We Buy Anything: Difference between revisions

In video games, regardless of a vendor NPC's specialization and location, they will never refuse to buy items from you. And they will never run out of money.

 

 

It is unknown how these vendors make a living; they can't profitably resell the things you sell to them, since [[Karl Marx Hates Your Guts|all the other vendors in the game usually pay the exact same prices for the same items]]. This especially applies to the vendors in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' that are unlucky enough to be the closest to the Auction House, bank or mailbox: nobody ever buys anything from them, but everyone uses them to dispose of their junk.

 

Compare with [[We Sell Everything]].

 

== [[Action Adventure]] ==

* ''[[Final Fantasy XII]]'' plays this straight to bizarre extremes. Your primary means of raising money is collecting and selling [[Vendor Trash]]. Any shopkeeper, including wandering merchants, will buy ''any'' of this (as well as any old equipment or extra items you wish to sell.) Keep in mind that the loot items you can sell range from innocuous stuff like wolf pelts and cactus fruit to things like meat that is so tainted that eating it condemns you to eternal damnation, or grimoires that give details on spells that could destroy the world.

** Shopkeepers also have unlimited gil to buy your stuff with, which leads to some really strange sequences - you can sell thousands and thousands of gil worth of loot to a guy who ostensibly doesn't have enough gil to pay for a river crossing. (You're exempt from this fee because in order to get the crossing to run you first help the villagers with a problem they're having, but it makes you wonder how much they normally charge...)

*** Kill enough of specific enemy types and the game actually gives you answers to that.

* Aside from [[We Sell Everything|selling every kind of weapon or armor the characters need]], Officer Kurosawa from ''[[Persona 3]]'' can ''buy'' anything they come across --particularly, the inexplicable equipment that appears in the inexplicable treasure chests that generate within the inexplicable, otherdimensional [[Evil Tower of Ominousness]] that appears out of thin air in place of the local high school.

** The same happens with the owner of Daidara Metalworks in ''[[Persona 4]]'' who takes Kurosawa's place as the game's primary equipment vendor, and will also purchase anything - and indeed needs to be sold all the [[Vendor Trash]] you scavenge off of Shadows, because these new materials expand his inventory.

** And also, though the mudcrab has more money, it is also out in the middle of nowhere which makes it much less practical. Meaning that most players use the scamp, which has half the mudcrab's amount of money, which means selling anything you get at higher levels takes several in-game days and a very good knowledge of math. This begins to get absurd once you start trying to sell stuff worth over 100,000 gold to a scamp which only has 5000 gold and all the junk you sold to it before.

*** This is precisely why the easiest way to play the game is with a thief-ish character who has Alchemy as a major skill. Thief so you can have a near-inexpendable supply of ingredients, Alchemy so you can turn those ingredients into semi-valuable and rather light-weight potions. When you start off, you'll generate a glut of potions for restoring fatigue, poison, etc... and then you'll pretty much only use them for trading.

* ''[[The Elder Scrolls]] 4: [[Oblivion]]'' has this to a degree. Initially vendors will only buy and sell whatever category of items they specialise in. If the player has sufficient "Mercantile" skill, they will begin accepting other kinds of items. Additionally, there is a curious limit on the amount of cash they will pay for a single item. The highest limit in the standard game is 1200 gold, so if one tries to sell an item estimated to be worth 2000 gold, one will only get 1200 in the best case. Yet if one has two such items and sell them separately, one will get 1200 each time. Effectively, merchants have unlimited cash, but only part with it in rather limited chunks. A fact of much debate among some players is that several of the downloadable content packs for the game introduce vendors who have a cap of 2000 gold.

** There are a number of stores, such as Jensine's in Imperial City, that will buy anything except illegal goods. Some vendors will buy even those, but you need to be a thief to find them.

** Both ''[[Icewind Dale]]'' games also had an amusing "supply and demand" mechanic : if you kept selling the same kind of item to a vendor over and over, the buying price would go down. Meaning eventually, merchants could offer you less gold for the ubiquitous +1 Longsword then for a regular Longsword. Equally amusing, the prices would only go down after a completed trade, so hogging hundreds of +1 Longswords in a Bag of Holding and selling them in bulk was much, much more profitable than selling them one by one. Oh, and of course, even if you drove one merchant's prices down to ridiculous levels, the merchant 5 feet away would still be more than happy to offer you the full price.

* In ''[[Crystalis]]'', you can only sell your items in specially-marked pawn shops that will take any unwanted armor or items off your hands.

* Slight aversion in ''[[Tales of Phantasia (Video Game)|Tales of Phantasia]]''. There are a set of items known as trading items which you find scattered around the world; each town will pay a different price for them, and the trick is to know which items to sell where.

* In ''[[Geneforge]] 1'' and ''2'', each vendor only has a certain amount of gold. This will go up when you buy things from them, and go down whenever you sell something to them. It is possible for every vendor in the game to run out of money, making it impossible for you to sell anything (of course, that means you have all the money, so you don't really ''need'' to sell anything). The gold limitation disappears in later games.

* In ''[[Mount and Blade (Video Game)|Mount & Blade]]'', every merchant has a set amount of money, so you can't sell too much (unless you buy some stuff at the same time). Moreover, some items will sell for different prices in different cities, and if you sell several of one thing you'll lower its price. (Works the other way too.) However, if you leave a city and spend a little time away, when you come back the merchant will have a refreshed inventory (the stuff you sold will be gone) and he'll have some money again. Because everyone buys everything, if you happen to clean out the goods merchant for example of all his silver denars but still have a few items to sell, then you can turn around and sell the rest of your items to the horse merchant, the arms merchant, or the armor merchant, regardless of whether you're selling oil, linen, or armor acquired in battle.

* Averted in the first ''Aretha'' RPG for the original Game Boy. Equipment can only be sold at pawn shops and each pawn shop will only accept three particular items, and they only start showing up a considerable distance into the game. It is not the best system of its kind ever implemented.