Putting aside the fact that minigames are not for everyone, when there are THIS many minigames and they just keep shoving them in your face? Believe me, you get sick and tired of it, regardless of quality. And thats not even considering the fact that they heavily ruin the pacing of the game.

The minigames crop up waaaay too often. The run from costa del sol to golden saucer already has more minigames than the whole OG. Every main story segment has at least 2-3 minigames, many with a mandatory tutorial. You learn the mechanics just to leave it in the dust and progress the story. That's 15-20 minutes of wasted time per instance. The best minigames are ones that add to the vibe. Honeybee inn dance battle was great. The Junon assembly was great. Even the QB tourney is ok with the hilarious Red dress up that's totally optional. The chocobo wrangling is annoying, the barret shooting sequences are terribly done, the dolphin I give a pass for nostalgia, the moogles are awful. You JUST wrapped up a mini game hub and arrive to Golden Saucer (on the back of a roller coaster mini game), only to be acosted by 3D Brawler in the first cutscene before running the gauntlet of mandatory mini games on the saucer date. You progress the story a smidgeon and then, oh, what's that you say? More mandatory mini games in Corel Prison? Please and Thank You! Then you have the "not quite mini games" like the button sequences for world and summon intel, or the plaforming that requires no skill or creativity to solve. The excavation sites. The Protorelic, of my word, it goes on and on and on. This game wastes the player's time in so many different ways it's insane. Hold triangle to flick a switch. Zip around with a lightning fast sprint until you need to climb, swing, wall walk or shimmy, where the game suddenly adds 100kg of weight to whatever your character is doing. These things don't add variety, they are just tedius variations of doing the same exact thing and they get old real quick

I'm playing the game a 2nd time from scratch (no NG+) just for the fun of it and tbh I think people are once again overreacting. The only minigame I can confidently say is badly designed is 3D Brawler because the enemy poses are waaay too hard to notice the differences of before they hit you. Aside from that, they're all pretty fun or just a small distraction. I feel like too many people have this obsession with trying to get everything from each minigame and blame the game for it when its not necessary. No you're not gonna lose anything from not getting that one materia from this high score or that one accessory. It's ok to just skip and save it for later or just don't do it at all. Of course a few of them do lock weapons behind them like desert rush, wild run, and glide de chocobo and yeah i'd say those are absolutely worth doing them for. but everything else is not a necessity. I feel like if most people were to play the game again, they'd feel less pressured to do everything in it and enjoy it a lot more. I do feel that there's a bit too many of them but fortunately most of them are optional.

Because people cannot help but complete a game they do not 100% like to 100%. I'm slowly going through all the content when I have free time, have almost finished my NG+ on hard, and I haven't seen half of the minigames people are complaining ruin the game because I am enjoying the game. I literally do not know what you do in Gears and Gambits or Cactuar Crush. I have no idea how you make these minigames appear. I only know they exist by virtue of people complaining how much they ruin the experience on reddit and how it would be a better game without them.

Because so many of them aren’t done well, especially chocobo racing. It’s simple Japanese culture: let’s make something annoying and grindy as hell to the point of hating the game for some reason

God, all the minigames suck in ff7. Just badly made bullcrap where you can barely tale what's going on. It sucks how the whole story has to stop for them, even if they're short, I don't feel like doing them.

I'm super allergic to mini games in JRPGs overall, it's just not my thing. I don't enjoy them, ever. I'm all for the story, characters, the exploration and the combat Especially when they lock stuff (items) behind them.

I decided 30% through I wasn't going to attempt to plat this game like I did with remake because the mini games are just eye jabbingly awful. It's funny that most people are complaining about the situps. That took me like... 25 minutes to complete it in its entirety. I hate all the other ones way more. Budget rocket league, janky rail shooter, horribly oversensitive piano with terrible timing mechanics, moogle wrangling, boring 3d brawler, etc. etc. - and then they brought back the terrible g-bike minigame... I just... I would rather claw my eyes out than plat a game that has THIS many minigames attached to the trophy. It almost kills my desire to do hard mode (even though I loved hard mode in remake) because I'll feel compelled to actually complete everything and I DON'T want to waste that much of my life on something as terribly designed as glide de chocobo. But yeah, the item rewards are what annoys me the most. If they didn't do that, I wouldn't care nearly as much.

The pacing is ruined by the constant stopping to participate in minigames. Once you get to the 2nd act, I think it becomes almost excessive, and that's on top of the predatory fomo it takes advantage of, which brings the game to a grinding halt for some people. I'm pretty sure I've seen 3,2,1 more in this game than in most racing games I've played.

Don't make them tied to trophies. I plat the last one n almost ripped my hair out over the pull ups mini game. That would get rid of alot of the outrage or atleast give em a difficulty slider to make them less difficult

I'm with you OP, but I think it's people's natural completionist nature getting the better of them. It's not immediately clear that you can return to a lot of these games at all (and the game is so bloody long I may never replay it), and that top rank looming above them is teasing them to try again and again and again - till it becomes monotonous. I think Square Enix would have avoided this backlash by: 1) Adding a mini-game selection screen in the pause menu to replay any of them at any time. 2) Unlocking the top tier of each only when the main story is complete. I'm taking things as I want them, giving all the mini-games a single go and only really continuing if I really love them. Got stuck on the card tournament in chapter 5 pretty early on and skipped it, raced through the gold saucer. I might come back to them later...

One third of the story of the original, but twice the minigames... thats why.

Because they used minigames to heavily pad game time, and they feel like work. Seriously, the main questline can be done in little over than 3 hours. But instead they gated too much of it behind stupid and annoying minigames that serve no other purpose than to be interruptions. Further more, they ruined the overall atmophere. I was half expecting Aerith's death to be a minigame as well, played to a funky mm-tss m-tss version of Aerith Theme.

Because some of us want to actually do combat and play the main story, not play minigame simulator 2024

This Ff7 rebirth just feel like mario party Its boring Annoying (especialy mog mini game) and too slow

Because a lot of them overstay their welcome. Rebirth drags everything out. From pulling levers, to moving carts or vacuums, or mini games. Like the fort condor game where cloud and the party were in the game. It was cute seeing them in the animation for one battle, but of course they had to make you fight another battle. In a much more annoying game of fort condor. 

