Bartering? Don't make me laugh, this is robbery!
Ok, let’s get the basic story down before we go into details of the game itself.You play Tingle, who wakes up one morning to realise that he’s a 35 year old bachelor with nothing going on in his life. Uncle Rupee appears to him and explains that if Tingle collects enough Rupees and throws them into the magic pool, Tingle can ascend to Rupeeland where all his dreams come true… food, money, girls, the lot.
To this end Tingle is suddenly dressed in a tight green body suit, given a red posing pouch and sent off into the world to collect Rupees to feed the pool. And frankly, after that inauspicious start, it goes downhill from there. You see, I can deal with Tingle being more camp than a Boy Scout Jamboree. I can even deal with the game giving me an over-abundance of groin thrusts from bridge repair men (yes, it’s true). But what I can’t deal with is a game that tries to shaft you all the time and even appears to have been coded just to annoy the crap out the player.
The basic tenet of Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland is to somehow collect enough Rupees to lob into the pool. As our ‘hero’ does this the pool, which you discover is actually on top of a tower, raises up higher and higher towards the fabled Rupee land. So your focus as Tingle is to grab all the Rupees you can.
You can do this in a number of ways. Questing in a dungeon is a big one and, should you beat the end of dungeon boss, you’ll be rewarded with a sizeable amount of Rupees. Less exciting and slower ways of generating cash are to battle monsters walking around the area and flog the bits they drop, or cook those bits up into other things and sell those. So dropped bones can be made into fireworks (don’t ask, they just can, ok?) or minced meat can be sold to the local chef.
Though the trading system in Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland works fine (it’d be hard to sod it up, really) it’s just about the only thing that works as you’d expect and if I’m honest, the rest of the entire game feels weighted against the player ever achieving anything.
For example, before you can even trade with anyone you have to pay them to open up shop. Ok, it’s a one off payment but when everyone in Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland wants paying… all the time and this soon becomes a major pain. But worse than this is the so-called ‘bartering’ system used to make payments or even, occasionally, ask for money from other characters.
Simply put, the bartering in Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland isn’t bartering at all. It’s you taking a wild guess at what someone else will accept and then waiting for them to either accept or turn you down. Not really a big problem if they say no though, is it? Well, yes, it is… because even if your offer is too low, they’ll still take the offered Rupees off you. So, offer up 20 Rupees for an empty jar, it gets refused and you still lose your 20 Rupees and will have nothing to show for it.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the game at least gave you a clue what prices to aim for but it doesn’t. In fact, in some places it’s bloody misleading. For example, in the first dungeon you come across, you’ll meet a great brute of a bloke who offers to be your bodyguard. He’ll accept 50 Rupees no problem. But on the very next level, a weaker bodyguard won’t accept anything less than 150 Rupees… with the guy running the shop pulling 20 Rupees commission off you for every offer you make whether the bodyguard accepts or not.
And to really rub it in, guess how your health is measured? In Rupees. So, blow 20 Rupees a time trying to hire a weaker bodyguard, as I did, and that bloke has now cost me 150 Rupees, plus another 100 Rupees in commissions and now I have 12 Rupees left… hardly enough to survive one fight… And I thought High Street banks were a bunch of thieves!
