DairunCates » Reviews » Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale
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9 people found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 50.6 hrs on record
Posted: 18 Mar, 2021 @ 6:27pm

One of the OG Gems of Indie games.

While it's true that Doujin games were popular years before Carpe Fulgur started translating their works over here, Recettear was one of the first real indie game to show that PC could be a legitimate publishing platform for more than just AAA devs. Since then, Recettear has been mimicked by many sources. There have been tons of weird Shop RPGs since then. Everything from the critical acclaimed Moonlighter to weird obscure stuff like Bar Story.

Nothing still quite beats the original even to this day.

What Recettear lacks in polish and complexity, it more than makes up for in Charm. Recette is a fun and funny character and you want to see her succeed. The game is exceedingly easy to break (especially once you get to the point where you can stock vending machines in vending machines), and the dungeon action RPG isn't the best, but it's impossible to deny this game's evergreen feel-good vibes.

If you like other simulation RPGs, do yourself a favor and play this classic.
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6 Comments
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DairunCates 14 Jun, 2021 @ 10:36pm 
Is this the part where I'm supposed to counter with a joke about Boomers and Gen X'ers only being able to respond to well-researched contradictory viewpoints with insults and appeals to age?

Hard to tell. It's been a while since I've argued with someone living in 2011.
izgule 10 Jun, 2021 @ 4:58am 
Ah yes... Peak Millennial, didn't happen till I was there to witness it.
DairunCates 9 Jun, 2021 @ 10:43pm 
...is a logical fallacy that proposes that two things that share multiple similar traits must be the same thing.
izgule 8 Jun, 2021 @ 8:54am 
Quacks like a duck....
DairunCates 8 Jun, 2021 @ 3:05am 
What you're describing isn't classically called "Indie development".

Despite having a scale that would be considered indie nowadays and starting out as small studios, those were the large end of development at the time. Calling something like Ultima "indie" is similar to calling "Journey to the Moon" an Indie film. TECHNICALLY you could, but when people say they like "indie films" they're not talking about studios that would quickly become the standard.

The truth of the matter is, in the early 00's until the 10's, PC gaming was mostly middleware (which is a separate categorization that's almost been lost entirely). If we want to be TECHNICAL, Doujin games (Japanese Indies) started around 10 years before Recettear, but things that would be classified as indie and realeased in the US generally started around then.
izgule 7 Jun, 2021 @ 9:36pm 
"Recettear was one of the first real indie game to show that PC could be a legitimate publishing platform for more than just AAA devs"

What are you smoking.... been on PC for over 30 years, rich history of Indie development... in fact many of the AAA studios of today started out as independent developers going all the way back to the 80s developing on PCs that where not even IBM, like Commodore 64 ect. Indie development has been a constant on PC platforms since inception.