|
From simple card games to world-spanning scavenger hunts, from snowboarding runs to forklift races, minigames in RPGs have entertained would-be heroes. But can minigames ever overly detract from gameplay? Can the inclusion of too many minigames in an RPG make a game unentertaining? Minigames, for all their contribution of simplistic, distracting fun, can become a nuisance. As publishers have increasingly been finding the need to jack up the number of hours they claim it will take the average gamer to exhaust their product of entertainment value, the number of minigames included in the average RPG has steadily increased, a trend I've come to fear in light of a few terrible experiences with minigames.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for minigames that are truly entertaining and well produced. I was blown away by Xenosaga Episode I's card game, and I usually hate card games. Final Fantasy X's blitzball proved to be a well-developed diversion from gameplay that tacked on an additional 15 or so hours on to my completion time of that game.
However, for each example of a great minigame I can think of, I can cite many more examples of terrible, fruitless, or downright boring minigames. Star Wars: KOTOR's card game was an atrocity; it wasn't entertaining, and the gamer had little incentive to play it anyway. Some minigames are offensive on a more basic level; they simply aren't minigames. Any "minigame" where all you have to do is mash the same button as many times as you can within a certain time period isn't a minigame in my book. Shenmue 2, the Pokemon Stadium/Coliseum games, and FFX-2 come to mind when talking about these games. I'm sure you can think of a wealth of others.
Essentially, minigames have a lot of expectations to meet if they truly want to be entertaining enough to hold gamers' attention and contribute to the main game's overall quality. Minigames should be exactly that; they should be "miniature games," not "shallow excuses for games whose mechanics could be designed by an average seven year old with multiple attention disorders." This is why the profusion of minigames in RPGs scares me. Too often, it seems that as the number of minigames in an RPG increases, the quality of each of those minigames decreases. Moreover, I hold that this can detriment the overall quality of a game greatly by affecting the game's playability, and I have one shining example that I think illustrates this phenomenon.
Final Fantasy X-2. No, I'm not trying to incite a flame war. This game just happens to portray what I'm attempting to describe. I couldn't even play this game for more than six hours because of how terrible I thought it was, and that's the first time in a long time that a game in the Final Fantasy series has done that to me. Let's set aside the things that I and many other people already disagree with, the corny J-Pop themes, the game's blatant rip-offs of other games, the poor dialogue (in comparison to Final Fantasy X, anyway). However, even with all these faults, I still thought that Final Fantasy X-2 might be playable--I mean hey, the battle system was entertaining, and I really did want to see how the story progressed. The faults I mentioned weren't what decidedly killed the experience for me. It was only when I discovered how many button-mashing, teeth-clenching, and hair loss-inducing "minigames" I'd have to play just to get through the game that I decided to return FFX-2 to my local Best Buy. Chasing after Cactrots and mashing buttons to shoot things on the field just doesn't do it for me (Of course, I also had a few other faults with the game that I've already mentioned. I'm sorry Square, but if you expect me to take FFX-2's characters seriously after you have them sing cringe-inducing pop songs, only to resume their quest of finding a lost friend, you've got another thing coming. Way to totally ruin the dramatic atmosphere established by the end of FFX. But, I digress.).
The addition of numerous mindless "minigames" to RPGs has the potential to ruin a lot of promising titles. The profusion of pointless minigames should always be examined; it means that game developers either thought that the main action within an RPG isn't entertaining enough, or that their target audience will enjoy mindless button mashing. Hopefully, the few examples I've mentioned don't constitute a trend that future games will follow.
|
RSS feed
iTunes
