Next time you’re off galavanting around a massive RPG world, slaying monsters and fulfilling your destiny, spare a thought for the shopkeeper in the last town who sold you all your gear. Without them, you’d be a nobody – you’d have no sword, no armor, no healing products. Confined to a live of standing behind that counter, all for your benefit.

Except that, thanks to satirical shopkeep-em-up Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, we now know the truth – RPG shopkeepers lead an even more exciting life than their customer heroes. Recettear is a wonderfully unique take on the genre, with great dialogue and plenty to see and do. It can be a little too difficult to begin with, but stick at it and you’ll find one of the best RPGs of the year.

GAMEPLAY

With debts to pay, your task is to open your item shop and sell sell sell. Customers will waltz in and offer money for whatever you have on display, and you can barter with them and try to wring a little more out of them. Over time, you’ll be able to upgrade your shop, changing the interior design, adding new shelves and selling better items.

The items have to come from somewhere, however, so simply sitting around in your shop won’t cut it. There are two ways to gather new stock – either heading into town and buying from the market stalls and Merchant’s Guild, or employing adventurers to accompany you into the darkest corners of dungeons, where rare and valuable items can be found.

When you journey to a dungeon, the RPG elements kick in. You take control of the adventurer, and hack-n-slash your way through baddies, levelling up and finding treasures beyond your (customers’) wildest dreams. Dungeons are randomly-generated, so every outing is different.

You’ll fall in love with Recettear immediately, thanks to its lovingly translated dialogue (originally a Japanese indie game) and general premise. Carpe Fulgur has done a brilliant job of localizing the banter between Recette and her associates, and I found myself genuinely laughing out loud a fair few times. Recette is so beautifully oblivious to everything going on around her, that lines like ‘Stained glass yeyness!’ will really get your lips curling upwards.

Recettear is all about time-management – working out when to collect new items, and when to sell. Having the weekly time limit is quite daunting at first, but eventually you realise that it creates valuable tension and makes you consider each day to the fullest. Being ruthless with your selling and pushing your adventurer to the max become key elements of your business.

Initially, I found the dungeon crawling to be rather difficult. You begin with Louie, a rookie hero who will die from just a couple of hits from the enemy. It can be really irritating when you’ve spent the last 15 minutes making your way up a tower, only for Louie to get caught in a tight spot and die within seconds, losing everything you just collected. Ironically, while Recettear satires the RPG genre, it’s also one of the toughest RPGs I’ve played in a while.

Eventually, however, you’ll start to build up strength with powerful equipment and higher levels, and enemies will soon be falling at your feet constantly. By this point, the frustration is over and Recettear is nothing but bliss all the way. Dungeon battling is great fun, with crazy boss battles to be found, while selling your wares in your shop feels really rewarding. Building up relationships with your customers is particularly gratifying.

What it boils down to is that Recettear is massively entertaining. Juggling your shop duties and your adventuring is rewarding stuff, and there’s always something to do, be it meeting new characters down at the pub, or receiving a special visitor to your store. The main game lasts around 10 hours and I was completely enthralled for the entire time.

If that wasn’t enough, extra modes are unlocked afterwards, which add new dungeons and variety of the mix. You can also continue on after your debts have been paid, and build your shop up to something incredible. I found myself staying up till four in the morning numerous times, as I simply couldn’t tear myself away from Recette’s world.

STYLE

Recettear‘s combination of static anime-style cutscenes and 2D sprites in a 3D world sets a marvellous scene. It all looks fantastic, and the facial expressions Recette and the gang pull can be priceless at times. The gorgeous – if sometimes blocky – visuals make Recettear’s world all the more entertaining to navigate.

It’s not often that using 2D sprites on a 3D backdrop works all that well, but here it is pulled off majestically. You really have to see the dungeon battling in action to understand how great it looks. Animations are smooth and the interface is useful yet never intruding.

The music will either be your taste or it won’t. There are plenty of very Japanese jingles to listen to, but eventually I found myself setting the volume low and booting up my own soundtrack.

I did, however, keep the voices turned up high – Recette and co have retained a few Japanese lines and will frequently say quick phrases and the like to each other. It’s especially nice in dungeons, where if the adventurer gets hit, Recette will call out to them and they may have a brief back-and-forth which I can only assume is her asking if they are OK. Which, let’s be honest, is cute as hell.

STORY

When Recette was very young, her father left to be a great adventurer. He also left some huge debts behind, and when he mysteriously disappears after an encounter with a dragon atop a volcano, the loan company decide to pay the remaining occupant of the house a visit.

Enter Tear, a loan shark fairy who lets Recette know that if she doesn’t pay off her father’s debts, the house will be repossessed. Tear suggests Recette should turn the house into an item shop, and work on making the money needed. She soon discovers that Recette has never worked a day in her life – and so the hilarity begins, starting with a combination of Recette and Tear becoming the shop name Recettear (which, just in case you missed the joke, sounds a lot like ‘racketeer’).

While it all starts off pretty humorous, you soon begin to see a different side to the heartless Tear and the moronic Recette. It’s impossible not to feel something for these characters, so lovingly crafted is the story. It may initially be satire, but eventually Recettear comes full circle and proves itself to be one of the greatest RPG ideas in a good while.

OTHER

I say without any hesitation that Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is definitely a contender for my indie game of the year. I’m not exactly a huge RPG fan, but this game pulled me in and never let go until the very last payment was made (and beyond!). It’s clever, it’s gorgeous, and it’s highly playable.

My advice would be to free up a few days of your schedule, grab a copy of this game and reap the rewards. For the ridiculously cheap asking price, can you really argue? Capitalism, Ho! and all that.

[Recettear Steam link]