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So you've fought through countless hordes of enemies. You've traveled across the world, through a dungeon, and are now about to have an epic battle with your latest nemesis. After words of banter are thrown around, the heroes draw their weapons and prepare for an epic battle. Then a dialog box pops up explaining the rules of this engagement. Control the character with the analog stick, press X to jump, and press triangle to reflect purple rocks at the boss? Oh no, it's a minigame battle!
While the above situation is, hopefully, entirely fiction, there are still quite a few games that do something similar. They have so many minigames in them that they sometimes take the place of certain boss fights. I'm not talking about cases such as Final Fantasy VII's chase scene where one transitions into another, but a complete replacement of the boss fight with some silly minigame that may or may not have poor design and play control. While not entirely unexpected in zany games that don't take themselves seriously, such as Brave Fencer Musashi and Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, it can still be bothersome to have a battle that a game has been building up for quite some time suddenly be replaced with a pointless minigame.
Perhaps the largest recent culprit of this is Kingdom Hearts II. While most of its special battles aren't minigames per se, there is a rather high percent of boss fights that have a strong minigame-ish gimmick thrown in. These range from playing a card game with one boss to having a flight simulator-esque battle randomly thrown in the middle of a fight with another. The largest problem in this case is not just that boss battles have been replaced, but that it takes place during some of the game's most highly anticipated battles.
Minigames are not a bad thing. Well, assuming they're designed well, have good play control, and are fun. They shouldn't spill over into the rest of the game though, especially when there is a lot of buildup to the battle they are getting in the way of. There are much better ways to go about designing this sort of thing, while giving both boss fights and minigames their respective time in the spotlight.
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