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Thoughts on Chantelise so far:

Okay, elephant in the room first -- Chantelise is not Recettear 2. It's not even Recettear 1/2, which is what it would be since it came out first. The enemies are similar, the high-speed dungeon fighting is semi-similar, but in Chantelise dungeoneering is the primary goal of the game. It plays like a 3D Zelda game set to 4x speed, all slashslashslashDODGErunrunrun.

The Gimmick is that every dungeon... screen, room, whatever... has a treasure chest in it you can only get through doing esoteric things. You can trade your max HP for tips t-- no, there's no way anyone would do that. What you do is either trade for the tip and then reload your save, or just read a FAQ off the internet. Either way, get the treasures.

The story is fairly minimal. Elise is a young swordswoman. Her big sister, Chante, was turned into a fairy by magic. The two of them quest for a cure. You do this with sword and magic and really fast running around. You also interact with a shopkeeper, who is a knife-to-your-throat mercenary in spite of seeming like a very nice young woman. Y'see, every time you buy something at her store, the price roughly doubles. Every time you sell her an item, the money she pays you drops by about a third.

She sells the only way to get more HP in the entire game.

What's the hardest, most head-bashingly difficult thing to deal with in the entire game? (I never get to do this.) IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID.

...ahem.

Also, giant enemy crabs! One is the boss of the second level. This took me two days and a combined six hours -solely on that boss- to defeat. I feel all Game Center CX-y now.

They don't... MAKE games like this anymore, you know? Well... some people do. But this is an unabashedly arcade fast-paced dungeon crawl swordbasher. The RPG systems boil down to what pieces of equipment you use and how much you've been willing to fork out in sacrifice to the placidly-smiling helldemoness of commerce.

That said, it's getting really hard. May be a while on this game.