So I had an unusual thought while playing Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale...
Actually, hold up, let me set the mood for you. Recettear is a game where you play as a little girl named Recette, who wakes up one day to find that she's inherited a rather hefty debt from her single dad that went off adventuring and has never returned. If she can't pay back the loan (which curiously, the principle is kept a secret from Recette, and there doesn't seem to be any interest or negotiations in the matter) then her home will be foreclosed on and she'll become a homeless little girl. She's given an option though, which is not really an option, which is to transform her home into an item shop and sell things in order to make enough money to pay back the entire loan in, get this, one month. Then, taking the role of Recette, you make it your job to catapult yourself from bootstrap bread merchant to gold mongering baroness in the span of a month, or be jettisoned into homelessness by the only person in the whole world you can call your friend. I played this game, and actually beat it in my first try without guides, and I have to say that I thoroughly consider it worth the 20$ I spent on it. After entering endless mode, the portion of the game where you may continue building your shop and enjoy the non-mogul portions of the game, which includes a rather simplistic dungeoneering part, which is actually required that you try out as part of the tutorial. It was disappointing though, as I quickly found out that the dungeon aspect of the game is LAUGHABLE in terms of how much money one can make doing it. To beat the game, to conquer the debt laid onto you by your deadbeat dad, you need to focus on your shop 100% of the time or perish in poverty, so there's just no room for adventure.
Enjoying this facet of the game, I allow myself to fall into the den of depravity that is GameFAQ's, and I lap up all the post-game content as fast as I can. I find the most odd, peculiar thing though, while experiencing the game and reading about the background mechanics of the game, and it's that the game PUNISHES you for being greedy! I just can't get that! The game where the motto is "Capitalism Ho!"... it completely disincentivizes you from sticking your hand into the honey pot, and grabbing as much as humanly possible, at the expense of literally everything else... which, I think, was the point of the game, but it would seem that that's not the case.
Allow me to dispense some examples: Early on, the game's tutorial advises you to try to ratchet up the price of items as high as humanly possible to maximize profits. I get this, and it makes me happy. What I don't get is that in the guides I've read, this is actually counter-intuitive. Each of your customers start with a bank roll that starts out small, and gets bigger as you get them "hearts" which is something that you achieve by selling or buying items at the perfect price percentage for that customer. Usually, this perfect price is much lower than the money-hungry pricing that you're advised to do. And you see, Until they have more hearts, they can't buy the more expensive items, and eventually you're drowned in your debt as a result.
Apparently, I got really lucky with the boons and price increases, as well as with Alloutte and Prime, who both start with enormous bankrolls, and I was able to beat the game thanks to whoring all those factors out to their fullest potential.
Another example: In the same vein as the hearts, is the merchant level system. You see, whenever you make a successful sale, or buy something off a customer, you get merchant XP, and with enough Merchant XP, you get Merchant Levels, this is rudimentary stuff. Merchant levels are extremely important, because if you don't get a high merchant as you play the game, then you don't get access to the more expensive items with a higher profit margin, and thus you drown in your debt. What the game flatout never tells you though, is the best way to go about acquiring Merch XP. You see, you're encouraged to haggle with the customer early on, to wring them for as much money as you humanly can, but once again, this is counter-intuitive. You see, one of the best ways to gain experience is through "Pix bonus" which is where you sell something close to it's base price, alot lower than you can get by haggling to get every cent you can out of every customer. Then there's the very significant "Just Combo" which is where for each time you manage to buy or sell something on the first attempt, the amount of experience you get for each successive customer interaction in this manner grows exponentially, capping at 128 XP. So if you charge low, and buy high, you can reap the bountiful XP rewards from your customers, and ultimately, the most profit in the long run. In this way, you're punished for being greedy, while rewarded for being the Nice Guy Businessman...
and again, I seem to have inadvertently found the right mixture of nice guy, and exploitative bastard to let me beat the game on my first try. It was really completely due to luck that I was successful, since I had no idea how the XP system worked until I looked it up after beating the game.
