Been playing the heck out of Recettear.

The game's ostensible scenario is thus: your character is Recette, your dad abandoned you three months ago to pursue his dream of being a hero, and the bills are coming due. Now, faced with the threat of foreclosure, your only hope is to leverage your sole remaining asset - the plaza facing of your house - and open up an item shop. You'll buy low (hopefully), sell high (hopefully), pay adventurers to (hopefully) make it back with piles of loot to sell, and stave off your creditors with huge sacks of money...
A slightly more cynical view would go: A financing company, seeing an opportunity to break into the retail market in the city of Penne (heretofore controlled completely by an alliance between the Merchant's Guild and the Adventurer's Guild), sends their hatchet-fairy, Tear. Tear shamelessly uses Recette, impoverished but irrepressible probably-orphan, to shoulder her way into the closed market system. The combination of cheap imports (obtained by adventurers, paid a pittance to venture into forbidden-to-anyone-without-a-licence dungeons, there to obtain loot which they are forced to surrender to the sponsoring merchant), low prices, and Recette's ability to naively charm anything from crusty old men to demons, will catapult the resulting enterprise to the heights of profitability... or at least pay off MOST of the mortgage before the finance company seizes the house anyway.

The game's cute and not overly complicated. It's split between a basic Zelda-style randomized dungeon and the actual item shop. There are a few main challenges...

-You've got to build a customer base. Initially customers will come in armed with only small amounts of money, and you're not paying off your damn-near-a-million mortgage by selling walnut bread to the masses. You build your reputation by making sales, ideally at or about what the customer thinks the right price is; eventually they will like you more and more, meaning they will arrive more and more often, and bring bigger wallets. Eventually even the hard-bargaining little girls will bring enough money to buy suits of full plate armor...

-You've got to build your merchant level. You get some experience every time you close a deal. You get a decent bonus for scoring right around the customer's target price, and a chain bonus for each successive sale where your initial price offer is accepted by the customer. The chain bonus starts at 2 and increases by 2x per sale, up to a maximum of 128; the normal exp per sale is 10, so you can see that chain bonuses are super-important. A higher merchant level gives you access to things that will help you earn more money, most especially more-expensive items at your wholesalers. It's vital that you get the merchant level up - you absolutely need the higher-priced (and thus higher-margin) items to have any chance of making your last couple of payments.

-You've got to get good at the dungeons. You initially recruit Louie, the broke swordsman, and he's actually pretty good and easy to use; think Link without the hat and with a fairy that NEVER says "hey, listen!" Kills get you experience; monsters drop loot; some of that loot is in the form of food items you can eat for HP or MP. Recette follows behind (invincibly) to carry the item bag, but she's only got so much room, so sometimes you'll have a choice between high-value loot items or healing stuff you might need to finish the trip (and thus, get out with anything at all). The dungeons are cute, the bosses generally have a gimmick, and overall it's entertaining.

-You've got to figure out how to make adventurers buy better gear. You can always pack extra gear in to loan to them for the trip, but then if you lose, you can lose the items, which can put a big hole in the profit/loss statement at the end of the day! But once an adventurer has bought an item, it's theirs until they upgrade again. So you need to make sure that the weapons, armor, and accessories you want your adventurer to use are in stock, and that the adventurer is coming in to shop (indeed, one of the biggest incentives of unlocking additional adventurers is the gaining of a regular customer), and occasionally you might even have to refuse to sell an item to someone else who's interested in it.

-You've got to manage the clock. You've only got four "time periods" per day. Opening the shop takes one slot, adventuring takes two, and going out into town to shop and go places for certain events also takes one. You want to see some of the events (funny, generally, and also generally seeing certain events is a prerequisite for unlocking other stuff), and you want to go adventuring to get your free lootz, but you've got to actually open up the shop for people to come in and buy stuff.

-You've got to manage the calendar. You shouldn't have any trouble making the first loan repayment, but after that you've got to do a pretty good amount of business in a week. You can't afford a lot of unproductive time, so you need to buy a lot when you go shopping, and you REALLY can't afford to go adventuring and lose much. At the same time, you've got to pay that loan in cash, not merchandise, so you can spend too much stocking up, fail to unload, and lose that way...

-Finally, from time to time certain product categories will have their prices raise (meaning you can sell them for 200% of their base price, which is nice) or lower (you can buy cheaper, but you can't sell for more than about 50-60% of the price). This can really screw you if you've invested heavily in one or two categories and they both fall right when you need to unload your stock, so diversification is really important. It can also help a lot if you manage to buy a load of stuff when it's cheap and unload when it's pricey. And occasionally it can set off a round of total shopping madness, like when my store was invaded by two dozen bibliophilic lolis, who cleaned out my entire stock of books.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 1048 words, total size 6 kb.