Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is an indie jRPG made by EasyGameStation and recently localized by Carpe Fulgar.

It was released on Steam for $19.99 and has made decent sales while picking up good reviews. So I went and played the demo, and then promptly bought a copy on Steam afterward.

The premise behind Recettear is that your father has disappeared, leaving you with a massive debt to pay. You play as Recette, a little girl who pairs up with a debt collector fairy to open up an item shop in order to pay off her father’s debt.

Everything has been translated into English while keeping the original Japanese voices. There are numerous amusing cutscenes, dungeons to clear for loot, and sales to be made. Buy low, sell high, and profit!

Each boss at the end of a dungeon has a different mechanic to it, making the fights innovative and fun.

The normal game (paying off all your debt) took me around 6-7 hours to beat, which then unlocks the survival and endless modes. Survival mode is trying to pay off increasing debt every week while endless mode has no debt left and you’re free to do whatever.

This game is really addictive because you want to keep playing to increase your fortune, raise your merchant level, improve your store, clear all the dungeons, and get all the characters/cutscenes. Plus, you get to rip off townsfolk with a greater than 200% markup of the base price on an item.

For $20, Recettear is definitely worth it. It was an interesting experience playing as an item shop owner since we usually never think about those item shop NPCs when we play RPGs. Hopefully, Carpe Fulgar will be bringing over more indie jRPGs for us to play!

Saw a link for this Japanese Lisp manga over at reddit and decided to go check it out.

Highly amusing concept considering that Scheme (a dialect of Lisp) is essentially the first computer programming language we were required to learn at UC Berkeley in CS61A.

One of the comments on reddit translates the character descriptions:

• Riko-san: the god of lazy bums who hang out in the Ikeda-city electronics stores.

• Suzu: famous in his area for being that guy who caught the alligator in in the swamp

• Wakana: SFC mario kart, able to complete some course in 1.56min flat

• Rikka: loves tofu, never thinks about anything but tofu.

• Mirin: a local cat. until recently often confused the concept of ‘macros’ with ‘maguro’ (maguro is Japanese for tuna)

• kuda- (i guess this explains the above): a vehicle that uses/travels the right side of the road (vehicles in japan drive on the left side)

• aya: a small animal. shes not very bright.

Needless to say, those are some epic characters.

Image Source:  マンガで分かるLisp

I decided to learn Japanese a while ago, but never really got around to doing so. Then I heard that the Genki books were pretty good for those aspiring to learn the language, which resulted in my purchasing of them.

I got the Textbook 1, Workbook 1, Answer Key, and Student CD 1. The latter two items were added on since I would be self-learning it and they seemed useful.

An insert in the textbook says going through the material should take roughly 200 hours for the 23 lessons. Seems like I have to somehow make time to go through a lesson a week.

So when I was in high school, they didn’t offer Japanese courses at my school. This resulted in me continuing from my 1 year in Spanish courses in middle school to have taken a total of 4 years in Spanish (3 in high school). Then the school decides to expand its horizons and offer Japanese courses the year after I graduate. I still can’t believe it. At least I learned Spanish, although I would have preferred Japanese.

Anyways, anyone else learning or want to learn Japanese? It’s always useful to add more languages to your repertoire.

My brother the other day told me about a website called Translation Party.

You simply enter an English phrase, and it then translates it back and forth between English and Japanese until an equilibrium is found. The fun factor in this are the warped phrases you can get from the repeated translations.

Examples:

Reltair has no time to watch anime.

Anime is godly.

The translations are done with Google’s translation engine. Quite a neat concept, I should have thought of it!

What amusing/interesting translation parties can you get?

Image Source: pixiv