What does it mean for an RPG to be a "role playing game"?
The core concept largely stems from Dungeons & Dragons, where the most stereotypical vision of role playing would be some nerd overacting their part as a level 10 Paladin in a campaign. In the gaming sphere, the concepts and systems from D&D and other tabletop games have branched out into everything from Disco Elysium to Paper Mario, to the point where the title of RPG feels more like an admission that there's not a better blanket term for all these games. In the midst of that, some RPGs, such as the aforementioned Mario ones, don't offer that interesting of a role to play. The relationship between player and character gets boiled down to me pressing the buttons to make the gameplay happen while the characters experience a plot for me to observe from on high. I'm not particularly invested in the weekly struggle of the Mushroom Kingdom while figuring out attack tells, you know?

Recettear manages to bridge that gap and provide a role that feels easy to project onto. While the eponymous Recette is tasked with paying off her father's debt by running an item shop, every minute detail in that process comes down to your own decisions. Between whatever price you haggle to, how you stock your store, or maintaining a proper store atmosphere, managing each bit of the shop makes it feel more and more like your own. Thus, the fourth wall between player and protagonist melts away. I just found it really easy to act out the role of the little shopkeep while deciding what I needed to stock based off trends or thinking about how unfortunate it is that small children don't have more disposable income.

A lot of this fine control wouldn't matter without some outside reason to care, and as such this game places weekly debts for you to clear. This pressure really forces you to optimize every day to its fullest possible profit, which provides the emotional investment needed to make each bit of the game feel relevant. The art of finding just the right price to coax the most cash possible out of people just doesn't come as easily without a real threat for failing to put up the dough. Even writing this sentence reminds me of the used car sales-anime girl energy that the game gives to both the character and the player, all thanks to having a goal that can be terrifyingly high at first glance.

While the bulk of this game is this shop management side, there's a bit of dungeon exploration too in order to get some rarer supplies. It plays in a more real time version of mystery dungeon type games, both in map generation and how it generally goes in one ear and out the other without much incident. Although it's on the passable but bland side, that's probably to the benefit of the core fantasy of running a shop. The action of the dungeon is hardly relevant to one's finances, I suppose, and generally you would prefer to keep the shop open for longer. As is, it works as a decent pacebreaker that doesn't cannibalize the rest of the game, and the variety of adventurers you get to hire and their playstyles keeps it a bit more fresh than it probably should be.

Overall, Recettear manages to hit on a really specific and interesting idea for a game, and uses it to craft a pretty convincing role to play in this little world. The tactile nature of the shop combined with the everlooming need to maximize profits makes the experiencing of running this shop so engrossing. It's a charming RPG that brings a lot to the table with simple gameplay layered with some pretty unique ideas.