.: Introductory Notes :.
About the Game
Recettear is EasyGameStation's second original creation; the first being Chantelise. Recettear is a game about a girl who has been left behind to repay a heavy debt. In order to repay the debt, the girl, Recetter, will have to run an item shop and through it, make the money required.
In comparison to Chantelise, there is a slightly wider range of things you can do (in particular, running the store). You will be able to change various layout and appearance properties of your item shop and sell/buy items to/from townsfolk.
Recettear introduces randomness into EasyGameStation's otherwise static line of games. Events may or may not be triggered depending on particular criteria (such as having triggered certain flags, or the appearance of your shop). To add to the randomness in the game, the engine creates custom dungeon floors a la Diablo.
The randomness of the dungeon floors means a few things. The most important one being that there's no point in making any attempt to draw a map for any of the floors. However, random dungeons also suffer from a lack of uniqueness. One thing that makes Chantelise better than Recettear in the dungeon aspect is that, although the stages were static in content and appearance, they were unique. Using a random dungeon generator removes that uniqueness from each floor and presents the same content, just shuffled around. To make the dungeons even more boring, there's only so many area types throughout the entire game, so after a certain point, you just keep seeing the same areas over and over.
On the up side, Recettear presents the player with different character classes to choose from, each with their own unique playing style. Chantelise offered the player with a combined team, which removed any real need for different characters to play, but at the same time, resulted in the same general playing style throughout the game.
Likely due to the loss of unique fighting areas, Recettear does not have any sort of puzzles or tasks that can be performed for secret material like with the secret treasures in Chantelise, which takes away from the replay value somewhat.
Ultimately, although Recettear may be addictive, the game really isn't all that fun to play after an extended period of time. Version 1.1x really did a lot more harm to the game than good, in my opinion. Perhaps the enemies were a little too easy to defeat in version 1.0x, but the difficulty definitely peaked after 1.1 was released. The Ruins of Lapis lazuli used to be a place where a player could confidently run through, but now the higher floors have become more of an area where you're much more likely to just rush through it to find the door and pick up any treasure along the way. I think it really stains the "Easy" in "EasyGameStation".
In comparison to Chantelise, really the only thing that I can honestly admit was hard was Peleka Mapuaa when you first run into him and "maybe" the Survival dungeon (it's really more of the fact that it's just really long, so it does wear you out over time).
New Design
This is now the 3rd version of the Recettear v1.1x section. I decided to make the pages more static this time around in terms of the width like the Chantelise, Tenerezza and Tokkyu Tenshi sections. This section does use JavaScript, but I've written it so that users won't actually need JavaScript enabled if they'd rather not. However, disabling JavaScript will generally make the site "messier" (i.e. you see all of the content at once), so if you'd rather be able to make use of the extra features, please leave JavaScript enabled.
Due to a lack of interest, the idea of using icons for different stats and effects has been dropped. I apologize if anyone was interested in this idea, but Minit seems to want to work on other stuff instead and I'm not very good at creating graphics.
Regarding any encoding issues
If you are having trouble seeing this section properly (i.e. the item category section of the menu shows a bunch of garbled Asian text), you are not using the right encoding type. This section (as well as the others) have been encoded with UTF-8, so please make sure that's what you're using (and not Shift-JIS).
