YMMV / Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

aka: Recettear

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Recette's dad merely a Bumbling Dad and The Ditz, or did he set the plot in motion by crossing the Moral Event Horizon?
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Most of the things you find in the dungeons are standard fare, among which are traps like bombs and boulders. However, one rare trap ends up throwing giant spinning fish across the screen.
• Breather Boss: The Gauntlet "boss" level two-thirds of the way through the Obsidian Tower, which is packed with a pretty large and exhausting variety of monsters, particularly various varieties of slime. Much, much easier than the other bosses at that end of the game.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Ropers were initially annoying thanks to a bug. They hit you once and you are either left in single digit HP or dead.
  • Regular enemies which usually deal pitiful amounts of damage in earlier dungeons become this in The Crystal Nightmare, where they deal larger amounts of damage, and get tougher with every floor you clear.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Alouette is very popular, simply because she can buy stuff at insanely high prices when you're in her good graces.
• Fan Nickname: C-c-c-combo breaker, basically to anyone who messes up your exp combo by refusing a sale. ^note This will happen if you sell an item too high (or offer too low a price if they're selling an item to you) for the customer. Happens most often with Euria, who refuses to buy, and mostly sells crap merchandise to you at ridiculously inflated prices. You'll either have to reload and pray you don't see her in the shop, or better yet, never activate her scene.
  • If people grow fond of Little Girl-type customers, they might start calling them "Little Sisters".
• Game-Breaker:
  • In 1.105 and 1.106 at least you can sell vending machines in vending machines. Physics aside, this can be a very good way to make money fast once you have the capital to get it started. Considering Tear says point-blank you (supposedly) can't resell vending machines, this is almost certainly a bug.
  • In the initial version of the demo, there was a woman who would buy a Walnut Bread on the first day. Unlike most other customers, she would never leave the shop no matter how much you haggled with her. This raised her willing-to-pay price by a bit every time. This meant that the game could be broken by selling one piece of Walnut Bread for millions of pix, until Carpe Fulgur and EasyGameStation released an updated demo which capped the woman's wallet at 150pix.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Euria, who will constantly try to sell you Treasures, which most generally are useless commodity you can obtain, at ridiculous prices (300~350%), more or less insuring the destruction of your combo, and gets stuck in a thankful statue/gold statue loop (both of which can be bought in the market shop). Made worse by the fact that if you actually buy something from her, she'll show up more often.
  • Prime will only pay base price until you increase your relationship level with her, the fact she tends to pick up the most expensive items in your display case doesn't help either.
  • Lightning Bugs. They're very small flying enemies, move faster than you can, and slow you when they hit. When you first encounter them with Louie (a melee character), you will be frustrated.
  • Gnolls can also be very annoying at first. While their ranged attacks can be blocked by Louie, they have some fast melee-range attacks for when you get closer, and the block only works if you face them and aren't attacking something else.
  • At first, Bombs are these. When you kill one, their corpses become bombs that can cause massive damage, so knocking one down in tight spaces without losing much health could be hard. Being sufficiently armored though minimalizes that.
  • Statues are very annoying, especially in groups when they can obstruct your adventurer from going further or close enough to attack them.
  • Ropers. The early variants mostly die with one hit, but later in the game they become fast and without a very strong adventurer it's unlikely that you'll get past one without taking Collision Damage. They are also immune to knockback.
• Good Bad Bugs: Thanks to Gameplay Ally Immortality, Recette is completely immune from damage while in the dungeons. On rare occasions, the floating pumpkins will attempt to land on her. If your adventurer is far enough away, you can completely avoid damage, and close in to attack them, while Recette remains completely unharmed.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Tear is quite pleased when Caillou thinks she's the proprietor. Given what we later learn about the treatment of fairies, she's probably not used to getting that kind of respect. Caillou himself thinks it's unexpected, though he's more willing to believe a fairy is in charge than a girl his age.
