Now that we’re done with the main story of Recettear, it’s time to finish up in the dungeons. Just a note before we do so: I haven’t been using a walkthrough or anything like that for any of this playthrough and I don’t intend to start now, so I may well miss unlockable adventurers and that sort of thing, but I’m not going for full completion so I’m okay with that.
Let’s get to it!
I’m taking my main adventurer, Charme, back to the Amber Garden, where we first come up against a duo of Crowned Slimes who are only marginally more challenging than a single one.
The next boss we encounter is this young girl who’s crying and looking for her sister. Naturally, Recette wants to try to help her, though Tear’s wise enough to be a bit suspicious of a lone girl so deep in the dungeons.
She is, apparently, an elf, and an angry one at that. So we fight her!
I have to destroy her wall of boxes (while she shoots at me, I might add) to get to her, at which point she turns and runs off.
Rinse and repeat…
After three lots of box-breaking, she finally stops and we fight her. She has minions in the form of rock-throwing goats making it harder to avoid taking damage, plus she’s an archer herself so it’s extremely difficult to get close without getting hit.
A horde of Charmes finally brings her down!
Recette’s concerned that we might have actually hurt the poor kid; we bring her back to town, finding some medicine in a convenient chest.
Recette explains that this girl tried to fight us, so we kicked her butt. It’s understandable, I think. Elfy isn’t too upset about it, just being surprised and a bit flattered that we used the super-valuable elf medicine to help her feel better from all those wounds… that we gave her.
She was apparently in the dungeons with her big sister, but they got separated; when Tielle saw us, I guess ‘stranger danger’ kicked in and she decided the best thing to do was to… run away, throw a load of boxes at us, have some goats toss rocks in our direction and attempt to murder us with arrows. Reasonable enough.
I mean, the gold would have been nice, but Tear evidently didn’t get the memo that we’ve already paid off the debt and are now happily in Endless Mode.
Hmmmmmm. I sense lore! I really won’t be surprised if Tielle joins us as an adventurer at some point, but I hope it’s not prompted by her finding her sister dead somewhere or something.
The next day, Tielle’s well enough to go out looking for her sister. Recette lets her go with an apology for beating the heck out of her and an invitation to visit any time.
Just as Tielle scoots, Alouette pops into the store and tells us about a coup in a nearby kingdom, which Recette doesn’t care about at all, but apparently there’s a missing princess or something. I was wondering if it might be Tielle, but then Alouette mentions the kingdom being famous for its drink…
Oh, hi, Charme. I was just thinking about you.
We beat the boss rush for the Amber Garden, and on the way back we run into a demon in the town square, so… that happened. He drops some comments about fairies still being subservient, which seems to throw Tear off a bit, then he pretty much just bails. Guessing he’ll be a boss later on.
There aren’t any more available dungeons right now, so I guess I probably need to just go back to selling and visiting the different areas in town for a bit.
On hitting level 20, I can expand the store once again, making it absolutely enormous! I don’t even know if I’ll have enough stuff to fill these shelves! For fun, I decide to stick a second vending machine in there; I know I don’t need to be making money at all at this point, but I may as well keep it up while I’m waiting for the next dungeon to make itself apparent.
Tielle shows up and gives us her card! I’ll try her out, but going by past experience with new adventurers I may well just end up sticking with Charme.
What with only being able to shoot in a straight line, and needing to charge up to boot, Tielle’s kind of hard to get used to. She has some pretty sweet specials, though, including a multi-shot, homing arrows and a sort of arrow storm that hits most enemies on the screen.
Once I’m a bit more used to her, Tielle’s not bad at all. The ranged attacks are definitely a bonus, since she can do damage at a distance without using up SP and therefore doesn’t have to worry about getting hit too much. Good thing, too, because she can’t take too many hits. Y’know, I still think she might be worth investing in; if I can get the hang of using her, she might be a very handy adventurer indeed.
By the time I’ve taken her through the first ten floors of the Jade Way, I think I’m decided that I want her to be my main going forward. Her capacity to take out opponents at range while being a bit easier to handle than Caillou offsets her slowness, and her multi-shot abilities allow her to deal a ton of damage very quickly. Doesn’t hurt that she’s kind of adorable.
Demon Guy shows up again, ridiculing Tear further for integrating with the humans. I think he sees some sort of kinship in her as a fellow fey species, thinking of humans as below them. You can gather from some of Tear and Tielle’s flavour text elsewhere that the non-human races (so fairies, elves and demons, and probably more besides) don’t really like humans all that much, as a rule.
After a bit of exposition as to how humans turned fairies into a lower class designed to basically do humans’ admin work for them, it turns out that, nope; this guy actually does hate fairies too.
Well, that’s… really sad! I wonder whether we’ve met any of these humans-turned-fairies (doubt it, though, as Tear and Prime are the only two we know). Demon Dude goes on to talk about how he hates humans even more than fairies on account of the whole ‘we’re humans so we’re best’ mentality. Warning: dialogue slideshow in which Recette is adorable incoming.
