but actually, no, I was pleasantly surprised to find that you actually can sell goods for, like, 4 times the price customers will sell them to you, and it honestly felt nice to just get to be the ridiculous unfair merchant for a change.

Plot

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 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. 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 feel 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 (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?), but I just thought it was neat.

Final Verdict

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 strong 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.

This is my favorite game. I don't know why, and I don't even know why I bought it in the first place.

An unexpected joy. Who knew capitalism became palatable when you can literally seize the means of production. I found the narrative charming and often hilariously meta, the dungeons fun in their complexity arising from a bunch of seemingly simple pieces, and the shop dynamics an interesting counterpart thereto. It's a challenge without being punishing, and the loops are all snappy, punchy fun.

it's good

when you need to sell the silver gauntlet to make the day's payment and a woman shows up asking for an apple

good game

A must-play for fans of simulation and light RPGs!
A charming and innovative indie game that combines shop management with dungeon crawling, offering a unique twist on traditional RPG mechanics. Extremely fun and highly recommended.

god I wish that were me

Please allow saving progress whilst inside of dungeons in the HD edition. Replayed this game yesterday and decided to stop playing after 20/30 levels of Amber Garden because the game started lagging so I decided to save and reload, only to find all my progress gone. I know that there was a warning in game that saving would take me outside of the dungeon, however I think the game would be better if you allowed saving progress whilst in dungeons in the new game :)

Will change my review to positive if this gets implemented or if I like the HD edition. Good luck with the work!

It's kinda peak