Recettear: A Surprisingly Fresh and Enjoyable Indie JRPG
Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is a Japanese indie RPG developed by EasyGameStation for Windows in 2007 and localized into English by Carpe Fulgur LLC in 2010. The game is an anime-style JRPG with a twist – instead of playing the role of the hero, you play the role of the proprietor of the ubiquitous “item shop” that appears in 99% of RPGs (western and Japanese). While this may sound tedious, it is actually a lot of fun.
Recettear is reminiscent of Torneko’s quest line in Dragon Quest 4, in that you are a merchant who can enter dungeons to find rare items to sell in your store. However, unlike in Dragon Quest 4, in which Torneko himself entered the dungeons, in Recettear you hire a variety of adventurers to do the dirty dungeon crawling work for you (although as the player, you control the adventurer – see more details after the jump). As the game progresses, your adventurers-for-hire level up.
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