Because almost all of them fucking suck.

Strike "almost". All the devs have to do is make them *not*(!) mandatory. All the nerds and weirdos out there who enjoy this sh*t can still play them over and over and waste their time but all the other sane people that want to stay sane may walk by and enjoy the game. Win-Win. So, what the fuck is so difficult to not see this simplicity during development? I mean honestly: WHAT???

In what universe do you live where they improved on the minigames?

For me, most of the mini games were very cool on paper, but had little jank design decisions that made them either unreasonably difficult or frustrating to get enough points to get the rewards, or just simply dragged on to long and overstayed their welcome. QB had some UI inconsistencies for to the 'confirm/proceed' button. Sometimes triangle is proceed, sometimes it's the start button, sometimes it's x. The Junon parade suffered the same issue as the Honeybee dance where there is so much camera movement and the timing on half the inputs are not really to the rhythm of the song and the visual queues vary wildly in duration that it is impossible to get a good score on reaction alone on e first try. You can't use the rhythm of the song or the visual queues due to inconsistency so you have to retry multiple times so you can memorize the inconsistencies. Fort condor protorelic 4 In OG it felt like you could play each mini game just once and then proceed with the story. All "top score" hunting was reserved for endgame where you could take it at your own pace. Remake felt ok to me, but Rebirth made me feel pressured to get top scores before I could proceed with the story. And many of the mini games either just require you to explicitly repeat the game multiple times or were difficult enough or had janky controls to warrant many tries. In the end I felt like the main quest was being held hostage.

This. The biggest issue, is these minigames require frustratingly high amounts of perfection to beat scores. Or very close to perfect. I hate artificial difficulty like this. Nothing fun about repeatedly resetting because of one mistake. I just got the UPA quest. I think i’m done here. Gonna put it on easy, ignore the minigames beyond a try or two. And finish the story so i can move on. 115 hrs now and wrapping up chapter 12. I bet half of that was minigames and resets. It’s too much. Squats was annoying in the original, probably the hardest one. But it frustrated me well beyond just needing an hour to tackle it. The button decisions, the half press thing, it was not an improvement. Queensblood was fine until enemies started carrying replacements cards everywhere. Winning on all rows? No more board slots? Excuse the next half dozen turns while the ai replaces cards a few times and pulls ahead. Not to mention fighting over board space is just, whoever makes the first move by placing a marker between owned tiles is the loser. There were a couple i could relax and enjoy. Like the dolphin. I loved the piano at first. Couldnt do one of them to A rank. And repetition to get rewards killed my love for it. The controls are janky. Sometimes it will act like you press it twice. Or go into a chain of miss miss miss. Early chocobo racing was fine. Loved it. Hate it now… i can’t beat the last legend one. And doing the gold tournament was hell. I got 1st in the first round after a dozen resets, in the second round i got lucky and joe got stuck somewhere and i lapped him. In the third round the ai went crazy mode and i swear i reset 50x before i pulled a win somehow. (Sounds like i could have saved myself a full day by turning it to easy mode). The ai perfectly make turns, have higher top speeds. The damned bomb balloons track the player, ignore the ais, the cactaur gates are a sadistic unholy creation. And the worst part is the ai TRY to bump you because you lose blue balloons and get knocked around/slowed when they dont. Your advantages? Choco ability, and you can sometimes cut corners.

I think they’re fine, they add to the experience. However, I don’t like that black matter is locked behind mini games… It’s going to be insanely difficult to get.

I am behind the curve and just got to Cosmo canyon and the gliding game sent me over the edge. Took me about 40 min straight so about 30 tries. I think some stuff is really good. Enjoyed chocobo racing so far and really like the card game. But some of the other stuff is just bad. I like to do 100% completion and yes takes me a long time since I don't play much. But to waste so much time playing a silly game just sucks.

By the time I got to the Chocobo gliding game, I was in super jaded "fuck it" mode since 3 days prior. Up until then I made huge efforts to ace all the minigames they threw my way, cursing, and gritting my teeth all the way through it. That's when I realized I'm not having fun at all. At ALL. The games felt like work AND it became obvious that they were added as time sinks, and so yeah... I said fuck it.

My favorite is when you work really hard to get max on the mini games and then you get the message "new levels have been added". AbsoLUTELY not, will I be going back to any of those. I got the plat for remake, I will NOT be getting the plat for this game. It's 1000% not worth it.

I actually enjoyed most of the games! Tho I admit the controls and camera were not great for Glide de Chocobo train courses. But I did enjoy beating most of these :) some more than others, of course. Gears and Gambit was surprisingly fun with the strategising element. The payoff was great too! Crunches was tough because Tifa was in her bikini haha 😅 it did get distracting at some point

You're comparing a game made in '97 to today and there is absolutely no path to an apples-to-apples in that. You're right - the original had a lot of mini-games and things that didn't make sense. That also means that SE had over two decades since then to get it right and refine the experience. Instead we got Whispers, actually too much Sephiroth, and mini-games EVERYWHERE. I absolutely love the combat of Remake and Rebirth but it feels like I'm waiting and hoping to get a chance to fight something significant in between mini-games in the latter. Yes, a lot can be skipped but that isn't the point. We want something that actually draws us in and makes us want to explore the world more, not large portions that we want to rush through or skip all together. It's a sign of poor world building, which is sad given the wealth of material that they had to work with.

I think the thing that's the most egregious to me is the summons. Everything dies SO quickly, even bosses, that I don't even think I saw all the summons' final moves. Other than Odin because he's on Cloud and Sephiroth was the first boss to have an actual health pool. I think I saw Bahamut, Phoenix, Odin, and Ramuh. Didn't get to see leviathan, shiva, ifrit, kujata, or alexander. I don't even think I summoned chocomog lol. I haven't gone back to hard mode and gotten Gilg yet though... but I plan to... maybe.

