Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Well, hopefully. While I’m always of a mind that all games should be available on all possible digital distribution wotsits, it’s hard to deny that getting the nod from Steam is good news for an indie title. And so is now the case for the lovely Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale – the translation of a gloriously bonkers Japanese game about playing as the owner of an RPG loot store. Translators/re-publishers Carpe Fulgur had previously secured an Impulse release but struggled to attract other attention. Yesterday they confirmed the golden handshake from both Steam and the august GamersGate. Both are also offering 10% off preorders. You’ve done the Right Thing, men. Details and videos and quotes and a made-up word are below.
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Cast your mind back. Back! Back to the distant, murky, forgotten times of July 19-22nd 2010. Life was so much different then. We could have been anything that we wanted to be.

We were also talking excitedly about Recettear, the Japanese indie game that had you playing the owner of a cheerfully stereotypical RPG shop. All we had to go on was a demo. Now, we have a place in time in sight for the full version. Ho!
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The demo of Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is one of the best things I’ve played in a while. A Japanese indie game pitching an RPG shopkeeper as the star… well, you can read all that in the last post. Given the slightly unusual nature of the project – it’s only available here thanks to a third-party translation company- I thought I’d chat to said translators about the why, how, who and what next. Interesting stuff – there’s this whole vein of (slick) indie gaming that we otherwise hear nothing about. Take it away, Carpe Fulgur’s Andrew Dice.

Why set up a business translating Japanese indie games? Love, profit, bit of both?

A bit of both, really. Should Carpe Fulgur prove very successful we do hope to take it beyond “just” indie stuff, although the Japanese indie scene is mournfully overlooked. There is a lot of what might be termed “naughty” content being produced by the Japanese indie scene, but it’s also where some of Japan’s future best and brightest are starting to make their mark and it’s almost criminal that localizers on this side of the pond won’t even give them a first look.
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I really, really like this. Even though it arguably gets its core gag absolutely wrong. It’s the old pun about why RPG shops are happy to repeatedly buy and sell the same old crap to the same old heroes writ large, as a rather funny and monstrously compulsive strategy-RPG hybrid. The fact there’s an RPG in that… well, that’s what it gets wrong. The RPG shopkeeper gag is that they don’t know what the hell they’re buying, what animal arse it’s been pulled from or why the guy selling it is covered in bits of town guard. When the shopkeeper’s part of the adventure, they’re no longer the naive/mercenary money-grabber we’ve encountered in a thousand different games.

I still really, really like this. I played the (fairly long) demo through twice. Can’t remember the last time I did that.
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