More Thoughts From Me #63: Building A Better Item Shop

Circle Entertainment brings some of the best Japanese rpgs to the 3DS eshop. I’m a huge fan of the publisher and I’m always to excited to see what game they’ll bring to the eshop next. Recently, I won a contest of twitter that Circle held. I received a collection of digital games from the publisher that I had never played before. I liked all of them, but the game that truly stood out to me was Kingdom’s Item Shop. I love Sim games and this is a fun one. Let me tell you more about it.

Kingdom Item Shop for the 3DS is a sim game, but it has a dash of rpg to it too. In order to get supplies for your shop, you have to hire adventurers and go with them on missions to defeat monsters. The monsters are pretty simple and straight forward, so is the battle system, but its neat to see your heroes defeat the increasingly hard monsters and get supplies out of each mission.

The actual running of the Item shop is pretty addictive. You have to put things up for sell, meanwhile making sure you have enough supplies, go to other shops to create even better things to stock, and even take specialty orders from clients too. There is so much to do in this game! And best of all, you can put items up for sell, quit the game, and when you come back you’ll have a bunch of money waiting for you. Yes, the game continues selling stuff even when you are not playing! Of course, Kingdom Item Shop isn’t for everyone.

There’s a lot to keep track of in Kingdom Item Shop. How much you spend, how much you are making (there are goals to meet), how much supplies you have, etc. Not everyone will enjoy the micro-mangement of the Item Shop. Also, at times, the game can feel a bit repetitive. Kingdom Item Shop is best enjoyed in small doses. It should also be noted that the game has touch screen and button support. I found the touch screen support to be a bit wonky at times. When creating items, sometimes you accidently put in more items than you want. The touch screen works well for picking up money and navigating most of the menus though. Overall, I’d say its best to stick to the button controls on this game.

Kingdom’s Item Shop, despite any flaws it has, is a really fun game though. I’m enjoying the game a lot!

Have you played Kingdom’s Item Shop? What do you think of it? Let us know in the comments!

Next week: There’s going to be another Tomb Raider movie! Do we need another one? Next week, I take a look back at what I barely remember about the first movie, what I know about the new one, and give you my opinion on whether a new movie is a good idea.

More Thoughts From Me is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed here are mine and mine alone. I wonder how my shop is doing right now…