But let me get into the design of the game that irks me the most: the dungeon system. I've mentioned before that the profit you make from being a dungeon crawler is pitiful, so pitiful that you can't even acknowledge it during the main game, relinquishing it to the post-game where you will have both the excessive amount of time, and the incredulous amount of money to fund your expeditions. This is really saddening, since I'd like to pay off my ginormous debt by throwing myself face first into terrible danger, killing all the foul creatures I come across, and carrying the massive amount of treasure I find back up to the surface to crush my creditors with.
It's just not feasible though, the profit is just too pitiful. In the early game, you might find a weapon or something that is above your merchant level, and can thus be sold for more money than anything else you have available to you, but you will quickly find that the reward for your spelunking to be measly compared to just merchanting full time. This is thanks to quite a lot of factors that are inherently problematic with dungeoneering.
The first and foremost, is that adventuring is costly, both in the sense of the amount of capital in weapons, armor, and food that you need to send down with your adventurer in order to ensure their safety and success, but it's costly in a currency much more valuable than the game gives credit: Time. The game postulates that adventuring takes 2 units of time, of which there are 4 units of time in a game day. This is a lie. Adventuring takes 3 units of time, evidenced by the fact that you can only adventure once a day, and even then only in the morning or noon, and at the end of your adventuring, there is literally no more time to do anything else. This is crippling to adventuring's prospects to be used in any practical fashion, since it consumes the entire day, and removes all but one unit of time that you can use to merchant. When the game puts you on the clock to pay back Recette's unreasonable debt, you find that time is more important than... well, pretty much anything else really, because you need time to sell things, make money, visit stores and replenish your inventory, and grow your business. If I could shell out 10,000 or 20,000 moneys a day to put Recette on a caffeine drip, and keep her awake for just a little bit longer to keep her store open for just that much longer, you'd be damned sure I'd do it. That's how valuable time is, and adventuring squanders it like nothing.
The next, and I can't repeat this enough, is that the rewards are just too pathetic for the amazing amount of capital and time invested, and the risk of your adventurer dying (and thus losing all but 1 or 2 items) is always there, looming over your head as you pick up nigh-worthless item after nigh-worthless item. As I said, you'll occasionally hit upon something that is actually quite valuable, but just merchanting and raising your Merchant Level is a far more profitable and useful method of getting access to better equipments and items. These valuable items you hit upon though, you find that they don't scale right for the difficult of dungeon you find them in. After I beat the game and could devote 100% of each game day to adventuring, early on I found that I was coasting through the early dungeons as I could afford to just send him flying through them with literally the best equipment that money can buy. I discovered though, that with the amount of time I was putting in, the rewards for the sections of game that I'd have access to them was, as I said, nil in comparison to the amount of money I'd be needing to pay back. It was only on the second to last dungeon did I start to find items that were actually worth my time to wrestle out of the treacherous, randomly generated hellscape, and even then they were few and far between. Even in the last dungeon, 3 months of game time into the post-game, I'm hardpressed to find anything that would have helped me in the last two weeks of the first month, which is where paying back the debt was most relevant. You can't even find actual money in dungeons, only items with which to sell, and that's just too disappointing.
Thirdly, the dungeoneering, the most foolishly risky venture that you can take in the game, disincentivizes risk-taking. It does this in two ways: very limited inventory space, and frequent exits. Adventuring is very simple business: Go down into dungeon, kill monsters, reap whatever rewards you can extract from chests and corpses, then get out while the getting's good. You only have 20 spaces (later, 25, then 30) of inventory space to make your claim on the monster filled holes in the ground, and you're advised to get out get out getoutgetoutgetout while the gettings good, with an exit that's made available to you every five floors. And trust me when I say that five floors is enough to fill your entire inventory. Unfortunately, it's only filled with junk most likely, since 95% of all items you find will be some useless, inexpensive weapon or armor, food item (which helps your adventurer, but not your bankroll), and "Ingredient" items, which are used for a game mechanic referred to as 'Fusion', which I'll get to later. The remaining 5% is actually valuable items that can be sold for a profit. It's more than possible to rush through dozens of floors at a time, aiming for only that 5% to make a profit, but once again, even the most valuable items are not that valuble, and you're just wasting your time in the long run, and once again, you're destined to falter and fail if you try to adventure your way out of your extravagant debt.
