Sooo… I’ve been pretty addicted to Recettear lately. I originally picked it up as a game I could play short bits of at a time, since the other games I’m playing are Assassin’s Creed 3 and LA Noire, which are harder to stop when I’m within a mission.
And well, now I’m just playing hours of Recettear. You play as Recette who has to pay off a debt her father has racked up. Tear, a fairy, comes to collect the loan, but seeing as Recette doesn’t have the means to pay it back, she suggests they open up an item shop, and thus… Recettear!
The game combines owning a shop to sell off your wares…
And also dungeon crawling, where you hire adventurers to help you so you can pick up the loot.
Some loot you can just sell as is and some are ingredients to fuse into even better items to sell.
You have a payment due each week that you have to make or else it’s Game Over. At first, I didn’t know how high the payment increased each week. It starts low at 10k, then 30k, 80k, 200k, and finally 500k.
I started by playing pretty casually. I’d enter dungeons often, unlock several of the adventurers, and fuse a lot of items. Unfortunately, going into dungeons takes up a lot of time. Though I had more fun this way, I ended up not making the higher payments.
Then I started over and focused on selling. I raised my merchant level and earned money faster, but… I went into dungeons less often, thus not unlocking as many adventurers or ingredients. I wish there was a better balance of the amount of time and the increase in payments.
If you Game Over, you start over at Day 2 with your money reset. Fortunately, you keep your unsold items, your merchant level, your adventurers’ levels, and your adventurers’ gear, so it’s not too terrible. Also, if you make the 500k payment at the end, you can play an “Endless” mode where you have no more debt.
So far I’ve spent over 30 hours on the game… I told myself I’d stop once I hit the last payment, but now the Endless mode is very tempting…
