Hey, hey people, Sseth here. Have you ever watched one of those
sad documentaries about the living conditions of sweatshop
workers in Thailand, and thought to yourself, "Those poor people, they make
products that sell for hundreds, yet they earn a single dollar for their labor." That's terrible. Those workers are clearly overpaid. I'd pay them half. Then I've got exactly the game for you. Recettear, released in 2007 and
translated from Mandarin Chinese in 2010. On the surface, Recettear is a game about the true
merchant experience of being a professional shill. As such, it resonates strongly with
my own personal belief and culture. Instead of being a random, adventuring schmuck that risks their own life and
limb to put bread on the table, you play as a child that risks their very soul, by venturing into the most dangerous,
cutthroat, and oppressive arena of all. The arena of business. However, beneath the surface,
Recettear is also a social commentary on whether or not it's ethically
acceptable to hold a child financially responsible for her father's debt. Spoiler, in this world, yes, we absolutely can. Now, get to work. Story. The story is very simple. Recette has a father who took a huge loan from
the Rothschilds in order to finance his item shop, without first reading the fine
print or the terms and conditions. Realizing that he has no way of making repayment, he does what most absent fathers do. He heads out of town looking for
coke vanilla and is never seen again. Immediately after, a loan shark appears. As you figured out from the title, Tear is
the secondary companion in Recettear, and from day one has psychologically engineered
Recette into a state of Stockholm Syndrome, thinking that she is somehow friends
with her debt repayment supervisor, who is a fantastic,
genuine, and warm person, who is entirely ready to throw a child on the
street if she doesn't make those deadlines. But don't worry, there's a generous
amount of time to settle your debt. An entire calendar month. As such, you have an increasingly
high loan to repay each week, or you get evicted and die in poverty. Welcome to capitalism. Gameplay. Recettear is a high-speed simulation of a
capitalist dream or the capitalist nightmare. Depending on your personal
ability and, uh, genetic factors, for each day, you have a finite resource. It's called time, and there's
four blocks of time in each day. How you spend it is
pivotal to your success. Grabbing inventory from the
local merchants' guild takes a block. Opening the store for
business takes a block. Hiring some schmuck to steal
loot from the dungeon takes two. Also, he might not come back. Everything in Recettear is
measured risk and reward. Your only objective is to
pay off the damn loan shark. But you can approach that
objective in any way you see fit. Every day is completely randomized, and you can't
predict what happens next on the free market. The invisible hand of the free market
is told to you through news bulletins, which, to paraphrase, sound like this. "Valuable material prices have stabilized." "Weapon prices are up." "Oh, and also, there's a race
riot happening in the north." The news in this game is amazing. These bulletins take place every morning, but they can trigger any time and force
a rapid change in your sales strategy. Let's say a news report comes in that
the local harvest has failed completely. Food prices are up, and
people are getting desperate. How can we help? Well, we buy the remaining
food supplies, put them on display, and sell them back to the
people for a reasonable price. Of course, you can't put a price
on feeding your family, can you? But, uh, I can. 260% of the base value. Thank you for your business. You don't have an alternative. Other times, you can have a
complete lapse of judgment. Buying a commodity in bulk and selling
it in high numbers will crash the market. Prices hit rock bottom, and until they
correct, you better have a backup plan. Or, you're going to be evicted. The act of being a merchant in Recettear
is a very personalized experience. You put something on display,
you attract a certain kind of clientele. For example, a man haggles
much less than a woman. I can easily upmark his purchases
to 125% without a single complaint. But the moment I dare
charge a housewife 120%, she will immediately
haggle me down to 110, despite the fact that women have twice the
disposable income to spend compared to men. What did they mean by this? Honey, I had to purchase
this Buddha statue for 5,000 because it just fit
into the decor of our room. Yes, I know food prices have doubled. That's why I took your Freddo bar you were hiding
from me under the bed and sold it for 500. Small children are also equally baffling. They go into a bookstore, browse the
selection, and then ask me if I have any food. Each successful transaction results
in a tiny drop of merchant experience. This is worthless. The only way to level up is stringing together
