Overview
Developed by a doujin group called EasyGameStation, Recettear was sold on December 2007 in Comiket 73 as a Windows PC game. The game was later localized by Carpe Fulgar, a development team consist of two people: Andrew Dice and Robin Light-Williams. The English version was released as a digital game on September 10 2010 and is currently distributed in Steam, GamersGate, and Impulse. Recettear is also the first independently-made Japanese game to be distributed in Steam.
Development
Carpe Fulgur was formed by Andrew Dice and Robin Light-Williams to help bring Japanese doujin games over to the English-speaking audience. In an interview, Andrew said that it was his dream to localize Japanese games after hearing about Ted Woolsey, a famous translator who localized Squaresoft(now Square-Eniz) games such as Final Fantasy IV, V, VI and Chrono Trigger in the 1990's. After spending 8 months in translating the game, Carpe Fulgar released the game on Steam, GamersGate, and Impulse and expected at most 10000 copies to be sold in six months.
Within a month, Recettear sold 26,000 copies and was well received by gamers and critics, obtaining a score of 82 in Metacritic. As its repuatation grew, the game has sold a total of 170000 copies by this year. Following Recettear's success, Carpe Fulgar became fully committed in localizing other Japanese doujin games for the West.
Capitalism, ho!
Recette Lemongrass lives a normal live in Pensee as her father went on to become an adventurer but mysteriously disappeared. Things got worse when a fairy name Tear came to represent Terme Finance and explained that Recette's father has left a huge debt after taking loan from Terme. Seeing that Recette is unable to pay, Tear suggested to convert her house into an item store and become a merchant in order to pay off the debt. Thus begins a tale of how Recette became a merchant with Tear's help in her shop "Recettear", a portmanteau of both their names.
