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.

Huh. Been hearing about this series for many years and I'm surprised to find that it kind of sucks? It has all the trappings that get me addicted and enjoying it, but this is a game that reaches above the sum of its parts, as nearly all of its parts are bad to terrible. This game is just what if Harvest Moon had very mediocre combat and some even more mediocre dungeons and that's really it. It plays more or less exactly like any other Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons game, except everything is cumbersome.

The good part is, well, that it plays exactly like Harvest of Seasons, so you know what you get. Actually, it's an expanded version where everything is an upgradeable skill and you can do everything Harvest Moon can but you can also tame monsters (and bosses) and use them as farmhands. I love that tossing things around is a skill that can level up, which made it fun to drop off every single piece of lumber I chopped, and that you also level up from bathing and that your overall strength and character ability comes from performing various tasks as all the things you can level, which is pretty much every task in the game, gives you a stat buff. Like the most recent Story of Seasons game I played, this title is also quite good at satisfying upgrades that seem to come just at the right time. On top of that, you get your usual relationships and growing crops, plus some dungeon-delving and combat, which should've made this a game for me. It's a game where you make runs in the hostile overworld and some dungeons in order to obtain resources that you then use to craft tools you use to grow better crops. I love that concept and that's what keeps me enjoying the game even though I think the game itself actually kind of sucks.

However, this is the paragraph that I begin with the word "however", and clarify that I think more or less every single individual aspect of this game kind of sucks. It comes together to form an enjoyable whole, but only if you have patience, and lots of it. The big problem is that this game doesn't actually have mechanics for most things you can do, and instead uses a shoehorned version of the dialogue system in place of a customized menu. This means that you give out orders to your farmhands, shop and craft using a dialogue tree, which is as cumbersome and slow as you can possibly get. On top of that, the developers decided on even more cumbersome things like making it so that every single item you can craft gets its own "dialogue tree" so that you can't just quickly and easily check if that new blueprint you got was a short sword or a long sword. Everything you do in the game, except planting crops and bopping enemies on the head with your weapon, is driven by dialogue menus and this game might have the very worst quality of life I've seen in the modern era because of it.

It really doesn't help that the combat is very stiff and simplistic, with lots of annoying choices like allowing you to get fully stunlocked from full health to death with nothing you could do, and that the game is absolutely dripping with horrific anime-style dialogue. From the very first frame, the game is jam-packed with text boxes and anime-style dialogue where characters say inhumanely haughty things in stilted language and where they take like 15 text boxes to explain a very simple concept that most people could've expressed in three words, not three hundred. Thankfully, you can hold square to skip over the inane dialogue that's telling a very shallow and anime-style story, but the unfortunate part about that is that this game is oldschool in that characters will tell you where to go instead of showing you a map marker and so you have to at least half-listen to this moronic chatter. One thing I can say about the dialogue, though, is that if you like this writing style, you will be in heaven, because this game has tons of dialogue and the characters have hundreds of lines. These NPCs do not just say that it's a nice day for fishing, but they have tons of things to say and the character actually grows and expands their dialogue as you keep playing. Probably the best friendship simulator I've ever seen on an ambition level.

I'm going to keep playing to see if I manage to grab some more trophies and to see how this game opens up in the post-game, since the game does seem very focused on just telling a (rather long) story so that it can open itself up. The game does the fake-out ending thing and has already "ended" once for me, and I hear it's going to "end" two more times and then you seem to gain access to some post-game dungeon and such. I've spent like 20 hours on the game but I still can't grow like a fifth of the seemingly available crops, and there are many weapons left to craft, so the game has only begun and I will stick around to see if maybe it gets much better as you unlock more upgrades. If so, maybe this game gets a more positive review. If not, I will have spent 20+ more hours on a game I to be pretty mediocre right from the beginning.

Update: I kept playing and the game does indeed keep growing and change, and I've been bouncing between hating it and being completely in love. I will say that this game really impressed with its hidden content and very much reminded me of how well Symphony of the Night pulled off the same thing. Once you complete "act 2" of this game, the game pretends like it's over and you can just keep tinkering with your farm but, eventually, town events will start happening that seem to indicate a continuation and that's when you unlock two more dungeons, more crops and more gear, and it feels like the game truly opens up. Once you finish the first dungeon, the second bonus dungeon is less pressing and becomes more something you do later on when you know you've crafted enough upgrades, so the game switches from being a dungeon crawler with a little bit of farming to being a farming game with a little bit of dungeon crawling and it finally feels like I'm free to focus on just growing things and getting married and the feeling is more pleasant than I would've anticipated.

I do love and respect all of the ambition that went into making this game a Harvest Moon++++, with added depth in every aspect of the game, but it's hard to get over the fact that the whole game really is built around a dialogue system and how cumbersome everything is. It's not just the dialogue system, but how the coders couldn't figure out how to do things like tooltip overlay info boxes, and for example how you have to equip and use a looking glass to get info about your crops, when a good game released in 2021 would've popped a tooltip as you walked over the crop you need more info about. I'm going to raise this game's score from 2/5 to 3/5 with the comment that, at times, it's a 1.5/5 when you have to deal with the cumbersome menus while crafting 150 swords, but it can be a 5/5 when you're running around and smacking bosses to get their rare drops, tending to your crops or using the impressive crafting system (I haven't even mentioned how the game has a wonderful secret system where you can use an item while forging a new item in order to give the new item the attributes of both and you can also do similar things of finding hidden attributes and features of various materials and plants too). If only the QoL of this game had been higher, with some more modern code designed by programmers younger than 60, this game would've been one of my favorite of all-time.