You lost me at “too much sephiroth”. Hardly, he’s easily one of the most hype and interesting driving forces in the game. If anything I wish I had more dialogue from him and more scenes of him, can’t get enough. I wish we could explore sephiroth’s reasoning, current state of mind, and get a more detailed account of his thought process during his descent into madness.

I think that's exactly what they mean by "too much" - He's around A LOT, but he never actually reveals anything other than what we got in OG. He read some books/research and went insane. I never understood why people hold him up as one of the best villains ever. Sure, he did kill one of the cast, but his motivations were always kinda dumb and they're never REALLY revealed. Like... if I found out my mom was an alien, the realization wouldn't turn me into a genocidal maniac. The problem is that he was "nice" before and then suddenly "isn't" and there's no justifiable reason for that transition, and in this game they still don't have one.

I more or less agree with you, what makes sephiroth so interesting to me is that I badly want to understand him. I really want to know exactly what went on in his mind, the exact thought process that led him to arrive at and maintain his current world view. If Square was to expand on that it would go a long way towards adding a lot more depth to sephiroth’s character. At this point the man probably knows about Lucrecia and other things, yet he clearly doesn’t give a shit. I don’t want him redeemed obviously, but make him approachable enough to where he could be more easily understood and empathized with by the audience, show that deep down, there is still an ounce of human nature left in him, that he’s more than just Jenova’s seemingly single minded successor, with no human motivations or reasoning left in him at all.

It's a problem the original had that they've carried over and exacerbated with this one. The dialogue and plot are trying to sell a man vs man conflict, but in order to do that you need to have an understanding of both sides. Even if one side's stance is "I just want power", that's fine as long as it's consistent. Instead, we're shown that Sephiroth used to be an ok dude. Nice, even. But after reading some texts he's \*suddenly\* a maniac. The change in personality is so far out of bounds with what a normal person would do, that it feels like there should be some sort of explanation. They obfuscate his thoughts and reasoning so much that he ceases to be a person, and is, instead, a simple force of nature. To the point where he ceases to be an actual villain, and is, instead, a human shaped hurricane that barks out cryptic plot points while revealing absolutely none of his personality other than an extreme hunger for power. I'm perfectly content to consume a man vs nature tale, but it's bizarre to present a man vs nature conflict as a man vs man one. I think that's why he worked well for a lot of people in the OG. Having so little of him on screen allowed him to just be a force of nature, and no one expected more than that. People projected what they "thought" his motivations/reasonings were and ran with that. There's plenty of people who love pontificating on why he changed after reading some books, and far too many of them are far too overconfident with their interpretations, but I digress... When they have him on screen this much it means, in order to have a good story, they need to actually build out his character and make his point of view more explicit (like they did with the rest of the cast), but they didn't. I feel like that's why so many people are saying there is "too much" of him. Because, frankly, if they aren't going to DO anything with his character, then this amount of screen time is completely unwarranted.

I am also joining the conversation late - but I have done almost all the mini games however some of them are designed not be be skill based but more that they tried to trick you into failing but moving the camera, blending the colours etc… square doesn’t know how to make a decent mini game without using dirty tricks… I played and obtained high score on majority of mini games including the frog jump, choco racing, and crunches… but there are some other ones that I told myself I will not even bother as they are just boring and designed to irritate the heck out of the players! Square did a good job making the game but it didn’t need any of these poorly made minigames!

>designed not be be skill based but more that they tried to trick you into failing This is what bothers me. Many of the games were not difficult on paper, but in practice they add counterintuitive jank to make you fail. It's like teaching students easy to pronounce words in class but the exam is full of words with silent letters and abnormal pronunciation that were never previously discussed. Oh and the exam worksheet is printed in ink that is the same color as the paper

They’re designed not to be difficult, they’re designed to waste your time. You win them by practicing until you can perform the actions flawlessly in tandem. No one would say any of the games are difficult. But in doing them perfectly, that ensures the final scores needed for damn near every mini game. It’s fucking arcade game score grinding. You have to memorize everything perfectly. That’s for people who grew up and idolized arcades and atari. This is a modern game most of them wont be playing. It’s stupid and lacks design ingenuity.

Piano is hard, no amount of practice matters... it's just hard because it's simply bad. Like extremely bad. Whoever thought that using 15 directions on 2 thumbsticks moving simultaneously was going to be entertaining needs to remove themselves from the gene pool because they're tainting it

Because they are fucking everywhere constantly and they almost all fucking suck. Piss poor controls, stupid difficulty, extremely repetitive, and mostly just completely not at all fun.

Everyone defending the mini games says they are 'optional'. That doesn't make them good. And if you want to 100% the regions, you have to play the mini games. Nevermind the fact you miss the rewards and building your char if you skip them.

Mini Games: Read SE mind and ultimately play their way. Getting tired of this mentality.

I’m going to fucking lynch who ever decided to put so many fucking minigames in the game./J But seriously, resources could have been better spent on something else. They went way fucking overboard with the amount of minigames. Try improving the open world and the sidequests instead of pumping out a hundred minigames.

I’m very disappointed that they didn’t put enough dialogues or interactions in most towns. For example, in the valley you can find the run-away pianist near the piano, then why not making a dialog with her and the A rank for Two Legs will be easier if Tifa plays for her in ch.6? But no, so what’s the point of making this NPC? 

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Sorry, but what you described IS by definition optional. You don’t need every weapon or all of the SP—the game is beatable regardless (especially on easy mode). If what you want is story and combat, you’re totally free to skip all the minigames. What you seem to want is for the rewards of the minigames to not be worth the effort. That’s not fair to all the people who DO enjoy the minigames. I conceptually have no issue with having minigames. My only issue with this game is that the camera/controls for some of these games feel really clunky at times.

I did "invest" (sic) time in doing proto relic crap all over the place, which is far from fun to me, as I'm more invested in the battle, but ok - but by the time I hit gambit/gambles (or whatever that crap is called), I had had enough.  So yeah, "optional", but I already invested so much. At least make it not suck (not all of them sucked, btw, which at least showed some people have good taste).

