T w e n t y S i d e d
Not long ago every game had an ill conceived, tacked on multiplayer mode that everyone ignored. Like, who the hell played the Last of Us’s multiplayer? I did. I was forced to if I wanted to get the platinum. But it was a needless waste of time and money for the devs for a middling game mode with a very short half life. The multiplayer modes never needed to be included. Nobody wanted them. Thankfully that has mostly gone away. A relative of the tacked on multiplayer mode has persisted however: the minigame.
As I stated in my prior article, I’ve been playing through Expedition 33. And as I’ve stated several times in the past, I’m a completionist. That means I am doing everything offered in the game so far, including some of the most frustrating unfun segments I’ve dealt with in my life. First of which was a long platforming challenge in a game with floaty, imprecise controls. Jump puzzles in games where platforming clearly isn’t even considered in the design of the controls is always a nightmare and I’ll never understand why devs feel the need to jam them in. E33 is far from the worst I can think of but it is the most recent. Back in the day when I played Maplestory there were quests that I just walked away from. The controls didn’t allow for enough precision to justify the effort. Elden Ring has some hidden items that force you to platform VERY carefully to reach. Just because you can run and jump in a game doesn’t mean you should need to lower your head and plow through some poorly conceived nonsense.
Later on I played volleyball with some sentient paintbrushes and this was what pissed me off. E33 has one of the most satisfying combat systems in a turn based game I’ve played in a very long time. King of the mechanics that are employed is the parry. Few things feel better than nailing a string of parries and landing a crushing counter. Even without the parry system the combat is great. But the ability to completely negate an enemy’s damage by learning their patterns and properly executing on that knowledge. I think the devs had this in mind when they came up with the volleyball minigame. And I think that’s where all thought was concluded. You’re stuck on a little raft in the water where you have to run back and forth around this platform and aim where your parry goes. In a game with floaty imprecise controls. There are 3 tiers of difficulty in opponents and the 3rd is an absolute monster. Huge health bar, fast “attacks,” and higher damage from the occasional flaming paintbrush baby. When you get to that last opponent you are expected to just execute perfectly. If you miss a parry the animation takes far too long to reset and you eat damage as a guarantee. You can recover, but it’s very difficult. I eventually completed it and it felt good to conquer that nightmare but in the same way popping a stubborn pimple can feel rewarding. I’d rather not have had to go through the effort.
The good news is that all of the above minigames are optional. That’s what they should always be. Optional. They can be loads of fun but please for the love of god give me some choice. Sometimes developers get their minigames so right that their releases almost double as minigame collections. Final Fantasy X had blitzball, which is super polarizing, but I genuinely adored. Grand Theft Auto has dozens of side activities and objectives you can take part in. Pretty much every JRPG in the last 20 years has had a fishing minigame of some sort. And the Yakuza series, my beloved, has some of the most entertaining side content in all of video games. Darts, batting cages, bowling, pool, Japanese mahjong, gambling. All are available and all are fun. And the king of all minigames, at least to me, is Triple Triad. Final Fantasy VIII was a Triple Triad game with some RPG to push through for me. Hours of fun.
I play RPGs for character progression systems and story. I play FPS games for satisfying gunplay and a decent challenge to overcome. I don’t play platformers because I genuinely suck at them and find them frustrating. For those of you who can play Super Meat Boy or Celeste with any degree of precision and confidence, I tip my hat to you. I just don’t have the manual dexterity or patience. Which brings me back to my earlier point. Platforming, in my opinion, needs very delicate and precise balance. You have to ride a fine line between floaty and ice skating levels of momentum. You have to decide when a character can catch themselves on ledges or whether you want that to even be a mechanic. You have to determine how long you can expect a player to continue without messing up and how to fix sections where the balance is off, via checkpoints or what have you.
I want experimentation in game design. If a developer wants to include a minigame where you copulate off-screen until a vase falls over and breaks, whatever David Jaffe. Go for it. But I do insist that it be treated as a separate entity within your game that you design with care and attention. If you bring over your control scheme and make it some form of challenge, ensure that it actually works and isn’t just a torturous mess. It makes the quest for completion for masochists and idiots like me so much more annoying.
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Well, in E33 the Gestral Beaches are frustrating by design. They are a homage to old-school “nintendo-hard” gaming in the same way the small fixed camera areas are a homage to old-school JRPGs with pre-rendered backgrounds.
You might notice that it’s not only the completing them that’s optional, it’s also the rewards aren’t in any way useful
As I said in the article, I’m aware they are optional. That doesn’t change my opinion on their design. And honestly I see that “nintendo-hard” reasoning thrown around a lot and I personally don’t buy it. The problems I have with those mini-games are the lack of good control of your character and the new mechanics they attempted to employ. Nintendo-hard games were difficult because the developers were still in the habit of making quarter munching arcade machines. Not because they couldn’t figure out how to program a good control scheme. Dark Souls is a good example of what you’re talking about. The games are incredibly difficult because they’re incredibly punishing. The controls are consistent and very usable, but make too many mistakes and you lose a lot of progress.
I understand what you’re saying and I respect the point of view and opinion, I just disagree pretty hard.
I do not understand the cross between “completionist” and “Yakuza fan”. I gave up on Mahjong, like, instantly. And then there’s darts, and baseball, and Shogi, and a bunch of other games I’m deliberately not playing. (I completed all the school event minigames in Lost Judgment; the finale had a block of text that was left untranslated. The game did not expect the player to make it that far.)
