Mineko's Night Market

The pacing was awful. The number of message in bottles and wind-up fish I got while fishing was extremely excessive to the point of being enraged when looking for specific fish. Very cute idea, beautiful artwork, honestly would be a great game if not for the pacing creating frustration in a cozy game.

It's a cute game, with a nice story and gameplay. There's a few bugs and you should pray that the RNG gods are on your side for a few quests/achievements.

I think my favourite thing about this game is the art style. The world and the characters are very cute, and it's a consistent style, even the UI is great. As for gameplay, I enjoyed it for the first half and less so for the second half. Both completing the story and selling at the market are great, but the game falls into a common pitfall for these types of games where I'm not sure what to do with my money. While leveling up the market, I quickly found I'd already bought everything I needed so nothing ate up my funds. It completely lost the fun of needing to save up and worrying about what to buy next, because there simply wasn't anything. Aside from that, I did encounter a few glitches (one of which crashed my game), mostly visual though. Not great, but could be worse. One of my main grievances came from the fishing mini game. I like it's style and had fun collecting all the fish as I always do, but I believe the game needed to implement a system to remove the glass bottles after all the crafting recipes are found. It ate up a lot of my energy. The drop rate for bottles was absurdly high, and when they stopped giving me anything it became a huge nuisance. I'm also not a huge fan of the gift giving mechanic. In Stardew it offers a lot of rewards, but here it was mostly gifts I could buy elsewhere. It's like they felt like they needed to add it as they are a 'cozy game' without thinking through why other games implement a gift system. It's still a game I recommend if it's a style you know you enjoy, but I think it needed either more time or a larger team. It feels empty later on, and a total grind to finish the museum. As nice as it is, I understand why so few who've bought it have finished it. I hope this team continues to make games, but I also hope they can carry through the mechanics and systems throughout the game in a satisfying way.