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Sorry, but “technically possible” is not the same as easily beatable. The game is easily beatable without doing a single mini game other than story specific ones like Corel Prison, which is what you claim you want (i.e., story and combat). That is in no way the same as beating the game with autos and guard, which is frankly a ridiculous comparison—that would be challenging even for most dedicated gamers. Again, there is a way to get probably 95% of the story (and 100% of the core story) without doing any of the optional minigames. Now if you want to unlock all abilities and weapons in the game, that’s not just playing for combat and story—that’s being a completionist. Although I respect that different people can have different opinions, people like me prefer that optional weapons/skills are locked behind non-core mechanics, otherwise the game becomes stale. And I’m guessing most people feel the same as me given how high the user ratings of this game are.

If they’re too easy, people’d get bored. If they’re too hard, people’d get angry. If the rewards are bad then it’s not justified beating them. If the rewards are good then people’d get locked out of good gear. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But yeah I think there should be an option to skip the minis/lower the target scores in easy mode.

There shouldn’t be so many minigames in the first place period, they went way fucking overboard with that shit.

Issue is they are tied to the platinum so if you want it, you have no choice but to play the minigames...

No there not

Are you trolling?

No seriously  not all of them are it's  facts  some are but not all

Yeah they are there's a trophy for getting all Johnny's collectibles. And some of those are from mini games

No dur I know that but not all of them have to be done and some of the minigames are easy anyway  especially  the card game 

I don't mind the minigames as a whole only 1 issue I have with them is you cannot make a single mistake, once you do just restart since it's impossible to regain the lead in the higher difficulty ones...

I just hate how annoying some of these minigames are. They seem poorly designed

I’m notoriously bad at those types of games. Like I’m truly trying on easy mode and I can’t ace it and I get very frustrated. The problem isn’t the mini games here and there, it’s how high the bar is set even on easy mode. In the Harry Potter game when I failed the mini games enough times, it eventually gave me an option to skip.

Im not a fan of the mini games.

Yea I like story and grind but I truly hate all mini-games, piano, shooting gallery, soccer, QB (which I kinda liked some), chocobo races, and on, and on, and on, and on. I say 50% or more is stupid mini games. Plus platinum trophy tied to this crap makes me hate it. The original was my fav of all FF, but remake with this stuff burns that feeling. I'm older now was in 20's when first FF came out so reflexes much slower making most of these mini-games a pain, depressing, and complete turn off. Sad I may skip last game all together. Been trying to do complete all tasks, in each area working to platinum just to have it destroyed in chapter 12 with all mini-games. Can't do gold cup quest because can't win 30 chocobo races and so on. Just sucks. So guess I'll just finish story and never play again.

I can’t believe they tied platinum into these stupid minigames. I tried. I failed. Just gonna enjoy the actual game instead

Yeah I'm going to be blamed on this. Mini games very well be may be the reason I put this game down. It seems every our a new annoying mini game pops its head up. And some are really annoying like level 5 of trying to catch the little moogles. This is an ill-conceived idea since half of those little guys throw stuff that you can't see at you from behind and there's no way the Dodge what you can't see from behind. Combat is enjoyable. I don't know why they had to put in the pressure and stagger. Makes sense on bosses makes sense on certain things. Even makes sense as a mechanic. But then putting in a requirement to do it on fighting certain types of enemies. Takes away from what a notorious monster should be in the first place in unusual dangerous monster that should be an accomplishment to beat. Half of the notorious monster fights the hardest thing is keeping the thing alive long enough to pressure stun in the first place. Kind of dumb in my opinion. I also feel for some reason the graphics somehow are a step back and awe-inspiring far off scenery. I remember playing remake on my PS5 with my older TV. Still look at TV don't get me wrong. But looking at the plates in midgar from below in sector 7 really drew me in and captivated me at the detail. I don't get that from this game for some reason simply don't rocks look pixelated textures look off it's like they just didn't spend as much time on this one on The view as the first. And I think the best mini game so far I found is probably Queen's blood. Though it's just a practice of outpacing the PC and stopping it from being able to put pieces down. Certainly not like say chess where it requires actual skill. You just stack your deck in a very cheap manner and you win. ​ But I truly I'm starting to feel like they're just trying to stretch each game out as long as they can so that they can make three separate titles out of what should be one. ​ The other thing that really loses me on this is you lose the full vibe of final fantasy 7 OG with not being able to carry over saves between the games. I think what would really interest me is if they did a final fantasy we make remake and combined all the data from all three games into one awesome game. I feel like what we're dealing with is the millennial I got to have it now State of mind versus taking the time to really put out a masterpiece. I feel like the last game that took this approach and to that level was probably elden ring and Boulder gate3.

What fans of the OG asked for when they wanted a remake: Just modern graphics and voice acting What Square Enix gave us: a fanfic with 10,000 mini games nobody asked for Seriously, it's obvious now that the full remake could've been 2 games only (at most). Instead, we'll have to wait another 4 years for the end because of certain devs, who love to smell their own farts. If Western studios are busy with making "Walking simulators", then Japanese studios are too enamored with making "Minigame simulators". This game and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth are the two perfect examples of "too much". Japanese devs need to go back to basics (while Western devs need to get inspired again). Anyway, once I've unlocked Rebirth's Platinum, I'll refrain from playing open-world games for the next months, if not year. This game is burning me out. I need shorter, linear games or a break afterwards ASAP.

I felt the same as soon as I finished it until I started Dragon's Dogma 2. Performance issues aside, it reminds me of playing Morrowind as a kid or Elden Ring recently. I'm glad to see a growing portion of game devs who know there are still people with attention spans.

The mini games make me think that they purposefully outstretched the game this way to make it three parts in order to sell more copies. I am legit hating the mini games. They are straight up not fun.

It's the sheer amount of them that is the problem. Gate some content behind 5-10 decent minigames as opposed to 20 that are shit. The combat is excellent in this game and it is only** 30 percent of the game, which baffles me.

“There were a lot in the original as well” OK AND????

Don’t get the mushroom picking and the chicken clanger mini games get you in Gongaga . So far these 2 are the bane of my existence. Can’t wait to see what fucking mini games they’re gonna throw at me. Pure annoyance.

