Capitalism, ho?
Recette Lemongrass awakes one day to find that her father has run off to become an "adventurer". Upon disappearing, the loan company of whom he had borrowed a large sum of money decides that they should pay a visit to his daughter to discuss the matter of payment of the outstanding debt. So to pay off her fathers owings, it is decided by Recette and Tear (a fairy working for the debt company who is helping/keeping an eye on Recette) that they should start a business in the item selling department and so marks the beginnings of Recettear (pronunciation akin to "racketeer").
Gameplay in Recettear is rather varied, due to the combination of a top-down action RPG and an item store/merchant simulation. As weird as it sounds the combination works well with the dungeon crawling RPG element making for a nice change to the cut-throat store simulation world. Starting off your store you quickly discover the rhythm between buying low and selling high, where to display items so that you can draw in those finicky customers and just how far a profit you can hope to make with certain items. Gaining access to the market/guild to purchase stock items and then selling them in your own store for a profit is just the beginning. Very early on it's discovered that another way of procuring items is through dungeon crawling to find treasures and to loot monsters that are encountered. Alas, being just an innocent little girl and her trading company fairy, the job is then left to an adventurer of which you hire to do your dirty work for you. This is where the action/RPG element comes into play with you taking control of said adventurer and exploring the dungeons which are segmented into five level sections with a boss on every fifth level. The game starts off simply enough but gains a complexity that you probably wouldn't have expected from a title which at first seems so shallow and inane. Each sale you successfully accomplish earns you experience and therefore raise your Merchant LV, the higher your Merchant LV the wealthier the customers who enter your store are likely to be and the more customizations you can apply to your store. Not only that but adventurers you hire to dungeon crawl for you also come in as customers and it is in your best interests overall to sell them equipment (sometimes at a loss) so that next you take them into a dungeon they are equipped with better items to battle through those pesky monsters.
Graphics and sound are I'm sad to say quite outdated but that's not necessarily a fair appraisal considering that the game was originally released in Japan in 2007. Having said that, the lack of widescreen support is quite disappointing even if it was produced back then. The voice-overs for the characters (although single words and phrases here and there in Japanese can hardly be categorized as voice-overs) are akin to drilling your brain with a corn on a cob but thankfully there is the option of turning down the voice volume in the settings menu. Overall these are the main weak-points of the game, the graphics while outdated definitely give it a retro feel and the voice-overs while annoying can be muted.
Pricing on the game has apparently been an issue for some people, at $20USD it does seem rather steep but to be honest I don't think it's that much to be asking for it. There is definitely enough depth and content in the gameplay to keep you playing for a couple hours and there is definitely some replayability in the game. It starts off rather slow but if you can bear through it I think you'll find a gem in this little title, it was quite a pleasant surprise for me.
A couple things though, part of me can't shake the feeling that this would have done so much better as an NDS or PSP title. Something in the handheld market, not only would the price have not been an issue for people (I've paid more for less worthy titles than this in the handheld genre) but the gameplay suits the market perfectly. Having said that the game does have controller support and is definitely how the game should be played (I used a 360 controller), it also has very low requirements so ran perfectly on my 10" netbook (1.6GHz Atom CPU/1GB RAM/GMA950 Integrated Graphics), meaning I was able to happily play it while on the go.
Overall though this is a game which I found to be both memorable and a lot of fun. Highly recommended to those who are fans of the JRPG genre.