Okay, this guy’s name is Griff. Griff the demon. It probably sounds more menacing in Japanese, but it just makes me think of Red vs. Blue, which isn’t intimidating at all. With a warning that the night is dangerous and we should go home, he’s off.
Tielle pops in the next day having received a letter from her sister, who’s… abandoned her and gone back to the elf village. Bit mean, if you ask me, but I guess elves must be a bit less familial. Anyway, Tielle decides to stay and keep trying all the sweets in town.
In the meantime, Euria’s working on pyramid schemes and that sort of thing. Griff pops into the store later on to… warn us?
I don’t get this guy’s deal! He’s a dick to Tear about being friendly with humans, but I think his warning to us to get out is meant at least semi-seriously… intriguing. Recette actually convinces him to buy something from us if we’re still around next time he’s in town, so I think he kinda likes us.
Louie pops in pretty quickly after Griff’s visit, going on about a big dungeon. Apparently there’s ‘something up with this one’.
Oh, Recette. Never change.
The entrance is apparently sealed, but just as we’re talking about it there’s a sudden earthquake. I think I’m going to have to check this place out…
He’s fine. I hope. Let’s check out this new dungeon…
Oh, shit. This isn’t ominous at all.
Okay, so the dungeon just opened for no apparent reason. That’s kind of peculiar, but let’s roll with it? I’m imagining Griff will show up as the boss here, but probably not for a good 40 floors or so.
Already there’s a new enemy, a weird little teleporting/invisibling wight thing that makes fireballs show up under my butt. My strategy with these is pretty much just to run past them. Too much trouble!
I do run into Nagi down here, though.
This fight was an absolute nightmare to get screenshots; everything was moving around so quickly. The boss turns invisible, little pumpkin things fly around, wights blink in and out of existence… it was all a bit intense. Somehow, though, I take that mother dooooown. I’m so badass.
I’m so caught up in my own awesomeness that I accidentally go to the next floor instead of heading back to town, so… I guess I’ll just have to press on!
If I’m having one problem adjusting to the Tielle playstyle, it’s that her attacks are slightly delayed because of the distance, which means that an enemy might have time to hit me between the arrow launching and hitting them. I am starting to find some decent treasure in the chests now, though, which is nice. Up until now, I’d been coming back with pretty much nothing worth selling.
The wandering jellyfish – who’s kind of terrifying – has a lashing tentacle attack and summons some wibbly-wobbly trees. His main body’s also pretty much invulnerable to everything on account of floating above the ground, so I have to try to hit the tentacles as they flimble around – believe me, hitting tentacles on the tip isn’t an easy task! I get through quite a lot of food trying to stay alive.
Tielle’s multi-shot comes through for me in the end; I’m seriously glad I was using her for this and not Charme, who’s quick enough to keep up with the tentacles but not without taking a lot of hits for relatively slim opportunities to deal damage back.
It’s back to town after the Electrojelly, to rest and come back tomorrow.
When we come back, we find that the next boss is a double Eyebat King. They are, if anything, even more annoying than a single one; they seem to have double the mooks, and Tielle’s not fast enough to be able to easily avoid their hard-hitting laser eye thingy. I basically have to resort to running around like a madman, firing off special attacks whenever I get the opportunity and hoping that they’ll hit something.
I’m legitimately not sure how I managed it this time, but we come back alive. It took a lot of food to keep Tielle from dying, though.
Elan pops into the store next time I open up. I think we’re probably fairly close to being able to have him as an adventurer, but I don’t know whether he’s likely to be any good or not.
Next time we venture into the Obsidian Tower, we run into Nagi, who’s apparently ‘on her way’ to the store. Somehow, I don’t fully believe it.
The boss is the Terran Golem, who summons little Easter Island head-like things that shoot very annoying streams of… something or other. This one turns into a bit of a damage race, because both the Golem and Tielle are hard hitters who are too slow to avoid the others’ attacks! Luckily, it’s a race I win.
The next day, when we open up, Recette and Tear seem absolutely shocked at something. They never thought they’d see the day, they say… and soon, I realise why.
SHE MADE IT.
She doesn’t join us this time, but she could still do. In the meantime, it’s back to the tower, where we’re powering through!
The next ‘boss’ is the ol’ gauntlet, in which I have to defeat every monster on the floor. On the plus side, I don’t know that I could have survived being stuck in a room with a boss; I’m in pretty bad shape. On the… other hand (mixed metaphors, but whatever), it’s fighting regular monsters that put me in this state in the first place!
EVERYTHING ON THIS FLOOR IS GREEN AND SCARY
Somehow, we make it through. Felt like everything on that gauntlet was actively seeking me out, but luckily it was a small floor.
On the thirtieth floor, we find…
Griff alludes to some sort of powerful magic thingumebob on the top floor, which Tear can sense but Recette can’t (because she’s not magical and has an itchy nose). With that, our demon pal decides it might be time to try killing us. Why he didn’t do it in the town square, where we weren’t functionally invincible, is beyond me.
…
Ah.
Y’know what, I think there’s going to have to be another post after this one. Come back next time, when I’ll have beaten Griff!
OverThinker Y 