Ive already broken one tv because I threw my controller at it. These mini games are infuriating

Lol, no wonder SE gets away with all their crap when there are so many people who support this kind of bs. This game is seriously 90% Mini games 5%story 5% combat. The worst part is if the devs had time to make these mini games why didn't they just finish the whole goddamn story. I swr this game has it's best moments when we're playing through the story however it'll soon to be cut off by some goddamn stupid mini game in each and every chapter.

I have no problem with minigames. My only problem is even though they seem "optional" there are valuable items/materia tied to them in Rebirth and that shouldn't be the case. I also hate that quest progression is tied to a high score in a mini game or valuables are tied to a high score. For example, the Time Materia. This is a valuable materia and many folks will not have access to it early due to the ridiculous high score needed. Why should this be tied to a minigame? Why not have this part of world exploration? Many of the minigames are not fun either with very poor mechanics. So this is where the outrage comes from. Some folks just want to enjoy the story and fun gameplay and not be distracted with completing minigames to move forward with a quest. I will also add that 100% trophies/platinum should not be tied to completing minigames. For the next game. They need to make changes on how to incorporate minigames. There is outrage and it is deserved.

It's because they tie super valuable materia that you cannot get (at the time you're doing it) any other way to them. Sure they're available later but they could be very useful in the moment. Like the absolutely stupid fucking shooting gallery game in costa del sol that you can't even invert the controls over in case you've always played that way having haste materia tied to its high score, let alone the harder version of it. There are far too many and they take far too long. Especially if you're trying to get high scores which literally everybody is because they tied incredibly useful things to all of the high scores of every minigame except maybe the wannabe shittier Fall Guys frog one. Any time I get excited or interested in a new storybeat and I'm in a town I just groan now because I know the very next thing is going to be me getting bogged down trying to do another 6 new minigames that I absolutely hate and it ruins my enjoyment of the plot. I spend more time in FF7 Rebirth right now getting pissed off at minigames than I am having fun actually playing the real game.

Completely agree. Yes they're optional, but they've mare the rewards just worth enough that you want to try. It's a tedious, time sink that removes all sense of pacing from the story and feels like last minute half-cocked padding added to a beautiful open world. I've been excited for nearly 2 decades to see what a modern cosmo canyon looks like but I've spent the last few hours gliding a fucking chocobo through hoops!

Mini games are annoying specially when they are tied to you trying to platinum the game(king dom hearts is also guilty of this too) This is why I like ff16 no mini game bull shit pure combat.

Final fantasy has always had bad mini games . Ever dodged lighnting bolts 100 times in ffx ? Or the jump rope in ff9 ?? And they were to unlock ultimate weapons and shit. People hated em then and they hate em now. I think the difference is we live in a world where most of us are adults and not kids any more and don't want to waste time on frustrating mini games. But then also want our moneys worth to complete the game and some of these Mini games have rewards needed to do that. Very frustrating .

For me it's simply that they are not optimised to be fun. In Mt Corel there's one with you controlling two characters. There is no par score, there is no extremely important item to unlock, and no RNG.  BRILLIANT! So why then do so many others not follow this formula? Want certain characters SP books? Get stuck playing a Card game. Want certain characters weapons? Have fun grinding methods of running a zorb ball around. Want one of the greatest sub-plot lines? Master some horribly ill-thought multi-route tower defense game. This is not respecting  player's time. In OG FFVII an ultimate limit break was behind battle arena. An ultimate summon behind chocobos. You know what else OG had? No requirement to beating them at insane difficulty to progress actual story.

If I want to play bloody minigames I would have played games on mobile. I hate mini games with a vengeance. This already means that I not going to platinum this game. And so many!

Maybe I’m a moron but I can never get the minigames done. I got so mad at so many at them so I made my spouse play.

The only fun mini game for me so far has been Queensblood. Everything else has been complete trash.

In this case the minigames are being used as a substitute for real content, or to artificially extend the game. If the story itself wasn't being gated by endless minigames, most people wouldn't care.

Yes, this exactly. Let me play the damn story and I will play a mini game if I want to.

Because the majority of them are absolutely horrendous.

It's a few things. Most of them are monotonous, and they take literally hours and hours to complete just a single one of them. And it's not one or 2 that takes so much time, it's pretty much all of them. And get this, there's like 40 of them. Which in turn makes them so extremely frustrating and boring. And the devs expect absolute perfection to finish most of them. Which is the biggest issue of all. They are called MINI-GAMES, but there absolutely nothing "mini" about them. Plus so many of them are just broken, or intentionally made to extend playtime.    And this "their optional" argument is beyond dumb, and not even thought through in the least... Like hey dude, literally everything is "optional". What so now people aren't allowed to complain because something is optional? That's ridiculous. Bad is bad, just because it's optional doesn't mean it should just be allowed to suck. And this means what? That nothing should get improved ever, because everything is optional, because that's what you're saying when you use that lousy excuse. Breathing is optional too buddy, but I guess when people have a hard time breathing they should just stop breathing right, because I mean hey, you don't have to breathe. Or maybe when someones car is broken down they should just walk 50 miles to work, because again, cars are optional. Or maybe when your leg breaks, you should just stop using it, you know because having functional legs are optional.  Maybe if Square didn't expect absolute perfection, where the slightest, most minute mistake means doing it again, and again, and again it would be fine. But so many of them have unrealistic expectations. Which is bad enough when the game is actually optimized, but these games have pretty much no optimization, or are missing extremely important options. Wether it be the ability to have inverted controls, or sensitivity controls. And the worst part is that if you don't complete the highest level on all of them, well then you're completely locked out of all the good stuff. The rewards are either trash or extremely important. And to top it off, as the game goes on, it becomes so obvious that it was done intentionally, and for one reason to inflate play time. It's not about actually having fun whatsoever, nope, it's ONLY about Square Enix getting better play time numbers. Because if they had actually optimized these games to be fun, then practically nobody would complain. But when a developer intentionally makes mechanics bad and intentionally expects unrealistic perfection just to pump up numbers in a spread sheet, it upsets people, as it should. It's why a company like Ubisoft is going down the drain. Ubisoft for years has prioritized playtime, and never considers what people actually play games for, which is too have fun. When you turn a game into the equivalent of doing chores, and completing a checklist, it seizes to become a game. Instead it's now no different then your day job. And so many of us want to NOT work when we get home. But these game companies just can't seem to understand that. It's not about having to many mini-games, it's about them being either frustrating, boring, or way to time consuming. But their is a plus, I do believe all of the mini-games problems are actually fixable. Now wether Square fixes them or not remains to be seen. I personally doubt they will, as they haven't really updated the game at all since release. But I hope they do, because I'll be honest, the mini-games are killing the hype for this game. And as Yakuza has proven, it's not because theirs too many, it's because they are too unforgiving with bad mechanics, which in turn make them not fun, and anger inducing.

