MIni-games: Love em or hate em, which game did them best?

[DaveMcDamage]

Now for me a mini game is all about giving you a break from the norm and keeping it nice and simple. Now whilst Gwent was great in Witcher 3, it got too easy once you built the deck and I think you could then only lose if you chose to. But for me, and despite some of them getting frustrating with RNG, I have to tip my hat to Yakuza Zero. 

 

Fantasy Zone. Pool. Darts. That mini car building game. The business empire. For me it did the best mini games. Now other Yakuza games have had great mini games, but for whatever reason they also broke the mechanics of some of the games that worked superbly in previous games. 

 

So whats yours. Its not about people hating mini games, but what mini games you loved. 

[Lorajet]

Hands down, best one to do this was GTA V.  You've got the shooting range, darts, arm wrestling, golf, tennis, parachuting, etc.  Loved them all, except almost impossible to get anyone to play tennis 

[Phlegeth]

Yakuza has the best minigames.  If I had to pick just one, I'd go with Judgment.  Cause I'm one of the weirdos who loves Puyo Puyo.  Or Like a Dragon, the Kart racing was way more involved than I was expecting.  Zero is up there too though.

[Mipsy]

Faves:

• FF7 - Gold Saucer, esp. Chocobo races
• FF8 - Triple Triad
• Yakuza - of any game in the series, Zero tops that list from what I've played; at that, I *very much* like billiards, darts, cabaret club, Koi-Koi, aaand yep: mahjong .3.
• TW3 - Gwent
• FF15 - Noctis' fishing, plus Chocobo races...again~
• Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Chao garden
• Ape Escape 2: Monkey Soccer Football, which I've played loads more than AE2 proper (and I 100%'d AE2, on PS2)

It would take some effort to pare that down to *1* victor...odd thing is, I wouldn't deem myself a mini-game aficionado. Not terribly keen on mini-games popping up in every game. But when I sink in, I sink all in.

[DaveMcDamage]

Baseball was also really good fun in some of the Yakuza games. I liked it the least in Zero as it was a totally different mechanic, also the golf in Yakuza 5 was well done to for what it was. Good shout on GTAV tennis. I too loved how well they made that mode. 

[Lava_Yuki]

I hate mini games in general as I'm very bad at them, but some of the few that I didn't mind were

 

FFX-2 Sphere Break- I really got into this, I dug up tons of great coins in bikanel desert using the chocobo and kicked Shinra's butt. 

Tales of Vesperia and Xillia 2: Poker- these games had fun versions of the poker games, great for money farming. 

Tales of Graces:Magic carta, you can kind of only do this if you have played all the other tales games, but I cheated and used a guide as Graces was my first Tales game and I had no clue who any of the voices were. 

Pokemon RS and DPS- Berry blending and poffin making, I really liked the simple mechanics and found it fun to make tons of these. 

Fishing is in quite a few games, I liked it in FFXV and Tales of Arise as they were easy (unlike persona....)

[DaveMcDamage]

20 hours ago, Lava_Yuki said:

I hate mini games in general as I'm very bad at them, but some of the few that I didn't mind were

 

FFX-2 Sphere Break- I really got into this, I dug up tons of great coins in bikanel desert using the chocobo and kicked Shinra's butt. 

Tales of Vesperia and Xillia 2: Poker- these games had fun versions of the poker games, great for money farming. 

Tales of Graces:Magic carta, you can kind of only do this if you have played all the other tales games, but I cheated and used a guide as Graces was my first Tales game and I had no clue who any of the voices were. 

Pokemon RS and DPS- Berry blending and poffin making, I really liked the simple mechanics and found it fun to make tons of these. 

Fishing is in quite a few games, I liked it in FFXV and Tales of Arise as they were easy (unlike persona....)

The fishing in Persona was okay. Not the worst but nothing made me want to play other than the requirement. In general and I was surprised at this, but the mini-games overall on Persona 5 were really half-arsed. Top game though. 

 

I thought Red Dead Redemption did good mini games too. The fiver finger fillet and the horse shoe game were really well done. 

[DeadlyPerfume]

I got really into Triple Triad when I got the platinum for Final Fantasy 8 and broke the game almost immediately out of Garden by amassing the best cards to convert into late game magic to junction my stats. Similarly had a lot of fun with Blackjack and Caravan in Fallout: New Vegas on a high luck survival playthrough getting myself banned from every casino on the strip and buying all the stat and damage resist augments from the clinic, then running around the Mojave as an extremely likeable 10 Charisma cyborg cannibal with human meat leftovers shoved in his pockets and the ability to tank bullets in formal wear. 

 

Also all of the festivals in Harvest Moon games if those count, kid me was extremely invested in dominating the cooking, cow and chicken festivals to demonstrate my superiority to the NPCs. 

[Eevee_Everfree]

I loved and got addicted to Triple Triad on FF8, the starting music always gets me excited. 

 

The number crunching is what keeps me playing.