Tag: recettear: an item shop’s tale

#oneaday Day 923: A Tale of Two Sadistic Sisters

Something convinced me that it was time to finally go back and finish Chantelise: A Tale of Two Sisters. It’s been almost a year since I actually purchased that game, and it’s been mocking me from my Steam list ever since, reminding me of how much I loved Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, which was developed by the same team, and localized by the (different) same team.

For those unfamiliar with Chantelise, it’s a peculiar beast indeed. In its native Japan, it was Recettear’s predecessor, but localization team Carpe Fulgur brought it to Western audiences after Recettear. This had the unfortunate side-effect of giving people perhaps unreasonably high expectations for it when it came out, since Recettear was pretty much universally loved by everyone who has ever come across it. In Japan, there was a noticeable upswing in quality and creativity between the two games; over here, people misinterpreted Chantelise as being a step backwards, since it appears at first glance to be much simpler and shallower than its shop-running successor.

After over 12 hours with it (probably about 15 in total — I started again for this play sesssion) I can say with some confidence that Chantelise certainly isn’t a shallow game, it’s just very, very different from Recettear. You can see how people would get confused, however, since a good 90% of the graphical assets are shared between the two games, and  the music for the final dungeon in both games is almost (but not quite) identical. When you consider this, it becomes easier to see why everyone had such lofty expectations for Chantelise and were then disappointed when it wasn’t what they expected.

Note: “not what they expected” is not the same as “inferior”, though some chose to interpret it that way. While Recettear was an accessible, adorable game combining action-RPG dungeon crawling elements with a simple business management sim (and a surprising amount of hidden depth for those willing to jump down that rabbit hole), Chantelise initially appears to be a rather straightforward action-RPG. Hack, slash, rinse, repeat. Job done.

And while there certainly is an element of mindless hack and slash to Chantelise’s gameplay, the game has a sadistic streak in it that I haven’t seen since Dark Souls. If you do not learn to play Chantelise properly, the game will punish you and send you back to the start of the area you’ve been challenging, effectively putting a big red “X” through your homework and telling you in no uncertain terms to “DO IT AGAIN! BETTER!” And, assuming you’re not the sort of player who gives up after suffering a setback like this, you will get better, because the game will keep punching you in the face until you understand what it’s trying to tell you.

You see, while Chantelise may initially appear to be a simple hack-and-slash RPG there’s actually a considerable amount of depth that many commentators don’t give it credit for. The fact that protagonist Elise doesn’t level up traditionally, for example — all modifications to her stats are achieved through equipment, and she gains HP through finding or purchasing special medicine. Finding the correct combination of equipment to make it through a particularly challenging stage is key to victory in Chantelise — some stages will require that you buff up your physical defense; others will practically require the use of an elemental crystal to defeat monsters with resistances; others will need you to focus on magic. As you progress through the game and defeat bosses, Elise gains the ability to equip more items simultaneously, allowing her a substantial increase in power.

The game’s magic system is an interesting aspect of gameplay, too. Rather than simply allowing Elise and her companion fairy Chante to cast spells as they please, they have to pick up coloured magic crystals in order to cast spells. Each crystal corresponds to an element — red for fire, blue for water and so on. The twist comes when you use more than one crystal at the same time. Using two, three or four of the same colour produces different spells with different effects — for example, one yellow crystal produces a metal ball that spins around Elise for protection, two causes her to gain a great deal of defensive power and resistance to being knocked back, three causes her to drop a giant boulder on her enemy and four summons an earth elemental who casts the other three spells at random for a short period.

But then there’s spells the game doesn’t tell you about. Augment the “two yellow” Super Armor spell with two red crystals, for example, and Elise gains a large amount of both attack and defensive power. Use of this spell is an absolute necessity in the later stages of the game, but it will only be discovered through experimentation (or reading an FAQ), because the game sure isn’t going to let you know about it. Similarly, the game doesn’t tell you that equipping a Darkness Crystal and hitting a baddy with a “charged” attack will drain health from the enemy and give it to you, making it a very efficient means of staying alive against baddies who do lots of damage.

All these factors — the surprisingly brutal difficulty; the uncompromising, punishing nature of the game; the hidden depths of the game’s various systems — combine to make a game that is very much an acquired taste, but one that is infinitely more satisfying than it first appears, assuming you find those aspects of it palatable.

In short, it’s not Recettear. It’s not easy (not that Recettear was, particularly — though with enough determination and patience you’d make it through eventually). It’s not traditionally “accessible” despite the simplicity of its controls. It doesn’t give up its secrets easily. And it wants very much to hurt you, make you scream, and cackle maniacally as you fling your controller across the room at your fifteenth death that session. Yet it does this with the same veneer of adorable characters and a compelling “small-scale” plot, just as in Recettear. You can see why people got confused.

