Games that are made for the reason of flipping an established convention on its head in one way or another can often feel as if they have a lot of boxes they need to tick to feel worthwhile thanks to the fact that it not only needs to deviate from the norm pretty significantly, but then also prove the worth of doing so to begin with. Recettear is one such game that ends up picking up such expectations due to the way it manages to reverse the roles placed upon the player in a typical RPG. Rather than taking the position of a questing adventurer or the hero, the player instead gets to play the role of an item merchant in their day to day life as they try paying off their debts and expanding their business, and I'd say that the game does a good job at providing enough depth to this idea to support its playtime while still being very simple and accessible at its core, despite some issues that become increasingly clear as you play through the campaign. This combined with the uniquely offbeat sense of humour that's presented ultimately makes for an experience that I'd consider extremely worth playing through in spite of the flaws that it presents front and centre.

One of the most effective things this game does is introduce new concepts in an easily digestible and tangible context. While the options the player has at the very start of the game are limited, they still feel like enough to get by, as if you could feasibly get through stuff at the pace you're going at, but then the game continuously adds new elements to its core loop that expand upon it in extremely clear ways that benefit you nearly immediately. The biggest example of this is once the player is introduced to fluctuating market prices, where certain items suddenly spike or drop in value. While this contributes to a heightened sense of complexity as the game now rewards you for having a varied stock in the backlog to best capitalise on these changing prices for maximum profit, the way that it's initially presented makes it something not just to think about in the long term, but something you can immediately do and see both the benefits and drawbacks of relying on these methods, as while they're effective, they're also very unreliable due to the lack of control over the market itself. While easy to understand and contextualised through gameplay effectively, this sort of underlying, layered nuance is what makes the shopkeeping aspect of the game tick, everything looks and feels simple, but the lightly strategic elements in play if you really want to double down and best run your business (which the game inherently makes you do) end up breathing so much life into these systems.

The writing is also really funny with the way that despite playing as this cute anime girl who's just trying her best to get by with what might seem to be righteous glee, the game makes explicit note of the way the tactics the player needs to use exemplify so much about the issues with capitalism, as you're charging absurd prices for even the most mundane of objects while also paying as little as possible to the desperate people selling of their possessions only to immediately charge triple the price, all while your main character is completely embracing it to the point where her main catch phrase is "capitalism, ho!" The rest of the game's writing matches this really well, painting this society as something that's clearly awful in a lot of respects, but having the characters seemingly embrace it in an entirely self-aware and explicit way, which creates quite a bizarre sense of humour that I can't say I've seen attempted to such an extent before, and I love it for that alone, because it makes for a truly special experience one way or another, even if it might not be for everyone. That said though, for as entertaining as it might be to be an airhead who's perpetuating the many egregious problems in society in such a lighthearted way, the game has one clear problem that heavily brings things down.

While the entire shopkeeping section of the game manages to cleverly tackle genre conventions while still feeling like a distinct and interesting artistic expression in its own right and I genuinely think it's an amazing time, Recettear is brought down by the adventuring sections that the player has to pursue. A prominent way in which the player is able to collect more resources to put on their shelves is by hiring a mercenary to enter dungeons and essentially play a top down, procedurally generated dungeon crawler. My issues with this aspect of the game are pretty numerous as I feel that not only is the section pretty mechanically dry, but from a thematic standpoint I feel like it kinda goes against what the rest of the game was trying to do. For an experience that seems so deadset on subverting the many tropes of this style of RPGs, this section just feels like an extremely standard take on a top down dungeon crawler, with the experience really being nothing more than making your way through bland rooms and slaying waves of enemies to get loot, with not even a hint of more self-aware snarkiness or even something as simple as a proverbial wink to the camera, instead just being an emulation of the style of other games but just, worse. It also doesn't help that even from a purely mechanical standpoint, not only is this section pretty mediocre, but it ends up clashing with the other elements of gameplay and almost always just feels like a lesser option past the first few floors. The fact that the drops you get from the treasure chests don't remove lower tier items as you climb higher up often make these sections feel unsatisfying as you exit with a bunch of stuff that feels practically worthless, but still necessary to pursue in case you do manage to score a great haul.

The crafting materials that you find throughout also don't help much due to the limited inventory space (what a surprise, me complaining about this stuff again) making you have to choose between taking more valuable items or taking ingredients to potentially craft something better, the issue being that the steep amount of these materials you generally need to make anything worthwhile ends up making this barely a choice, as it's almost always more beneficial to just take the items that are worth more than to try doing anything special with them. It all ends up becoming a game of irritation and you're just constantly throwing out items worth ever so slightly less than others to make minuscule additional profits, ultimately micromanaging in a truly unsatisfying way that also wastes time that could've just been spent getting significantly richer off of buying and reselling items in town. I ultimately just feel that this section doesn't provide sufficient reward for the time investment and risk involved, as losing an entire in-game day if you fall in battle is absolutely brutal and will impede your chances at being able to pay off weekly debts pretty significantly. Everything about the game seems to scream against touching this portion of the game at all, and yet there are too many incessant moments that push the player towards that all that I have to assume that they want you to heavily engage with it despite it being by far the worst aspect of the experience by a huge margin.

Overall, Recettear is a game that is an amazingly fun romp that manages to be equal parts witty and very silly and I love so much about what it does in certain respects, particularly everything related to the shopkeeping elements on display, but I can't fully embrace it and want to engage with it beyond its main campaign due to how hard the game pushes an entirely unsatisfying aspect of itself on the player. The amount of underlying nuance that the player is expected to figure out and best capitalise on is absolutely wonderful and provides further depth to such a deceptively basic time, but even so, if you decide you want to play this, be prepared for some moments of severe tedium in between the cool stuff, and it's certainly not a dealbreaker, this is still a fun game, even if it maybe bit off a bit more than it could chew.