Recettear - An Item Shop's Tale

There are exits on every fifth level. You can also die to get out but then you can only take a limited number of items with you, depending on your Merchant Level.

I had the same question after I cleared out the 4th level of the tutorial dungeon. My packs were full, I'd gained some levels, and my hero was a little hurt (I didn't want to waste the food items by eating them). I was ready to head home.

I wandered around, fiddled with a bunch of the options, and eventually gave up. "Alright, I guess I'll go down to the 5th level then- hey! A door!"

Finally started today after the Thanksgiving sale purchase. Fun stuff. Only 4 days in, not quite level 3 yet.

Dungeons closed on Sunday or something? I went there to check it out, got a cutscene with an adventurer who said he would take me with him, went to buy supplies, and then it wouldn't let me back to the Adventurer's Guild building. Guess he'll still be there tomorrow...

Stele wrote:

Finally started today after the Thanksgiving sale purchase. Fun stuff. Only 4 days in, not quite level 3 yet.

Dungeons closed on Sunday or something? I went there to check it out, got a cutscene with an adventurer who said he would take me with him, went to buy supplies, and then it wouldn't let me back to the Adventurer's Guild building. Guess he'll still be there tomorrow...

I am absolutely hooked on this game. I'm thinking it might be in my Top 10 of 2010 list.

And yes, dungeons are closed on Sundays. Louie will be your adventurer for a while. And whatever you do, don't sell the ...

Spoiler:

Slime Liver

.

So Recettear managed to break 100,000 copies. The guys who localized it are pretty ecstatic for their future prospects.

If they keep picking games this fun, and continue to do as good a job as they did on Recettear, I'll keep buying them.

Had we sold the game for $5 first and then bundled it into a pack, we’d have earned quite a bit more than we did. So lesson learned on that front.

I'm really glad they learned that lesson. While I'm happy as a consumer for getting 5 games for $5, I haven't even installed the other 4 yet.

Thats great news for them. They deserve the success.

Post mortem interview over at RPS.

They've sold about 110,000 copies of the game. Wow.

It took me a while to understand the relationship between the store atmosphere and customers. Had to look it up online, in fact. Wasted a lot of money thinking that more expensive store decorations were objectively better when I couldn't have been further than the truth! Now I have brick floors, resort wallpaper, carpets with bunnies and hobo cardboard boxes for tables. This gets me more customers than ever.

Yeah that whole system confused me as well. If you want to attract certain adventurers then specializing your shop is the way to go. If you just want more of everyone then getting your atmosphere as close to balanced as possible is the way to go.

Currently I'm on my third playthrough. I failed the first one (couldn't make 80k in the time allotted) beat the second one and decided to restart. Something I've noticed is that the store is so big that it is probably impossible to get even halfway through on your first playthrough. You just don't have enough spare time to hit story triggers. My second playthrough is far more relaxed as its much easier to make payments.

Has anyone else tried the final store expansion? I didn't like it, it was so large that my shop started to feel like a supermarket. I like having a small cozy store.

Tamren wrote:

Yeah that whole system confused me as well. If you want to attract certain adventurers then specializing your shop is the way to go. If you just want more of everyone then getting your atmosphere as close to balanced as possible is the way to go.

I don't think specializing really gains anything. I get all the adventurers in my store with my totally balanced atmosphere. Only thing specializing seems to do is kill your profits.

Tamren wrote:

Currently I'm on my third playthrough. I failed the first one (couldn't make 80k in the time allotted) beat the second one and decided to restart. Something I've noticed is that the store is so big that it is probably impossible to get even halfway through on your first playthrough. You just don't have enough spare time to hit story triggers. My second playthrough is far more relaxed as its much easier to make payments.

I made it through my first time, though I did have to load older saves to correct mistakes in order to meet my last 2 payments. I focused more on buying discounted items than on adventuring through dungeons, which makes you very little money. My second playthough was a breeze and now I'm playing endless mode.

I'm not sure I follow on how you mean the store size affects story triggers?

Tamren wrote:

Has anyone else tried the final store expansion? I didn't like it, it was so large that my shop started to feel like a supermarket. I like having a small cozy store.

I have it. It's... huge. I'm not getting any more customers, so I don't know if it really buys me anything. I suppose it lets you put out a wider variety of items, but does it translate to more sales? If not, then what's the point? One could argue that you don't have to spend time restocking items between shifts; to which I say you'll spend that time stocking in the morning anyway.

I wish there was an action to clear all my store shelves. When the morning news comes in and all my stuff is suddenly price-reduced, I don't want to sell it! Instead, to clear my shelves, this is what I do: open the shelf, put in a vending machine. Open the shelf, revert to table. If you own two of that vending machine, this lets you clear a table buy click-click-click-left-click. Needless to say, even this takes some time with full expansion.

I also wish there was some other kind of goal or objective that I was working towards now that I've paid off my debt. I keep making money and buying discounted stuff and haggling, but to what end? Though I'm progressing through the dungeons, there's not a lot of point in doing so except to unlock some newer ones? I get so few useful ingredients that I can't Fusion much at all. And if you get to the boss and get knocked out, the whole trip was basically a waste of 20 minutes.

While you will get more visitors with a balanced atmosphere, some event triggers will only fire if your shop is tilted to dark/light and cheap/gaudy. I had to go online to discover this when I hit a point where the next dungeon refused to appear. Turned out I was missing a particular emo kid who needed a specific atmosphere in order to show up the first time.

Mr Crinkle wrote:

While you will get more visitors with a balanced atmosphere, some event triggers will only fire if your shop is tilted to dark/light and cheap/gaudy. I had to go online to discover this when I hit a point where the next dungeon refused to appear. Turned out I was missing a particular emo kid who needed a specific atmosphere in order to show up the first time.

