Well, finished everything except for Crystal Nightmare, that is. Doing suicide runs with Louie is more stressful than fun, and the rewards aren’t that great anyway. I hate games with poor item drops, they just stress me out.
But anyway, I spent quite a bit of the New Year playing Recettear – An Item Shop’s Tale, so I thought I should at least give it a brief mention here. It’s a really cute, fun game, and both the store-running and the dungeon-crawling aspects have just enough challenge to be both fun and rewarding. I used to hate dungeon-crawlers, but Rune Factory changed all that. Now I’ve been looking for more to play through, I’m thinking of trying Shiren the Wanderer next.
Anyway, story… Recette Lemongrass’s dad disappeared and left her with debt. The debt-collector, Tear, suggests she open a store and use the profits to pay off the loan. They open the store together, hence Recettear. And that’s pretty much it to the story. You pay back the loan pretty quickly and then you can either play all over again or you can continue until you get tired. Along the way you pick up a few adventurers you can visit dungeons with, picking up stuff to either sell in your store or fuse with.
Like I said, it’s a cute game, it’s fun and the challenge level is moderate (except Crystal Nightmare). The characters are likeable and memorable and some of the dialogue is outright hilarious. The only thing that stopped me from enjoying it more was that I’ve played a number of similar games over the past few years, so both the concept and the execution didn’t feel that fresh to me. I’m talking games like Atelier Viorate, Lemuore no Renkinjutsushi and Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar, where you make stuff, forage for stuff, sell stuff, etc. The unrewarding nature of the dungeons in Recettear made it lag behind the other games when it comes to fusing items, but unlike them you can get filthy rich just by retailing stuff from the main stores. The game interface is far more polished than Lemuore‘s, and the selling mechanics are deeper than Grand Bazaar‘s.
All in all I had a good time both selling stuff and plundering the dungeons. I think I got filthy rich a little too quickly, which meant I bought excellent equipment for my adventurer too quickly, which meant I finished the dungeons really quickly, but while it lasted it was great fun. I hear the localizers plans to bring over another game by the same company, called Chantelise. More stuff to look forward to in 2011.
Speaking of localization, Luminous Arc 3 is never coming out in the West, is it? And now Imageepoch is making games for the PSP instead. Goodbye, Luminous Arc. You’ll be missed!
