.: Frequently Asked Questions :.

Q. What type of game is this?
A. Recettear is a combination of shop keeping and dungeon exploration. The main part of the game revolves around managing a general item shop to make money. Dungeon exploration acts as a supplement to making money by allowing the player a chance to acquires items in batches.

Q. Is this game for casual or hardcore gamers?
A. Recettear is a pretty addictive game and it's pretty easy to get in to, so I would say at least for the beginning, it plays well as a game for casual gamers. The challenge really begins during the Ruins of Lapis lazuli (or week 5, if you go by shop-keeping challenges) where enemies need to be struck over and over and over before they go down. I only recommend going through the Crystal of Nightmare for hardcore gamers, i.e. the people who are willing to invest an extra X hours just to go through more of the same.

Q. I played for hours and when I quit, my progress wasn't saved. Isn't there an auto-save option?
A. EGS' games all (at least, to date) require the player to manually save their own progress with the save option found in the in-game menu. While this is rather unfortunate, as you lose data that wasn't saved, it is actually beneficial to be able to save the game manually. Players can exploit this feature by testing to see how well sales / dungeon exploration goes.

Q. I was playing this game with a friend. How come my / his/her data didn't get saved? We both used the save option.
A. Unfortunately, up to Recettear, EGS has been using a saving system that only uses a single file. This is to track the data collected from all save slots. Although it's easier to work with on the programmer's side (i.e. check a single file for all the items that have been found), it's problematic for players. For example, only one person can be playing any one slot at a given time if they intend to save. Players cannot collaborate efficiently by passing along the data from a single slot. Perhaps it's for such reasons that EGS chose to use a single file.

Q. What's the maximum level an adventurer can achieve?
A. All adventurers can go as high as level 99.

Q. How come the experience bar still fills at level 99?
A. When an adventurer levels up, they get an instant refill of their HP and MP. However, previously, when an adventurer reached level 99, their experience bar would fill completely and it would simply sit there. Essentially, this meant that at level 99, you would have to rely on items (and skills) to replenish lost HP and MP. This would likely have caused many players to try to stick to lower levels to take advantage of the automatic recovery.

Q. Why can only certain adventurers run?
A. This is essentially part of a balancing system that EGS used to try to make adventurers supposedly all equally useful in there own way. In my opinion, some of the adventurers are rigged in a way that you'd only want to use a select few in any given situation. You can read up more about how each adventurer ranks in their respective pages.

Q. How come some adventurers get so many skills and some learn so few?
A. Just like the last question, it's more or less EGS' method of balancing the adventurers.

Q. What's the difference between version 1.0x and version 1.1x?
A. A fairly detailed answer can be found in the changelog.

Q. How does version 1.1x affect gameplay?
A. Unfortunately, version 1.1x affects gameplay quite a lot. Items that were easy to come by have become much more rare (most need to be found in the dungeons), while some items that were near-impossible to find have generally gotten easier to find. Enemy levels now span a much broader range of numbers, which makes later parts of the game a pain to get through (you'll likely find yourself looking for the exit more often than making an attempt to clear a floor). The effects of items have changed greatly (many have been introduced with additional stat changes). The vast addition of items adds to the number of hours of gameplay required to "complete" the game, but players may find the routines of finding these items to be dull and tedious over time.

Q. Who's the girl that appears in a box at the beginning of week 2?
A. That's Alouette, who claims to be your rival. Despite being your supposed "rival", she doesn't actually do anything that would obstruct you from managing your shop. She'll drop by once in a while (depending on your shop's environment) and buy/sell items. In a rather implicit way, EGS uses Alouette to express the "dumb blonde" stereotype, as she doesn't understand value very well (i.e. you can sell items to her at a much higher percentage than most customers).

Q. Who's this girl that keeps trying to buy/sell items at ridiculous prices?
A. That would be Euria. Aside from breaking your Just Combos, she doesn't really play much of a role in the game.