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.
