Recettear!

Recettear (2007 Japan, 2010 North America)
I wonder if those two would still be smiling the way they are if I hit the submit button.

This is a charming Japanese indie game that I started playing over the Christmas break. The dungeon crawls look and play like The Secret of Mana from SNES with the tortuous addition of the FF12 XP chaining system. The town consists of maybe 6 locations, one of which is your store. 15 hours in, I had completed the store owner's compulsory story line, but as it turns out, that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Another 30 hours later, I had collected all the characters, completed all the dungeons, exceeded the last merchant skill threshold level (level 50) and I was still only like 60 something percent done with the game according to the save file. Sigh. I'm supposed to farm the last dungeon over and over for crafting materials? I dunno ... anyways, for such a simple seeming game, I spent an extraordinary amount of time on it. For comparison's sake, I recently finished Mass Effect 2 (and achieved a full level 30 character) in nearly the same amount of time. I wouldn't call this game good necessarily, but it's not bad in an OCD inventory managing, credit micromanaging way.

I had fun at first, but the last 10 hours or so of grinding seemed really sad considering I really wanted to play FIFA 11 or Starcraft 2 instead.

kenholic rating: 6.0^(1/n), where n is every 15th hour spent on the game.
Thus: 6.0 the first 15 hours, 3.0 the 15-30th hours, and 2.0 the 30-45th hours.

I bet you didn't even know ratings could work like that. Well I didn't either, I just came up with it on the spot.