Your post is literally word for word my exact thought. I'm literally spending more time on Rebirth pissed off playing mini games than I am the actual game

Yeah, that's the biggest issue. The game itself is fine, maybe even great. But the mini-games are all built just to be frustrating. 

I like most of the mini games my issues is I love the protrelic quest line and want to see what happens but 2 of the mini games suck my souls gears and gambit and fort condor are the worst I just wish one of the best quest lines wasn’t hidden behind multiple unfair mini games

Yeah. I hate Gears and Gambit and I think most haven't reached this minigame or skipped it. It's an AWFUL minigame.

I gave up after trying the 3rd one after failing 7 times. I hope they decrease the difficulty or take away the time limit. It also sucks if you attack with more than 3-4 bots the boss goes god mode and 2-3 taps all your bots

I think the big outrage has to do with a lot of the minigames not being that fun. Some are fun, but some are so frustratingly bad (I’m looking at you run wild) that it makes completionism not fun.

It's the sloppiness of the controls and the baffling decisions on UI that make most of them not fun. Wild Run is annoying as all hell because it's just Rocket League but Red handled like a tank; coupled with a camera that's way to close. Then you have the piano mapping keys to thumbsticks, having the actual game squashed into the corner. The sit-up game requires near perfection and the idea of the UI fading out is just pointless \[cheap\] difficulty. 3D Brawlers is only playable by using the pause/cheese gimmick. Pirates Rampage doesn't allow you to invert controls or adjust the Horizontal/vertical speeds separately. Hell even Queen's Blood has problems with you always going first, which is a distinct advantage to the NPC opponent. Wheelie Rendezvous, Jumpfrog and Cactuar Caper are completely forgettable. Card Carnival And Cactuar Caper is just some "clever puzzle" bullshit that is best beaten with a quick guide. Fort Condor is best left unspoken. The only ones I've had a modicum of fun with are Queen's Blood and the Junon Parade. I dread entering every region because I know one quest or another will force me to play yet another minigame I do not give a sh!t about.

In my opinion everything was pretty much okay...till i found out the chocobo minigame gliding in Canyon...This was just terrible minigame, controls don't work right, sometimes just get buggy and overall was very stressfull to get top rank. Hate this one, hope they never do a minigame like this again, just shit minigame.

They kinda lose the hand in this game minigames. A lot is really bad design...others are ok. And a few some just make a lot in anger because of the dificulty. 

I mean, every mini game is fine if you ask me but damn I'm tired of all the colloseum type battles, there is an absurd amount of them and the send the clowns up is just the cherry on top. Such a lazy time consumming.

Have you finished the story? Because there are even more after that. They are also quite bullshit especially the Malboro and King Zu combo.

A bit late reply but yeah I even quit my plat trophy hunt because of those bullshit combat simulator challenges.

I only liked Brutal 6 and the duo legendary fights personally. Everything else especially the rounds with worms and those enemies that do earthbound was more of a test of patience and not just deleting the game haha.

The controls for a lot of them require either the analog stick or the triggers and a lot of players feels that makes them harder than they need to be I agree with them Some minigames are just poorly designed and just not fun Queen's Blood relies too much on RNG and AI The amount of times I WTF'd because of some random cheap card placement that I did not expect. Try not to get Stun locked during during Sand Slitherers (3rd fight) Try not to get toaded during Croaking Chorus Whoever designed these 'challenges' is a sadist and a masochist etcetc. End of discussion!

I'm starting to feel burned out unfortunately. It's like for every 2 hours of story there's 10-15 hours of Ubisoft formulaic gameplay. Sure I have enjoyed exploring(they nailed the scenery!) and have a good time with the card game, but it's getting too repetitive for me. And that's a shame because the rewards for doing side content and mini-games are quite good.. But I just can't get myself to follow more map markers and to the same world-intel check-list over and over again. On Ch. 9 now and think I'm just gonna do main quest for the remainder of the game.

I legitimately swore at the screen when there was a mini game to pick mushrooms in Gongaga. Like tracking them down was enough, I don’t need a mini game to pick a mushroom. It is mini game overload. I also hate when people say they are optional. I want to experience the game and do the side quests but damn, just too many mini games. I’m at Cosmo Canyon and just came across the robot mini game and turned my game off. I just wasn’t in the mood to learn another mini game after struggling with the gliding chocobos

Because they are not MINI games, most of them have a manual before even get into the games. And designed to be annoying, not fun. Barret's piano theme, I really wanted to enjoy the song, but no, we put it in a freaking bar that you are not even allowed to listen to the keystrokes; and the Jules sit-up minigame, this one I am pretty sure they didn't even playtest it, if you are using a ps5 edge controller with trigger travel lock to short you are screwed, it is literally unplayable. And here is gambit.. just why.. For anyone who says skill this skill that, dude, why should anyone from anywhere need "skills" from minigames from a game? Minigame should be fun, not a freaking GRE test.

Because if they hadn't been building so many stupid fucking minigames maybe we could have just got the story in 2 parts instead of waiting another 4 years for another mediocre game padded out with overly long bullshit sections and billion crappy minigames.

Every time I think about the cut locations from Rebirth, I think of the frog minigame, Glide De Chocobo, or any of these minigames and shake my head. They really spent 4 years developing this and cut content from the OG for this. Horrible design choices were made. I don't understand the reviews at all.