And all this is a shame, because for something that boils down to simple dungeon-crawling, it's actually pretty fun. There's a plethora of characters to use, each with their own special quirks and abilities, and the dungeons themselves make themselves interesting with randomly given statistical buff and debuffs to your characters or the dungeon monsters, or even to the dungeon itself. Each floor is it's own gamble in that way. Each five floors, before you're allowed to leave, there's a guaranteed boss fight or 'gauntlet', and gauntlets are SO FUN! What they are, basically, is just a normal floor, except instead of randomly spawned creatures, it's jam packed to the brim with predetermined creatures, and instead of having to find an exit, you have to kill them all to progress. If there were a mode to just face 50 gauntlet stages back-to-back, I'd definitely do it. But I digress...
For a moment, I'd like to talk about the Fusion mechanic. When thinking about what to say about it, my first thought was to type "Man, fuck fusion. Fuck fusion. Fuck fusion. FUCK fusion!", and while that sums up my opinion pretty succinctly, I think I should go into a little bit more detail. Fusion is where you take your ingredient items, and maybe some other items, and combine them to make new items. This sounds innocent enough, but the reality of the situation is that the fusion mechanic is designed from the ground up, not to help you make useful items, but to suck weeks from the lives of hardcore completionists as they grindgrindgrind to get the rare ingredients that practically every recipe calls for. From what I can tell, there are five ranks of fusion items, and I'm on the last dungeon in the game, and I'm struggling to make rank 2 items, despite hauling as many ingredient items as I can back to town in every expedition. Even making simple stuff requires ALOT of things!
What I'm trying to get at, is the dungeon system's last flaw. You can only get ingredients from killing monsters in the dungeon. It's the only way. I don't know what it is about making dungeon crawlers, but game designers seem almost instinctively compelled to make them boring grindfests in one way or another. The very fact that my adventurer is a nigh-invincible, armed-to-the-teeth god-killing lunatic, and he still has to waste his effort on collecting 'fur balls' from killing the bunny monsters, that can't even hurt him, is a disgrace, both to him and to the player personally. There's so many benign and mundane things that shouldn't even be a concern, but stand in the way of the game's last challenge, conquering the fusion mechanic, and that brings down the fun factor significantly once you become acutely aware of this like I have. Combined with a very limited inventory, requiring many individual expeditions hauling ingredients back to town, then waiting an entire game day before you can go back to the dungeon to repeat the process, and I'm sure you can tear your hair out in frustration just imagining it.
Really, the game had the opportunity to take man's most decadent sin, greed, and ratchet it up to 11, but it just didn't. Why? Maybe the designer just didn't want to invest that much effort in what amounts to a secondary portion of the game? Maybe he just didn't have the insight to hammer out it's problems? Maybe he honestly finds crushing repetition to be the best thing since sliced bread... but for whatever reason, the dungeoning mechanic could use some features to make it more profitable in game terms, and profitable in the amount of fun it gives to the player for time invested. I would like to personally put my ideas for these features.
Now, to sum up my ideas, it boils down to adding 2 things to the game:
1. To incentivize the player to stay in the dungeon longer.
2. To reward the player for taking risks, with larger risks paying more.
I'd like to take a moment to allude to DoomRL (Doom Roguelike) and how it handles risks/reward. The entire game is a dungeon, basically, but optionally there are secondary floors you can visit. These floors are usually much more dangerous than what the normal game has to offer, but completing them will reward the player guaranteed benefits to their character. Then there's the game 'Binding of Isaac' which also takes place exclusively in a dungeon, and while I could lampoon the game all day for it's shameless lack of sanity checking, it offers alot of choices to the player, mainly in the form of standardized risk-taking with the slots and cup games, but also with more visceral risks in the form of it's own guantlet levels, which you may just to claim a prize sitting out in the open, but doing so triggers three waves of enemies to attack you.
