Mineko's Night Market is so beautiful, but so grindy

Mineko's Night Market is out at last, and on Xbox Game Pass to boot — it is both absolutely beautiful and at times alarmingly grindy.

Opinion by Heidi Nicholas

Published 04 Nov 2023

Mineko’s Night Market has been on top of my must-play list since I first saw it. Everything from its beautiful visuals to the wonderful setting just made it look enchanting. I’m a fair way into the game now, and the thing is — I want to keep playing! It’s gorgeous, and its mix of folklore, wacky characters, and, above all, cosiness is the absolute trifecta. I want to get further through it — I want to discover the rest of the island and its secrets. But, there's a problem.

Mineko’s Night Market’s gorgeousness goes fiercely toe-to-toe with its grindiness, and it’s not yet clear which is winning. The game shoots itself in the foot as you can’t really start to do more — unlocking new areas, crafting benches, activities and so on — until you start making big money to buy the crafting benches or tools to unlock those new areas, which can only be done by selling at the Night Market. This Night Market is not there every night as you might expect, but every in-game week. So for the first week or two, all you can really do is pick flowers every day until you run out of stamina, make some flower crafts, and rinse and repeat until Saturday rolls around.

This isn’t in itself a bad thing — this isn’t a game to rush through, and it’s satisfying to put the effort into gradually building up the village, the Night Market, and your crafting capabilities. Plus, once you’ve got a fair bit of money, things start to pick up. You pass time by travelling to various island locations on the bus and you can only make so many trips a day, so once you start deciding where you want to go and what resources you want to gather, your days start to fill up. There are more resources and more minigames to play for those resources, which then means you can make more complex crafts and earn more at the Night Market, and can start completing villager requests left, right, and center.

However — this doesn’t undo the fact that if what you need to progress (whether to the next island spot or the next crafting bench) is more money, you’ll still most likely be stuck waiting out the week for the Night Market. This is too bad, because instead of taking your time enjoying the game’s beautiful world, music, and characters, you’re quickly reduced to rushing through days just so you can get to the market, earn what you need, and move on.

There are other irritations that get in the way too. Flowers, for instance, are season-specific. If you don’t save a stack of each (which you might not think to do, since after spending stamina to get them, you want to use them for more money) and then need a particular recipe with, say, spring flowers further down the line, what are you meant to do? Unfortunately you need to wait until next spring rolls around, and have that villager forever hovering, waiting for that request to be fulfilled. There are plenty of crafting recipes, and they need more and more combinations of resources. This gets more complicated when you consider that a lot of things in the game are random. Certain villagers want random requests before they'll give you friendship points or more recipes, so you need to hope you come across the recipe they're after when fishing, or that drink or meal they want from the vending machine. Throw into that a request for a certain type of food from the Night Market, for instance, or a particular boximal (a funko-pop style doll), and you may be waiting a while.

All of which to say, this is only a problem because the game is so good everywhere else. It’s just as gorgeous as I’d hoped, to start with. It’s accompanied by beautifully calming music. The dialogue is often genuinely funny, and its characters are wonderful. The setting is magical, and the game’s lovely, whimsical mix of folklore and the Night Market is a real winner. If you’re yet to try it out, you should definitely start it up. It’s utterly lovely. Just, please, let me get that damn Snappy the Snail boximal without spending my hard-earned pocket money and please, please, tone down the grind and waiting.

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Written by Heidi Nicholas

Heidi tends to lean towards indie games, RPGs, and open-world games on Xbox, and when not playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, happily installs every new wholesome game that appears on Xbox Game Pass, before diving back into favorites like The Witcher 3. She's looking forward to Age of Mythology Retold, Everwild, Fable, and Avowed on the Xbox horizon. Heidi graduated with an MA in English Literature before joining the TrueAchievements team.