Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale (ルセッティアRECETTEAR〜アイテム屋さんのはじめ方〜, Rusettia – Aitemu-ya-san no Hajimekata; Recettear: How to Start an Item Shop) is a role-playing game developed by Japanese dōjin maker EasyGameStation for the Windows operating system. The game follows a young girl named Recette, who is charged by the fairy Tear to run an item shop out of her house to pay off the considerable debt her father had accumulated before his mysterious disappearance; the eponymous shop is a portmanteau of the lead characters' names. In the game, the player controls Recette in several areas of gameplay, including bargaining and haggling with clients for goods, and accompanying an adventurer into randomly generated dungeons to acquire goods to sell, with the goal of paying back the debt within a fixed deadline. The game, first released in 2007 at the 73rd Comiket in Japan, has been localized into English by indie localization company Carpe Fulgur and was released internationally on September 10, 2010 exclusively via digital distribution platforms. Recettear is the first independently made Japanese game to be distributed through Steam. Though Carpe Fulgur only expected about 10,000 sales of the title in Western markets, the game was warmly received by critics and its reputation spread through word-of-mouth, leading to over 300,000 sales by September 2013. The game had sold over 500,000 units on Steam as of July 2017. Recettear's success allowed Carpe Fulgur to look towards other dōjin titles to localize, as well as helped pave the way for more dōjin games to reach international markets. A remaster of the game is set for Japanese release in 2025.