Only 2 characters are apparently exclusionary: Griff won't show up in Light stores at all, Louie won't show up in Gaudy stores at all. Other than that, while certain atmospheres are more likely to attract particular shoppers, they don't seem to be required.

Edit: Oh, nevermind. That's only referring to attracting them as customers, but does not apply to encountering them for the first time in a triggered event.

It's a flaw of the game to require you to do a certain thing in order to progress with events, but not tell you.

Quintin: I never got to that point but the story does continue in the dungeons, even after you've paid off your debt, so there is a point to continuing. Although I think there is a final dungeon that's just there for the challenge of it and has the materials to craft the best items in the game.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
Mr Crinkle wrote:

While you will get more visitors with a balanced atmosphere, some event triggers will only fire if your shop is tilted to dark/light and cheap/gaudy. I had to go online to discover this when I hit a point where the next dungeon refused to appear. Turned out I was missing a particular emo kid who needed a specific atmosphere in order to show up the first time.

Only 2 characters are apparently exclusionary: Griff won't show up in Light stores at all, Louie won't show up in Gaudy stores at all. Other than that, while certain atmospheres are more likely to attract particular shoppers, they don't seem to be required.

Edit: Oh, nevermind. That's only referring to attracting them as customers, but does not apply to encountering them for the first time in a triggered event.

It's the hallmark of a JRPG to require you to do a certain thing in order to progress with events, but not tell you.

While I don't disagree necessarily, this is certainily more accurate. FFVII and the Weapons, anyone? Chocobo Breeding? Knights of the Round?

It seems that the bigger your store gets the harder it is to shift the atmosphere away from plain. The number of customers doesn't seem to have increased much either.

I'm on my second playthrough and I'm still amazingly strapped for cash. There is just so much to buy. Meeting my quota is easy but I can never have too much profit. There are a lot of items that simply never show up on a first run either. In my first game I found a copy of the 200 warriors book off of Charme. It was used in a fusion and I never saw another. In my new game I had 3 copies of that book sold to me at the same time. And also got to buy teacher poles and other items.

Arise!

I picked this up on day one of the Steam sale. First, I tend to not like, for lack of a better term, "Japan-ish" things, and creepy, big-eyed characters typically make me turn around and move quickly in the other direction. Also, the combat system is really basic, the music is plinky, the dialogue and characters are ridiculous, and . . .

Somehow, this is still just a giant pile of awesome. I don't know why the hell I'm enjoying this so much, but it's really simple and elegant and loads of fun. Easily worth the five bucks I dropped on it.

Im on the last "campaign" dungeon boss and hot damn is it hard.

I LOVED this game. Just ridiculously good. It was worth every penny of full price, and if you got it for five bucks, damn, man.

DAMMIT YOU STUPID LITTLE GIRL STOP TELLING ME I'M MEAN AND BUY SOMETHING FOR A DECENT PRICE FOR A CHANGE.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

DAMMIT YOU STUPID LITTLE GIRL STOP TELLING ME I'M MEAN AND BUY SOMETHING FOR A DECENT PRICE FOR A CHANGE.

YES.

In my opinion, it is less important to wring every last cent out of your customers and more important to hit their sweet spot to get more experience. As your level goes up you get access to more stuff. That stuff is worth more then a few percentage of your sales.

I think For little girls it is 105% for old men 110% and men 120%.. Or maybe it is 110, 120 and 130.

I am not sure but you get an xp bonus for getting it right, and the more you get right in a row the xp grows exponentially. This only happens I think if you get it right the first time.

Kier wrote:

In my opinion, it is less important to wring every last cent out of your customers and more important to hit their sweet spot to get more experience. As your level goes up you get access to more stuff. That stuff is worth more then a few percentage of your sales.

I think For little girls it is 105% for old men 110% and men 120%.. Or maybe it is 110, 120 and 130.

I am not sure but you get an xp bonus for getting it right, and the more you get right in a row the xp grows exponentially. This only happens I think if you get it right the first time.

Truth. Plus it's much more important to level up your relationship with someone than it is to maximize your income on a sale. You make people happy, the money that they have to spend in your store gets much higher.

Also you're probably supposed to fail the first time through. You keep a lot of your progress so it's easier the next time.

Yeah, you should actually fail at least once, it's funny.

Oh I didn't realize failing was expected. I was about to not make my 2nd payment and I just didn't save..

I'm preparing to not make my final payment; I squeaked by the third one but just don't have a chance with the last one.

Bullion Cube wrote:
Kier wrote:

In my opinion, it is less important to wring every last cent out of your customers and more important to hit their sweet spot to get more experience. As your level goes up you get access to more stuff. That stuff is worth more then a few percentage of your sales.

I think For little girls it is 105% for old men 110% and men 120%.. Or maybe it is 110, 120 and 130.

I am not sure but you get an xp bonus for getting it right, and the more you get right in a row the xp grows exponentially. This only happens I think if you get it right the first time.

Truth. Plus it's much more important to level up your relationship with someone than it is to maximize your income on a sale. You make people happy, the money that they have to spend in your store gets much higher.

The real sweet spot is 107% across the board for regular townfolk.

Generally I'd sell cheap things at a low markup to build up a relationship, then wring as much as I can (percentage-wise) for the expensive items. I also sell things really cheap to adventurers.

You have to get the sweet spot to level up your relationship with customers so that they're able to pay more for more expensive items. Also it gives you more experience for your merchant levels. The best thing to do is check the Wiki to see what price you should be offering. 107% is generally the sweet spot at the beginning but I found it varies a bit depending on the character, the relationship level, and the item level. Also the % is much higher for high demand items and lower for low demand.