My recent obsession with Recettear led me to watch a few Let's Play videos of it. It's fun to watch people's reactions to the quirky characters, but some observations, both good and bad, soon become apparent.
Warning: some spoilers about the game mechanics follow.
Mostly, it's that the tutorial and opening section is long. Really long. The game proper really starts on the morning of Day 2, and one Let's Play took over half an hour to get there. Granted, this "feels" longer when watching someone else, or when seeing it the second time, than when experiencing it "blind" for yourself. It also depends somewhat on how fast you read. Some of the length does come from extra little lines that add redundant flavor without adding critical gameplay information. This is a bit of a trade-off, because this flavor adds character-building information, which makes the tutorial entertaining. If the tutorial is going to be long anyway, a little extra length to make it funnier doesn't hurt much.
The second point is that some parts of the tutorial are actually not quite accurate, or withhold one critical, subtle point that impacts performance a lot. A lot of the game's difficulty stems from this.
One example is Tear's advice that most customers will be willing and able to pay 130% of the base price of an item. 130% is actually more of a soft upper limit than an average. Worse, Tear never gives any information regarding what the Pin and Near Pin bonuses signify, nor the customers' reputation and budget mechanics. The tactical consequence of this is that although it's best to charge customers more like 105%, especially near the beginning of the game, the only way to find this out without consulting outside resources is to actively go against Tear's advice. If you charge too much near the beginning, it's easy to haggle yourself into a corner: the only way to get enough money per transaction to pay off the debt is to deal in the expensive items, but you can't sell those items to customers who submit orders because their budgets only cover the cheap stuff. As orders come to represent more of your total business, and pleasing customers also starts to depend on having enough extra cash to buy the things they want to sell to you, the cycle becomes vicious.
Another is in how time advancement works when visiting town. The game phrases it thus: going to places in town takes "no time", but after one place has been visited, returning to the shop advances the clock. This is misleading because visiting that first place means the clock will advance by one either if you go back to the shop, or if you depart for a dungeon (which then consumes an additional two time units). It would be clearer for the game to display the first town visit as being the thing that advances the clock, rather than the end-of-town transition. One sees the effect of this when heading outside during the early evening: before visiting anywhere, the Adventurer's Guild is open, because you could go to a dungeon during the evening and night slots. But once another location has been visited, the Adventurer's Guild closes even though the clock does not seem to have moved, because now the evening slot has been taken by the town visit.
That said, there are many things the tutorial does well.
First, the tutorial really is useful for a first-time player. Recettear has a rather unique interface and core mechanic, so having a few "trial runs" goes a long way towards making new players feel comfortable. This counts extra when the action being simulated is setting and negotiating prices face-to-face. Americans don't generally do this in day-to-day shopping, so the idea can be a little intimidating.
Next, it integrates the tutorial with the game's plot. Recette is a newbie at running a shop, and has good reason to be, so it makes sense that Tear has to explain things to her at length. When Tear has to describe how to do things by "pressing buttons", it's duly lampshaded. This helps prevent the player from feeling like the game is "lecturing them"; it's Recette who's getting the lecture, and the player's just there to help her through it.
The third good thing is tied in with the overall game mechanics: new elements are introduced to the game gradually, and Tear offers mini-tutorials on new things only as they appear. This makes for a relatively gentle learning curve, but because many new elements are triggered by an increase in Merchant Level, a player who catches on fast can steepen it. Even the clock, which operates as normal during Day 2, isn't formally explained until the player has had almost a full day's worth of real play. This keeps it from front-loading the initial tutorial even more.
Finally, Recettear gets the order of operations right: it opens with the tutorial right at the beginning, and only afterwards does it flash back to the lengthy cutscene that explains the backstory. This gets the player Doing Things right off the bat, and gives them confidence that they can do those things well, while letting them hold onto and intensify their curiosity about why they're doing it. Satisfying that curiosity requires a respite from Doing Things, so once the backstory is established, they're eager--sometimes downright impatient--to start Day 2.
...oh, yes, there's one more thing. Every single dialogue cutscene in the game is skippable, including the tutorials. So if you don't want to sit through them at all, you don't have to. Though New Game+ resets the mini-tutorials triggered during gameplay, it at least skips the Day One infodump by starting you off on Day 2.
Ultimately, the tutorial holds up better in gameplay than it does in videos. A person filming their run for the purpose of posting it is going to be more impatient with tutorials than they would be otherwise--while feeling more obligated to move through them slowly so that viewers can follow along--and this further skews a passive viewer's perception. Overall, though, it's pretty effective, and the people most impatient with it are those who wouldn't have liked the game's aesthetic anyway.