  • An early encounter with Louie searching the want ads at the pub ends with Recette stating that he reminds her of her father. Given what she does — or doesn't do — when she finally sees her father again, this may not be as sweet as it sounds. A scene after clearing the Lapis Ruins and the "reunion" with Mr. Lemongrass has her saying to give her some credit — she isn't as stupid as Louie!
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The introductory cutscene for Euria becomes ironic for 2023. She tries to sell Recette and Tear a picture for half a million pix and then tries to justify it by saying that it's an investment and the price will only go up, just like someone attempt to sucker a person into an NFT scam.
• Ho Yay:
  • A very drunk Charme complains that she can't take Recette home if Tear is there, too. She's just joking, but Tear finds it hard to believe, and so might the player, considering just how abruptly she backflips when Charme realizes what she said.
  • Recette X Tear, where the game's title could be a Portmanteau Couple Name. A Running Gag is Recette A) concluding that Griff is in love with Tear (much to Griff's consternation) and B) declaring her intention to stand in their way: "Too bad, because Tear is my -". The only real time Recette shows anything related to romantic feelings is towards Tear. Specifically, she's convinced that Griff has a massive crush on Tear, and Recette, rather than being Shipper on Deck, doesn't want Griff and Tear to become a thing.
• Moe: An impressively large portion of the cast has the Moe look. Recette especially fits the archetype; one reviewer described her as "cute enough to induce insulin shock." Even somewhat lampshaded in the dialogue: "That girl: something about her inspires people to care."
• Older Than They Think: Being able to play as a merchant to sell items to adventurers is predated by Dragon Quest IV, granted it was for a small segment instead of being the whole game.
• The Scrappy: Euria exists only to force you to spend ridiculous amounts of money to not screw up your Pin combos. People have actually gone so far as to avoid all cutscenes during the times of day that she could appear and thus start appearing in the shop.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Adventurers cannot directly equip something from you unless they buy it at Recettear. If you choose to have them equip it for a single dungeon run, the equipment swapped out takes up slots in your bag. Because shopping relies completely on chance, it could take in game days for the adventurer to actually buy what you want to sell them... unless, of course, you want to keep your Pin, to which you're likely to sell it to an NPC first.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Repaying the debt without going adventuring is a somewhat common one, since you can get by if you buy items from the merchants' guild and the market and resell them for a value of around 108%. As long as you prioritize increasing your merchant level so you can access higher tier equipment and take advantage of price fluctuations, you can usually get enough money to repay the entire debt with about a week to spare.
• Squick:
  • Your customers will often sell you food... with a quote about how it's a "family heirloom" or "my grandfather used it with love before he passed", which raises a natural question how much spoiled are they.
  • Certain wearable items have descriptions that can raise an eyebrow, such as the fighter guy sell a sailor suit saying the grandfather used it with loooove.
• That One Boss:
  • Griff, Rebel with a Cause in the Obisidian Tower. He can down an unprepared adventurer with two attacks. He is also swift, difficult to counter and loves to spam magics all over the place.
  • The Geddon Device, the Final Boss (though you can only fight it in Endless Mode), in Lapis Ruins. It has a wide array of attacks that are either extremely damaging or difficult to dodge. It is well known to downright one-shot poorly equipped adventurers.
• The Woobie: Recette, if you believe the Fridge Horror that she's probably been starved for a while before Tear comes to help.
• Woolseyism:
  • The English localization came about as a result of two Goons looking to break into game localization. Although the formation of Carpe Fulgur came about partly as a way for the two to gain credentials a post-release interview clearly shows their passion for translating and localizing, even namedropping Ted Woolsey as a major influence. This results in a localization that is top notch, capturing the game's humor and charm perfectly while sprinkling in numerous clever references to other relevant works and maintaining a biting sense of humor. The fact they've done the same damn thing with the games spiritual prequel shows they're truly dedicated to their craft.
    "Son of a Submariner!", indeed
  • The game's memetic catchphrase, "Capitalism, ho!" was eventually admitted to have come up as a whim of the writer, having no equivalent in the Japanese script. He commented in the translator's notes that given the popularity of the phrase and its effect on the game's marketing, he wasn't too concerned.

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