Addictive and Fresh. More action please!
The game starts with Recettear, a young girl that finds out her father has left her with a substantial debt to pay off. She decides to open a shop to pay off the debt with the help of Tear, Tear is a fairy by the way yep her name is Tear. Anyway Tear is a serious accountant and she puts deadlines on your payments to the debt. If you cannot pay off the amount requested by set deadline your store gets repossessed but its not game over you just have to start back at the beginning of the month with all the things you have already earned through dungeon crawling and purchase. That's right dungeon crawling, on the town map you can go to guild and hire an adventurer for a fee of course to explore dungeons for loot. This is where the game opens up. You control the hired er sword and commence exploring!
As the adventurer you have a special attack meter and a health meter. The dungeons are randomly generated for extra playability. The action is all done in real time, when you destroy your enemies they explode with gems, the gems are drawn to you and build up your experience points. The experience points will help you to level up making your attacks more potent. At the end of every 5 stages you fight a boss and can then choose to keep exploring or go back to town. All the loot you acquire is Recettears to keep, the only thing the explorers want is payment for their services.
Back to the town you put your loot on sale and barter with customers to help pay off that looming debt. The days pass in 4 block cycles. At the end of a week the owing amount is due, hopefully you will have haggled your way to the required amount or you will start back at the beginning of the month. Going to a dungeon takes 2 blocks of your daily cycle so your time management skills are put to the test.
Throughout the game you meet a handful of characters, this is an indie game man! You'll start to understand the limit that the characters reserve when it comes to haggling with them. Eventually when your 3rd payment comes up you'll be busy buying and selling from merchants around the town. This is where the game becomes a feverish buy and sell. I stopped exploring dungeons and focused on buying and selling because I made more money that way and time was running out.
After you pay off your debt the end credits roll and you own the store. I only unlocked 1 out of the 5 dungeons in the game at this point. You can play the game after you finish payment so this will give you a chance to unlock and explore more dungeons and characters without the debt pushing you around. I wish the dungeons were a bigger part of the game but really that's just me. To make the game better I think they would have to make it bigger, again its an indie title how big can they realistically make it. Still I think if they make a sequel or an expansion it could really take off.