In summary, then, is Chantelise a bad game? Its Metacritic score certainly seems to suggest so, but as we established a while back with Nier, a Metacritic score is absolutely not a reliable metric as to whether or not a game is “worth playing”. And such is the case here — though I certainly wouldn’t recommend the game to everyone. If, however, you fall into that category of gamers who enjoy being punished by their games and figuring out how best to make use of the seemingly-simple systems with which you’ve been presented, then you should certainly check it out. If you feel like doing so, here it is.

#oneaday, Day 316: Pity The Poor Shopkeeper

The poor shopkeeper doesn’t have it easy, whatever form they take. If they’re a retail monkey working for minimum wage in some sweaty hell-hole where chavs repeatedly come up and ask if the nearly-black garment they have in their hands is available in black, then they’re probably losing the will to live by the second. If they’re working in a, shall we say, “premium” retail environment they’re probably having a better time but rapidly growing sick of the fixed grins they’re forced to wear, not to mention the stock phrases that spew forth from their mouths like some form of verbal effluvia.

And then there’s the poor, downtrodden RPG merchant, forced to sell all manner of crap, apparently only to adventurers, who then helpfully restock them with an endless supply of boar intestines, bits of wood, crystal chippings and used swords that they don’t need any more. It must be a difficult life. And frequently a tedious one, as anyone who entered the online world of Ultima Online with lofty ambitions of owning a huge retail empire will attest.

It’s this odd premise that quirky Japanese indie game Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale (available on Steam, as well as directly from the distributor’s website) decides to explore in great depth. Playing the role of Recette, an adorable young girl with an absentee father, it’s the player’s job to help her run a successful RPG item store and make enough money to pay off the debt her father left her with. She’s not in it alone, of course. She has a fairy assistant named Tear. Tear works for the financial institution with which Recette’s father took out the loan, “because fairies are good at administration” and is there to help Recette pay off the debt she’s been saddled with. The two become friends quickly, but should Recette be unable to make any of the weekly payments she’s required to, Tear will quickly repossess her house and leave the poor girl living in a box.

So far, so Animal Crossing, you might say. And you’d kind of be right. Except not. There really isn’t another game quite like Recettear out there. There are games which focus on individual elements of the game, sure. But none which blend together such peculiar and diverse elements with such successful results.

The game is split into three main sections. Firstly, there’s the item shop itself. Recette can dump anything from her inventory onto the shelves in the store. Stuff in the window is likely to attract customers. If she chooses to open the shop, she has to deal with a flow of customers coming in and asking for things. If they’re on display, all she has to do is agree a suitable price with the customer. If they agree, cha-ching. If they disagree, Recette has one chance to make a more reasonable offer before they leave.

Simple enough. As the game progresses, though, more elements are added to this formula. For starters, in true RPG tradition, people start selling stuff to Recette, too. This can be a good way for her to build up stock, as she can often get stuff for knock-down prices with a bit of shrewd haggling. Then people will place special orders, requesting that she deliver, say, three hats in two days’ time. Recette has to not only make sure she has the hats in stock but also remember to have the store open when the customer plans to return. And finally, some customers will come in not quite sure of what they want, and Recette will have to make recommendations from the stock she has on display and in her inventory.

It’s a straightforward mechanic, and you soon get to know how much certain customers are willing to pay over base prices. A few twists come in later with a news ticker informing Recette of increased or decreased prices in the market, but it’s mostly a case of buy low, sell high.

If Recette chooses to leave the store, she can wander around town and occasionally bump into the people who frequent her store. These come in the form of random townsfolk and adventurers. Completing requests for adventurers will sometimes net her their Guild Card, which enables her to make use of them for expeditions to the local dungeons.

Yes, there are dungeons. Because sometimes the local markets just don’t have the things people want to buy. When that’s the case, Recette is free to pop down to the local Adventurers’ Guild and hire one of the guildies she’s made friends with. It’s then into an action-RPG dungeon crawler to kick monster booty and gather lots of crap that people might want to buy.

It works, brilliantly well. The item shop stuff occurs quickly enough that it never gets tiresome. The storytelling scenes feature attractive artwork and a truly excellent localisation from the Japanese. And the dungeon-crawling, while simplistic, is fun and satisfying, broken up by regular boss battles and in-dungeon special events.

The whole game is distinctly adorable, but deceptive. The artwork, music and squeaky-voiced Japanese girls make it look like something which should be incredibly embarrassing and cringeworthy to play. But in fact, there’s a distinctly acidic sense of humour underneath all the sweetness, and a large number of the dialogue exchanges are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. The kawaii presentation coupled with fairly sophisticated, intelligent humour and a wonderfully self-aware nature reminds me a lot of the Disgaea series.

I’m probably about halfway through the game now, having made two of Recette’s repayments successfully. There’s the hints of a bigger plot at work, and a bunch of new characters have been introduced, most of whom will presumably end up being playable adventurers for the dungeoneering sections.

If you’re after something that is both comfortably familiar and quite different to any JRPG you’ve ever played, then Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is well worth checking out. I fully intend on posting a full review somewhere once I’ve beaten it.