as many transactions as physically possible, allowing you to become
a truly powerful merchant, until you become semi-successful,
and then this bitch shows up. She'll try to scam you with insane prices, and if you don't take it, she'll
break your entire combo. Euria? More like UREA, because
she's an incarnation of human waste. As your merchant levels increase, your options
expand and the game gets increasingly more complex. You can customize the appearance of
your store to attract different customers. You can expand the store
to hold more items on display. You can fuse dungeon items together for
less money, but exponentially more time. You can have customers sell you
their garbage for garbage prices. You can agree to take
advance orders from customers. Only to forget about it until they
come screaming the next day. You can even automate the whole process by
replacing your entire store with vending machines, eliminating unnecessary human contact, and
streamlining the process of hands exchanging money. Who needs social distancing when our
employees are unpaid, unfeeling golems, whose only purpose is to serve
you watermelon at competitive prices? Now, it is traditionally believed that you
can't finish this game by staying in town. Bullshit. I finished the game in two days of
play, and I didn't even need the dungeon. All I needed was some interior decoration. Turns out, the best customer
is your own business rival, because holy shit, she buys everything for 150%. Alouette, you are my MVP. For everyone else, you might
have to go into the dungeon. My condolences, because
the dungeon is not very good. You go inside, kill monsters, and open chests. Very often, they don't contain items. They contain something to fuck
you over in a variety of different ways. Each time you get hit, your
main character screams. This happens often, so get used to it. Often, you'll stay in a dungeon
until you find something of value, to justify spending your
time in this godawful place, which is filled with all manner of
fantasy creatures we know and love, such as vegetable, animal,
and of course, tentacle. I fucking hate the dungeon. But it's the only place where ingredients
drop, and you need these to make fusion items. Some examples are toothpicks, cotton balls,
and bat wings, which can be used to make soup. Honestly, anything you encounter
down here is not dangerous. They're benign and completely harmless. Imagine robbing the elderly. You wouldn't call them monsters, would you? They're more like walking loot dispensers. Yeah, just cut this part of the script ou- Once you get their business
card, the adventurers do get better. The dungeon, however, does not. It is the same randomly generated
grid, copy-pasted several hundred times. But Sseth, there's boss fights. Correct. They take about the same
amount of time to kill as vegetables. I implore you, become
a better merchant today. If not for the love of money,
then from the deep existential fear, of having to go through the equivalent of
Dante's Inferno and the Nine Circles of Hell just to come back with
a fucking back scratcher. Recettear is a very charming little title,
and it's quite different from the rest. I find the act of shilling
endlessly to be very relaxing. And I think you will too. Even when you finish the main
story, there's still more content. It's not much, but Endless Mode lets you experience
everything you missed without time constraints. There's a lot of little side stories. Yes, they are wholesome and endearing. But, uh, I'm just here for the money. Also, don't stay on the main menu
or your ears are going to bleed. If you're a masochist, you can play
the Dante Must Die difficulty mode, Survival Hell, where
the debt never truly ends. It only keeps increasing
until you're financially crushed. Oh, and also, all your progress is gone. Good luck. I give Recettear a 10 out of 10 years ago,
back when this game was still relevant. I still play it sometimes to relive my
ancestry, so I thoroughly recommend it. Unfortunately, the game never goes on sale. Correction, the game is currently on sale. And 15 bucks for something older than the
average Pyrocynical subscriber is unreasonable. Thus, I strongly encourage you to use a
VPN and buy the game in Argentinian pesos, which converts roughly
to about three dollars. Also, I'm proud to announce that I'll be
streaming on dlive for the next month. How? Why? Because the Trump of cryptocurrency
has bought out the platform, and he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. That's four streams of two hours, once a
week, each Saturday, at the following times. Come and hang out. It'll be fun. We are literally the second
biggest stream besides PewDiePie, because we actually have a script. As always, more content
to come, so stay tuned. A warm thanks to the many
members of the Merchants Guild, generously funding and
bankrolling these videos. This one, however, is completely free. You're all truly wonderful. Have a good one.