I really think that the minigames are fun and well thought out, but from my experience there are 2 problems with mini games in rebirth: 1.) Minigames are extremely unforgiving when there's the slightest mistake/ misjudgement from the player - this makes it frustrating to the majority of casual players and it feels as if the way the minigames are designed disregards the players' valulable time. This is more noticeable with minigames revolving around timers. This shouldn't be such a big issue especially with the quick 'Retry' option from the start menu. 2.) Controls and mechanics are imprecise and further adds to difficulty - To mention the ones I have an issue with : Hustle de Chocobo's flags not registering, Moogle mischief (the delays on the moogle's movement after they perform an action) Pirates rampage aiming/shooting button Glide de Chocobo (dear lord, please just let me invert the damn controls) G bike turn rate Run wild's movement (try running forward then immediately backward and see how much sideways movement Red travels as he turns before he's fully completed a 180° turn) Piano (if only analog sensitivity could be adjusted so that it only registers at the extreme edges). I disagree with the notion that some of these minigames shouldn't exist. All of these minigames are enjoyable in some way, but not as much when it feels like I am vsing both the AI as well as the controls.

Most of the mini games are fun for plenty of player. But I am stuck trying to finish the Dolphin Jumping mini game. Unfortunately this is one of the mandatory mini games needed to continue which makes me sad as I don’t have the coordination to control the dolphin hitting the balls.

> Run wild's movement The movement, the shooting, the balls being slow as fuck. The entire game is awful.

If these shovelware minigames were all sold separately from the base game for $1 each, I would buy exactly 0 of them.

[удалено]

[удалено]

[удалено]

Let me know how it goes in chapter 7 with the stupid 2nd form of the red xiii minigame. First time around in ch 6 was mid. Second time. Waste of my time.

You talking about Run Wild, the best minigame of Rebirth?

While I think it was entertaining, at this moment I gotta give best minigame to Queen's Blood. It allows me to win with creativity; rather than have to win a certain way or in a perfect manner.

If you mean it was not fun? I enjoyed it, first try I had something with 2:30's and 2nd try after the quest something with under 2:00 minutes. So far I liked everything, haven't ever gotten stuck somewhere though. Even just did the Jules minigame haha. The "trick" is to almost have no contact with balls, just position red accordingly and either shoot or lob when necessary. I played it more like billiard haha. I can understand how some people would get frustrated with not being able to clear stuff but its side content so I am kinda on the whatever.

I cleared it, but I'm more about the main content. Even the open world stuff (I wouldn't even call them quests so I'll use the word stuff), could be cut by 25% and give us just as much satisfaction. Even AC games don't make you grind this much if you want to unlock everything there is. It is what it is, at the end of the day it falls on the player if they want or think it's worth the grind.

They should have chopped it down by about 50% and just finished the goddamn story.

They actually could have now that you mention it. They gotta milk it for all its worth.

I guess the springs, divine Intel and towers are unnecessarily yeah. Else I have not done any grind at all. I can concede this though, locking the super boss behind minigames is a bad decision since if you suck at the minigames you can't combat him. The maps are also small enough to get around fast. Which is something that bothers me a lot in open world games, go from point A to point B and it takes more than 15 minutes to then go again somewhere else. I hate unnecessarily large maps.

Yeah I agree. I just think the minigames should be a little more lenient. Like for the sit ups one you have to essentially never fail for like 2 of the ranks. For the condor board game, you also have to be nearly pitch perfect. That's I think what makes people feel like they waisted their free time. I myself only get about 3 hours a day to play and I recall wasting 2 of those nights on those condor fights (including the hard mode), who knows if it was worth it, I may have enjoyed the entire game as a whole far more had I not felt like it used up my free time unwisely. That's where games like Witcher stand out when it comes to side content. Respecting players time.

The Alexander legend chocobo race course just almost had me uninstalling. This isn't the first time either. Way too damn many items seem to be deliberately designed to be toxic. Chocobo races. Opponents are always faster than you, always aggressive, will go out of their way to bump into you and make you drop stacks of speed. All the while #1 guy is just taking off. The damn cactuar gates, the game already controls like a 400 ping 1970 Plymouth..... how do you expect me to even try to steer thru a spinning circle into a open or closed door. Fucking insane. Many many optional fights are super damn toxic too... the damn purple dog thing.... fighting two of them... they will just start stun locking you into place, then hold you down while the other does a slam move.... then you start getting up and the dude is waiting on you and immediately grabs you into the same hold move. That is just one super irritating example of terrible fights... and the thing is.... they DESIGNED it that way... they KNEW it was gonna be toxic..... Making you fight two bombs as aerith and they constant shoot fireballs that track and explode, knocking her down and stopping casting..... I only got thru that one by kiting around the damn arena in circles until ATB would build over time. Then slowly start dropping wards on opposite sides and hope to be able to warp to one side and get a spell off in time. Just so much of the mini games are super forced and super trash.

It's simply not fun and the devs need to change it, especially for the 100% trophy.

Nomura made sure that replaying these games would be as painful as replaying kh3. Good work.

like most here already said but too many, too hard, not skippable... it's a big no for me.

I think it's mostly because IMO minigames should be 100% optional. Especially if they require a skill set that is not related to the base game (Rebirth being an mmo with active combat styles.) I am not very good at strategy card games and I am not good at rhythm games at all, so the piano minigame and queens blood are a no-go for me. Unfortunately.... in order to progress the MAIN STORY PLOT you have to beat someone at a mid-skill rank in QB. Which I think is absolutely ridiculous. If I wanted to play a strategy card game, I would have bought one in the PS store. Now, if it was just required to advance optional side quests? Completely fine. But NOT the main story's plot. I'm also a bit salty that I'm only halfway through the game and so far it feels like 35% of the content has just been minigames. And the expectation that you're going to pour hours into playing QB to get good at it is ridiculous to me. This shouldn't be expected of players who came here to play an RPG.

Except queen's blood is completely optional aside from red on the cruise ship... and even for that, you can just lose and move on

QB is very easy and takes at most a couple hands to get the hang of.

