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!

osu! is a free rhythm game for the PC that is somewhat in the style of DDR except with clicking.

I discovered this game after watching a Starcraft II stream where the player was warming up with osu! before playing his matches.

There is a built-in editor that allows you to create your own beatmaps, which has resulted in a large selection of user-generated content. Plus, there are online rankings and even multiplayer mode!

I’m pretty impressed so far with what I’ve seen, and it looks like this game will last me quite a while considering that normal difficulty is challenging enough already.

After playing the StarCraft II Beta for a while, it still holds up as a solid successor to the original StarCraft.

Battle.net has been completely revamped with Achievements added in and a ladder/match-making system similar to that of World of Warcraft Arena.

New teams play 5 placement matches that will land you in a league ranging from Copper to Platinum. I love this new system since it saves me the trouble of finding matches against players of around equal skill level. You can still play private matches against friends, but those aren’t ranked.

My only gripe with the new Battle.net is that you invite your friends to a “party” and you get a tab that pops up into a small chatbox. I miss having the channels in the old Battle.net where large groups of people could meet up.

As for the game itself, it’s mostly the original StarCraft with updated graphics similar to WarCraft III. There are of course new units, abilities, and structures, but the core gameplay remains largely the same. The pace of the game feels quicker with units and buildings being destroyed more easily.

Protoss is my race of choice, and I must say that Void Rays are amazing. They’re basically flying glass cannons that annihilate buildings in a blink of an eye, but can easily be destroyed itself. I haven’t played Zerg or Terran much since I was mainly a Protoss player in SC1, but I’ll still give them a try.

Look at how long StarCraft has lasted. StarCraft II will be played for many years to come, making this a definite purchase for me. I can’t wait to do some 4v4 matches with my friends!

What can I say? There was a plethora of good games released this month.

• Final Fantasy XIII (PS3)
• Final Fantasy XIII Limited Edition Strategy Guide
• Final Fantasy XIII OST
  
• God of War III: Ultimate Edition (PS3)
  
• Battlefield Bad Company 2 (PC)

FFXIII is the shiniest gem out of all the March releases. Graphics are so amazing that it’s hard to tell the FMV sequences apart from the in-game graphics, and the combat system is innovative and actually gets fun deeper into the game. Some people might complain about the linear plot and endless sprawl of dungeon maps, but it’s really not that bad. I actually prefer the way the maps are structured and that there’s only one ending. Well, I’ll share my thoughts in an actual post focused on FFXIII later on.

Moving along, the FFXIII Limited Edition Strategy Guide is one out of a total of 210,000 printed. Mine is numbered 103,100 and worth every dollar I paid. As for the OST, I haven’t had a chance to listen to all of it yet, but what I heard so far was superb. Figure Haven will actually be carrying a few copies once I update the store with the new inventory we received. Square Enix decided to drop the price of the OST from $49.99 to $34.99 since they were pleased with FFXIII‘s reception in North America. We’ll probably offer it for $29.99 or something, but I digress.

Ah yes, the God of War III: Ultimate Edition. It naturally comes with the game, an art book, and a replica of Pandora’s Box. Basically you pay extra for a rather realistic-looking, but plastic box. I was surprised at the size and how it looks to be made of metal, but you realize it’s simply plastic once you touch it.

Then finally I got Bad Company 2 for the PC after reading great reviews about it and watching gameplay videos on Youtube. Fully destructible terrain? Sounds perfect to me.

Now I just need to find time for all this. FFXIII takes priority of course.

I picked up Dragon Age: Origins for the PC during Black Friday and finally got around to playing it for a few hours tonight.

This game feels very similar to Neverwinter Nights and in some regards is WoW-like – especially when using WASD movement. My main character is an Elven Mage: I always choose to play the magic classes if possible.

The main storyline seems a bit stereotypical but that does not take away from the game. I have been a fan of BioWare games since Baldur’s Gate, and this is no exception.

I am looking forward to spending 100+ hours or whatever is needed to fully complete the game, and then messing around with the toolkit that allows users to create their own content.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 just last Tuesday on 11/10.

I bought it for the PS3 and had the pleasure of recently beating the single player campaign.

Epic story, epic gameplay, epic graphics. The most amazing FPS game I’ve played to date.

My only complaint is that the campaign felt too short; I want more!

Be sure to get the console version if possible since I heard that the PC version doesn’t have dedicated server support for multiplayer.

Subterranean Animism is the eleventh Touhou Project game. The games are mostly made by a person called ZUN, who does all the graphics, music, and programming. Quite an impressive feat for one person to create this game AND compose catchy music. The Touhou Project games are bullet hell shooters, a concept that can be most easily explained by watching the video below.

The character being played in the video is Reimu. When I first started playing this, I mostly used Marisa but now I use the same Reimu shown in the video. However, I am nowhere near as good and I only just recently beat it on Easy mode. =/

It runs on Windows and is a fun game to distract yourself with when you need a short break or you’re waiting for an anime episode to finish downloading, which are the times when I occasionally play it.

Image Source: pixiv

At this year’s E3 Expo, Square Enix unveiled their new upcoming MMORPG scheduled for release in 2010 for the PS3/PC with new video footage that can be seen below.

Although the trailer looks great, it seems to be mostly or completely comprised of pre-rendered CGI which prevents me from seeing how the game is really like. As I used to be an avid player of MMOs (Ragnarok Online, World of Warcraft, Lineage II, Aion, etc.), this looks really interesting. I never actually played Final Fantasy XI, but I heard from a friend it was pretty good except that you had to have a party for almost everything. FFXIV seems to be going along the same route considering the same team that made FFXI is also working on this.

Another reason that I would be on the lookout for this is because Final Fantasy type lore definitely appeals more to me than the Warcraft lore did, but that’s just personal preference. I also hope that leveling won’t be too much of a grind unlike my higher level experiences playing the official Chinese Aion servers (I’ll post about that in the future). Square Enix has been working on this since it was first announced as codename Rapture back in August 2005, so hopefully we’ll be seeing lots more ingame footage soon.