These are inspirational points, as the dungeons in Recettear already have alot of mechanics to put the pressure on the player, and reward him accordingly, it just needs a few more to fully take advantage of them. What I have in mind is the addition of 'Dungeon Credits', a Dungeon Businessman, and a magical Joker character. Also, changing it so the player is more aware of the Will-o-wisp clock and it's subsequent tightening to be less forgiving, but also to make it possible to interact with it. I'll get more indepth on that later. Also, a revamp of the combo system, to make it more rewarding for the player to indulge in it. I'll also get into that later.
Now, what do I mean by Dungeon Credits? It would be it's own currency, except can only be found and used in the dungeon you're in... Now, I'm already sick of typing the word 'dungeon', so I'll just refer to them as DC's. You will start every expedition with zero DC's, and when you stop the day's adventuring, all DC's you've accumulated in the Dungeon is converted into the game's money (pix) automatically, let's say, at a one to one ratio. This is to prevent the player from hoarding them over the course of many expeditions, and allow them to profit from their journeys, but also to give the impression that each adventure is it's own clean slate. Now, how does one acquire them and what are they used for?
Simply put, DC's can be acquired by killing monsters. Creatures already explode into a treasure trove of jewels upon death, albeit only for the benefit of giving your adventurer EXP, I don't think it's that large a stretch to also have them explode into a few things that look like poker chips, representing the DC's you're getting for killing that creature. Also, you can get DC's by dealing with the Businessman, an indestructible NPC That would appear in the Dungeon either at random or preset intervals.
It's simple, you deal with him, and you can sell anything you find to him for one half of it's base value, in credits. Why? Just to make carrying your own valuable things into the dungeon to sell not profitable. This would serve as a way to loosen up space in your inventory, squeeze some usefulness out of the many useless useless things that you'd ordinarily drop on the ground to make room for better things. Also, for a small fee, he'll teleport items out of your dungeon inventory to your store inventory, giving you both space in your inventory to adventure for longer, and relief to know that your items are safe. This would incentivize you to adventure longer and seek to make more progress in a single sitting.
Also, just because getting alot of ingredients and rarer treasures is a pain in the ass, he could sell them to you for so many DC's, and bam, they're yours. No need to spend hours upon hours grinding for them.
Next, one thing that would make the game better is the addition of the joker NPC I have in mind. Basically, he's the one you'd speak to for accepting large amounts of risk for large amounts of reward. What I have in mind is that you would find him, or he'd approach you randomly, and offer some deal.
"100,000 DC's say you can't beat these monsters I have... Yes or no?"
"Think you're tough? How do five Guantlet levels in a row sound? How about for these fabulous items I have *show items*... Yes or no?"
"I'll throw down 50,000 DC's right now, but the stats of every monster on this level are tripled. Yes or no?"
"Good job beating that boss! How about double/triple/quadruple/etc or nothing? Multiply the boss, multiply the reward! Yes or no?"
And it'd be fun if you could approach him for things. Like say if you could pay him such-and-such amount he'll randomize the level effects (so if you don't like that all monsters have double defense for the round, you can spin the wheel and hopefully get something better, like double attack power for you!). I think it'd also be pretty alright if he had more traditional games you could participate in, like Shell game, high/low, slots, the dice game from spelunky, just things that have very simple rules, and can be played without having to leave adventurer-perspective. Of course, DC's are the only currency he accepts. The joker's purpose is to give the player further incentive to traverse the dungeon, in the hopes of finding him and hitting upon some massively profitable deal, and it adds an additional layer of thrill and excitement to the experience.