Minigames are a very strange beast. Mostly I like having them but not playing them. I legitimately enjoy Demonschool’s design, where it’s got a dozen minigames that are all pretty boring and over in seconds*. But they’re there, and you know they’re there if you want something to do besides punch demons.
*(There’s also an Outrun knockoff with deer on the course for you to run over, that was probably the abandoned game the characters claim it is. But that one takes some unlocking.)
Yeah, the Yakuza games are each a beast to complete. I learned Mahjong for the completion of Yakuza 5 and I really enjoy it, though I’m terrible at it. And since I measure completion by the trophy list, Shogi in the games is completely optional or have a good cop-out option (Puzzle Shogi) in all their applications. I wouldn’t bother completing them unless I enjoyed the process though. I have the plat.
And honestly I agree with your second point. I just finished my completion of the most recent Yakuza game (I may have a problem) and it comes with an emulator built in for a bunch of the Sega Master System games. I love seeing it as an option to have but I have no real interest in grinding through the majority of those games.
I mostly ignore Yakuza minigames, which I know sounds criminal but I am mostly in it for the ridiculous, over the top, storytelling. In my meager defense the one that’s probably best quality tends to be karaoke and I absolutely and utterly suck at rhythm games.
Might & Magic 7 had an awesome minigame called Arcomage. It was a collectible-card-game type battle game that you could play at the taverns, once you had your own deck, which you could get in a quest in the first main-game-area town. It was great fun, and they eventually released Arcomage on its own. I got it, but it was horribly buggy (which I found boggling, because what…? It worked fine in the main game o_O ) so I just kept a save where my party was at my favorite tavern and went in just to play Arcomage whenever I felt like it. Favorite tavern because each tavern had its own starting condition and win requirements. You got… something…? if you won a game at every tavern in M&M7, but I don’t remember what it was. Fun stuff, though.
Any RPG I’m playing that has a platforming minigame had darned well better make it optional. I’ve never been into skill-and-action games — what in the old days we called twitch games — and platforming gives me hives. It reminds me of Ultima 1, a turn based (they all were at the time) RPG, incredibly simple by modern standards, where there was essentially no precision or aiming required of the player in regular combat. Where you get all the way to the freaking end of the game, and suddenly you’re playing a vehicle sim, trying to pilot a shuttle while dodging gun fire or asteroids or whatever it was, with a high chance of crashing. I crashed three or four times before muttering something unprintable and quitting. I never did finish that bleeping game.
Ooohhh, so that’s where they got the idea for Gwent in The Witcher 3! A card game so fun and intricate that it spawned its own competitive digital card game, as well as two single-player games, one of which was an excellent story-heavy affair (called Thronebreaker), and the other is a rogue-lite deck builder (called Rogue Mage), which also has quite a good story, although I’ve only just started playing the latter.
Fun stuff! I highly recommend all four aforementioned games :)
I also thoroughly enjoyed Dice Poker from the first 2 Witcher games as well. :) Especially the first. There was just something about the jaunty, upbeat tune that felt SO refreshing amidst W1’s dark, gothic atmosphere, like it truly was an escape for people from the horrors of their world.
Ooohhh yes, dice poker was awesome! I was initially very sad that it wasn’t in the third game. It would be cool if there was a version of it you could play outside of the main games, but keeping all the Witcher theming.
I liked dice-poker, especially the fact that the dice were physics enabled and it was possible to completely whiff your roll and send them all flying off the board.
Gwent is an odd one. I absolutely loved playing it as a mini-game but standalone it bores the hell out of me.
I also vastly preferred it in the Witcher. I thought about why.
– It’s fairly simple, mechanically speaking
– The most fun part was discovering new cards. Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the Witcher 3 you don’t get a list of all the cards in the game. So it was an added factor that you had no idea what kinds of cards you could get, and it was super fun to discover them during matches
That being said, I also loved Thronebreaker, and I’m finding Rogue Mage reasonably fun, as well. Although in Thronebreaker I had much more fun with the non-standard matches – i.e. those special events where you were playing Gwent, but it had some fun twists to it.
Oof that’s rough. I had a buddy that somehow kept screwing up the Warthog run at the end of Halo CE and just waited for me to go over to see the last cutscene. Not sure how he managed to mess up such a short section so badly, but I can only imagine how annoying it must have been playing a great FPS only to hit a brick wall because of a mechanic that felt slippery and unfun to him.
I have been playing a great deal of Darktide lately with some friends. Darktide has periods where your job is ‘fight waves of enemies while this gadget does an ill-defined technical process’. Inevitably, the gadget requires rebooting, which involves one of… at this point 4 minigames. Two of them are exclusive to particular missions. The default up until recently had your cursor move back and forth across a row of characters. Push the button when it’s over the highlighted one. Repeat 4 times. If you miss, go back a line. Simple enough. Get hit too much by enemies (your three teammates are expected to provide cover from the horde of enemies) you lose the game and have to start over.
Of the two mission exclusive games: There is one that a friend hates that involves keeping a very non-responsive ball centered (or at least not touching the edges) for a fixed period of time, and another that involves moving through pre-defined selections until you find the arbitrarily ‘right’ one. Repeat a few times to succeed.
The last, and my most hated gives you a grid of symbols, and a 2×2 selection to find and select within the grid. It’s not an exceptionally large grid, but it is a little more mentally occupying than before. As before, getting attacked kicks you out of the game but you retain your progress (likely because it’s such a fiddly bastard).
And those mini-games aren’t even in the tutorial! Nothing like learning whole new mechanics while under attack and possibly with a time limit.