The Mandatory Mini-Game

Mini Games in an RPG can be pretty fun. I personally remember getting fairly good at Triple Triad in Final Fantasy 8 having a near complete collection. I also remember doing poorly in the arena at Final Fanatasy 6, but having a good time despite the fact. Extras like this are great, and can really add to the overall quality of the game. But more often than not, making these mandatory can send a bad vibe to the gamer, and Square Soft is on of the worst offenders.

I believe it stems from that fact, that for years they spun their magic and successfully defied this, with Final Fantasy 7 being their crowning achievement in the mandatory mini games. Both the motorcycle scene and the chocobo race had a well rounded difficulty, and the latter led to an amazing mini game that many of friends took pretty seriously. And I may be crazy, but it has been a while since I have enjoyed the magic of a mandatory mini-game. 

Last week I broke down and bought Crisis Core for the PSP. I loved the story line in the sequel (original), and wanted to see if the game did any better than the movie. I have been very impressed with the story, and surprisingly very impressed with the game play. What really strikes me as funny is how much better the voice overs are for the game than they were for Advent Children. :-)

As far as the true highlights of the game, I would certainly go with the story line. While it can get a bit choppy and confusing at times, it all seems to play out pretty well. As far as annoyances go, it took me a while, but I found one. But before I go into it, I want to hit on the source of this frustration, and how this game at least made up for it. 

When I played FF XII Revenant Wings for the DS, I somewhat enjoyed it for a while. There were all kinds of cool weapon building things I could do listed in the manual and that had me pretty excited. I was a big fan of this in Vagrant Story on the playstation. The magic was lost when it took me days of battling through endless repetitive and borderline un-interactive combat. When I finally got there and went to use it, the weapons I could craft were weaker or equal to the weapons I had equipped. I haven't played it since. 

But in the journey through a boring game to unlock a feature I had imagined as being fun and rewarding, and quite possibly even making the game worth playing, I had to pass through a mandatory mini-game. This mini game involve stealth where there really wasn't anything to hide behind, and whether or not I was actually hidden from the enemy was a matter of trial that wasted several days of me trying to pass through. 

I was beyond irritated with this, and since nothing else interested me in the game (and the fear that I would come across another level like this) I just put it up and started playing Final Fantasy 6 again. :-) With Crisis Core, I came upon a very similar level and cringed. However, this time, there were things to hide behind, but I never pulled it off successfully, and each time I got caught the enemy took what was in the treasure chests. But the ability to brute force my way through this mission far outwayed my curiosity of what was in those boxes, verses the unavoidable frustrations of trying to play through another square stealth mini-game. 

Now, I am not against stealth in a video game. In Never Winter Nights, I only play as a Rogue/Shadow Dancer. I have yet to find another fun class in that game, and I have tried most of them. What I am against, is a game forcing me to learn a new game on the fly with vague instructions leaving me to trial and error my way through frustration in order to advance the story (or an attempt to get me to buy the game guide?). 

To me this is a bad design decision for pretty much any game. While true, I might have been able to brute force my way through the stealth mission in FF XII, it would still have taken me days in my 20 minute intervals. And while I have enjoyed some of the mandatory mini games in the Final Fantasy series, more often than not they are a low point in the game. I actually enjoyed the motorcycle mini-game in FF VII, but level of difficulty was pretty simple in comparison. It does however, make me wonder how many people were truly irritated with it verses how many of us thought it was the best RPG mini game since Chrono Trigger. 

So please feel free to express your views on the mini game.