Now, I mentioned earlier about tightening and flushing out the 'will-o-wisp' timer. You see, in the game, if you spend too much time on any one level of a dungeon, terrifying balls of hate and fire start appearing all over the place. They deal tremendous damage and never stop spawning all over, though they'll never appear on a boss stage or a gauntlet level. In a way, they're like the ghost from Spelunky, and that's a good thing. Thing is, it's a crapshoot to figure how much time you have before they start appearing, but in all but a few cases, it's a such a long time before they appear that you might as well have all the time in the world. It'd be a good idea, I think, to actually let the player KNOW how much time they have, in the form of a literal timer present somewhere on the screen at all times. This would give the player a good reason to hurry, as they see the clock ticking down. This adds an additional layer of excitement. To compound that though, I'd like it if the amount of time given to the player were decreased significant, so that threat of the wisps is always there. The sense of danger is intoxicating.
What I'd want, ideally though, is to have the time on the clock to act as it's own currency. You could strike deals with the joker, and interact with the clock in special ways.
"I'll give you 100,000 DC's for one half of your clock... yes or no?"
"If you pay me 50,000 DC's your clock won't tick down for this level... yes or no?"
"I see your clock is almost run out! If you pay me 200,000 DC's though, I'll give you one minute. Yes or no?"
and maybe the businessman can get in a little bit of that action too, although maybe at a reduced rate since he's more shrewd and reasonable.
"Hmm, I'll give you 250 DC's for every second of your clock that you're willing to sell me. How many would you like to sell?"
And I like to think that the rates for both would fluctuate depending on which dungeon you're in and which floor you're on, so the buying and selling of time would be either much more profitable in later dungeons, corresponding to where the phase of the game that you're in demands that you make more money quickly.
Other than that, I'm undecided on what other changes to make to make to the clock. In my head, I played around with the benefits of giving the player bonus DC's for extra time left on the clock when they leave the dungeon, but that incentivizes rushing through the floors, which I don't think is something that'd be worthwhile. I also toyed around with the idea of a 'static' clock, or a clock that doesn't reset on every floor, but receives a time bonus at the start of each floor, and while I think that would add another layer of strategy and thrill to the game, it might be excessively punishing to the player that just wants to be thorough.
Of course, the number of DC's you have, and the amount of time on your clock, is rendered moot if you happen to die in the dungeon, where then you'll only have your adventurer's unconscious body, one or two items, and your personal shame to carry back to the surface. It's what I'm talking about when I say I want the game to exemplify the mortal sin known as greed. Enticing the player into throwing away their own safety, to ignore common sense, to risk everything for the sake of incredible profit, and to climb out of the outrageous debt you've been placed in. That's the feeling I want the game to impart onto me and others, the feeling of desperation that is to be placed into a terrible situation, and to know that the only way to get out is to be willing to resort to the most extreme echelons of personal risk to dig yourself out. It becomes a humbling and insightful experience to the people that fail, while enlivening and euphoric to the people that succeed.
Now I mentioned earlier about 'revamping' the combo system. This is hardly a necessary change, but I would personally find it alot more fun. The way it stands, and it actually took me awhile to find out how this worked since it's so non-intuitive, was that you got so much bonus EXP for your adventurer for every successive kill of the same creature. I just don't think that's particularly rewarding of player skill, since it's completely up to the Random Number God whether or not multiples of a creature spawn in the same place, and it's just a pain to ignore different types of creatures as you look for the ones that will increase your combo score. Really, the best strategy is to ignore combos altogether and just kill everything you run across willy-nilly, which is a shame since that just makes it a throwaway mechanic, and there's no reason for that.
An improvement would be the far simpler, more intuitive, and personally rewarding system of "number of kills in a row without getting hit". It's not that hard, and it's a pet peeve of mine when something so simple and effective is ignored for an inferior system.
I have no idea what came over me to write this massive thing, I was just playing the game, and then decided to exit out, and then I sit down and write for maybe 10 hours, this giant post.
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Topic: Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, or my take on greed in videogames. (Read 3411 times)