Review - Final Profit A Shop RPG
(Originally posted November 25, 2023)
I saw a bit of buzz about this going around on some website called, uh... cohost.org. It's not terribly expensive and seems to be a mostly single-dev effort, so I gave it a go and had a decent enough time with it.
Final Profit is a game made in RPG Maker in the broad lineage of Recettear and the like. You play as Queen Mab of the fey, who - when confronted by the encroaching economic power of the intensely corrupt Bureau of Business - decides that the only way to stop them is to go incognito, climb the corporate ladder, and beat them at their own game. (Because, you know, that always works when it comes to capitalism.)
As the newly christened Madama Biz, you start with a tiny shop in a backwater village; work your way up to an emporium in the big city; and eventually get yourself a holdings office on Fake Wall Street where you trade commodities, buy real estate, and speculate on stocks. All for the sake of making profit stopping those vile business types.
Despite its engine, there's no direct combat in Final Profit (though there's certainly violence); your experience points are directly tied to your overall revenue. Thus, rather than by tough monsters or bosses, game progression is gated directly by your level in the early game and eventually by simply how much money you have to throw around regardless of your level. In fact, a late-game NPC will even let you trade out your EXP stores for a certain benefit that I won't spoil.
You do still want to level up, because it increases your HP and MP, of which you're going to need plenty. Various quests around the game world require you to cough up one or the other, and you often need to spend obscene amounts of mana just to stock up your warehouse or activate an upgrade. Queen Mab regenerates mana slowly over time, but you can also charge it up instantly by drinking alcohol (adding to your Alcoholism stat), easily purchasable in bulk from your nearby tavern.
So, like all clicker/idle games (and make no mistake, despite the overworld and sidequests, this is absolutely a clicker game), the game settles into a rhythm of switching between a few game flavors:
- Managing your shop and accumulating money
- Discovering new products that give you more efficient profit
- Spending your money on incremental upgrades to your income stream
- Repeat: Eventually you hit the next "tier" of total assets, where you must then effectively start from zero but with a new selection of much more profitable ventures.
Other than the inherent dopamine hit of "number go up", these kinds of games rely heavily on the curiosity value of seeing what kind of silly upgrade will appear next. Final Profit delivers on this by having a decent cast and story to keep you invested. It's nothing amazing, but the tone is whimsical and irreverent without edging into being twee about it (usually). It's willing to tell a bunch of dumb jokes, but when something relatively serious is happening, the storytelling treats those moments respectfully and doesn't undercut itself.
My favorite part of the game by far is the middle chapter where you're trying to build up your emporium. The game keeps new products, quests to improve your current products, quests to recruit new customers, and wacky side adventures coming at a solid pace, along with a looming debt goal to keep you on track. I had a good chuckle the first time I brought the Artist through the shortcut dimension or encountered a certain avian character.
(Aside: I do have to shout out the mini-chapter with an investigation that takes place entirely on a train moving from one city to the other, which is one of my weird pet favorite tropes ever since I played Paper Mario 2)
As for the main narrative, it's mostly about whether or not Madama Biz can actually participate in capitalism without succumbing to its worst impulses. Nearly every choice in the game boils down to either doing something that's morally good but negatively impacts your profit margin, or something that's morally negligent-to-actively-evil for the sake of bigger gains. This is mostly in favor of letting the game proffer its core fantasy of letting you be a good capitalist, and I'm a bit torn on how it all shakes out.
Like, okay, we all know that moral choice systems are often bullshit. Possibly the most infamous example that highlights my point is Bioshock, where you could either kill children for more magic currency or spare them for warm-and-fuzzies but a smaller reward... except you would get special care packages after certain spare thresholds demonstrably better than if you just killed all of them. Thus, it's a non-choice.
I tried to be Nice at every possible opportunity in Final Profit, and you know what? It did affect my profit margins. The game was very clear that, for example, I could either stock a product for 128g apiece or accept a favorable discount for 100g apiece that might negatively affect the supplier down the line. By the time you hit the next "tier", this difference might as well be negligible, but it's nothing to sneeze at in the moment. The problem is it eventually starts to feel like you're just making things take longer for the sake of not seeing a sad face in the dialogue window, and boy do things start to take a long time.
I'm a little too aware of my ADHD brain now to get as taken in by clicker/idle games as I once was. If you give me two dozen upgrades that will each take a good 15-20 minutes to save up for and will each improve my income by like 1-10%, then fuck it. I will open Cheat Engine or a save editor and crank up my money or product stock to avoid having to wait around spinning plates indefinitely. So sue me.
Getting back on track, there's some of that ol' ludonarrative dissonance or what have you going on. You're fundamentally participating in capital in order to defeat capital. While nationalization and sustainability and fair trade are always presented as the "good" options, the question of The Economy At Large starts to loom in the back. Money might as well appear from and disappear into a black hole; does the Bureau mint the coins and distribute the currency? Like, if you have the cash to pay for it, most product stock is infinite. You can purchase property, but from whom? Previous owners are listed, but they appear to lack the ability to refuse your offer (because they don't have the Property Vision spell, I guess), simply grumbling and paying their rent every tick. All salable products grow in sale price as you sell more of them, when it should be the opposite if you're flooding the market.
I get it. It's a video game. You gotta have progression somehow. I wouldn't think about it too hard if the game itself didn't gesture towards these things, though.
(aside: I thought about it a little more and regarding that last point, every product is actually consumable or addictive in some way that justifies it not oversaturating the market, so that's to the game's credit [but dang it sure makes your entire mission even more inherently unethical])
I hear there's actually quite a bit of story and ending mutability depending on your specific choices as well as NG+ content, but for now I think I'm satisfied with Final Profit. It's got fairly novel gameplay, some clever and funny writing, and plenty of optional completionist tasks if those are your kind of thing. It's a great example of the kinds of things possible with a tool like RPG Maker (you know, besides indie horror games).
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