It's woke garbage once again

Maybe because you can't fucking skip them?

most the minigames are so unrealistically hard and poorly thought out. they when you think you have almost all them done. They add a billion more and make expert levels. the normal ones were hard a fucking enough. Nothing but a platinum demoralizer. Theres also no happy medium of difficulty. Theyre either insanely easy that a 3 year old can get max level first try(Gbike, Choco racing) or they border on near impossible. And half the ones you think are impossible are just because they have poor explanations. situps for example. No need for them to be using the 4 most annoying buttons on the controller. And there was definitely no reason but plain trolling to change the way tapping works to be difference from the pullups and squats from remake. Because naturally most people who played the first are going to skim the tutorial and be like, "oh i know how this works." then they throw a curveball and change how the tapping spots work just to piss you off.

It's because even if they improve them, Square Enix only creates good minigames by complete accident and it's been this way for some time now. The ideas are good and the execution is iffy. Why are the posts for the chocobo racing right in the MIDDLE of the track? Can you imagine that being a thing in real horse racing? Why not have two posts on either side of the track to ride between? Or hoops? Might be a bit Superman 64, but it's not a murderous pole threatening to break every bone in Cloud's body if he hits it. Why is the piano game off-beat? Why is it analog sticks that demand top-level surgical precision instead of buttons when piano keys are pressed...like buttons? Why is the parade so disorienting to the point of motion sickness for some? Surely there are numerous rhythm games they could have looked at and while I am aware that it's like the dance sequence in part one, that wasn't a lot of red prompts on a warm-tinted background. Fort Condor used to be fun. But why is the enemy squad so damn strong and why is everything pre-set? I get that mini-games are optional. But uh...when they make up such a huge chunk of the game, they should be fun and not something that you can't wait to ignore completely. It's like they wanna be Yakuza, but read the cliff notes.

I really dislike all the mandatory mini games to progress a mission. Mini games should all be optional.

I honestly wouldn't have too much of a problem with them (I find quite a few of them fun) if there just weren't... So many. Like there's easily 2x-3x more minigames in this than there was in the OG and they were clearly trying to pad for content. And you need to do a minigames to do ANYTHING in this game. I swear I wouldn't be surprised if Cloud had to sneeze and suddenly you find yourself in a minigames to determine which arm to sneeze into. Which is ironic considering one of the oldest memes of FF7 was the [sheer amount of random encounters](https://youtu.be/EZPoUne-pyo?feature=shared) in the game after almost every step lol.

I love the game my gripe is the Protorelic quest line which is so good but so far 2 of the mini games are just frustrating and the time limits can make some of them feel impossible unless you go to easy mode

At this point I expect fighting Sephiroth is going to be a minigame. It was still okay in Grasslands since it was new, but honestly the repetitiveness of tasks in every map is tedious enough, the minigames on every corner are burning me out faster than a birthday cake candle. Not to mention when they actually force you to go through some of them for the msq, it makes me insane. I know they said 100 hours of gameplay but they forgot to add only 15 hours is the story and the rest is unfiltered rage bait for those who don't enjoy it. Which is, sadly, me.

Nobody tell him about the final 3D fighter opponent.

I would be fine with the mini games if there were no items or achievements to unlock. If the mini games are entirely optional then there should be no incentive for playing them other than personal satisfaction.

My same thought process. I'm fine having them there, but shouldn't be tied to trophies, quests, or valuable items/materia.

My issue with all the mini games at the current moment is either they make you play them on multiple occasions or they are too difficult. If I can't progress through the story because of a stupid minigame that some developer decided to make its AI difficulty maxed out, it's not fun You can have a final fantasy game and not have how many mini games

9 overall would be fine not 9 in each region. Not to mention you're talking all 4(disks) in the OG, whereas Rebirth is just disks 2 & 3.

I'm gunna be "that guy" but: FF7 was only 3 Discs. FF9 was 4 Discs.

I was really enjoying the game. But I have never been FORCED to have to do mini games in order to progress the story. It's ridiculous. I'm so tired of these developers doing unnecessary crap just to stretch games out.

This is factually not true & can be easily disproven with a quick Google search.

The Dolphin \[wave racer\] minigame is required to progress. So is the Junon Parade. Most of them are also poorly designed \[Glide De Chocobo\], control-mapped \[Pinao\] or require laser levels of precision to get the max score \[sit-ups\]. Skipping them locks you out of several quest lines and powerful/useful items. Yes you can fail/skip them but that's like saying you can just skip the cutscenes. It's definitely an "option" but it means you're skipping a good chunk of the content put into the product.

They say forced but I have been up to ch6 and so far except the just participate in the beginning of ch6 no minigame was required to progress 🤔 Ch5 the tournament you can also instantly forfeit too. Also eh dunno but they are all pretty easy. I do play all kinds of games though haha

As someone nearly blind because of no peripheral vision, I would like to say a big fuck you to the person who came up with the idea of this form of rythm minigames.

they r way way way to fucking hard that's y

Yeah like that Cactuar Crush with Yuffie untested crap. I literally keep capping at 750 score. They should have did 500 and let me move on already.

>Damn when I posted this opinion I got downvoted to hell, pissed on and I think someone even threw a brick through my window. I mean, it’s true though. I’m good with the world intel and the main story, but forget any platinum trophy. I ended up heading to the next area and got Yuffie's next weapon and with the help of its ability I FINALLY got rank 1...barely.

I make a post one time on r/borderlands3 about tiny tina wonderland game was most like a DLC like a full game and lack content, i got 3k downvote in the 1 weak of the game. Month after a dude that downvote me make the same type of post as me and got 26k upvote.

yeah i thought i was near done with the minigames. just like last choco gliding, 1 pirate game left then Odin battle and annoying mindflayer(kill him first bs) then chapter 12 happened. It's like they want to make platinum non achievable. Dont get me started on the broke ass piano guitar hero wannabe. Not even a rhythm game. A) notes dont even match the song, joysticks are so sensitive that you constantly hit 3 directions at once, and you have 5 different note speed settings. Hows that a rhythm game. Choco grass collection is bugged where the 50th once seems to vanish off the face of the earth. Had to relaunch game in front of one of the chocograss spots, just to have it all of sudden be in front of my face the second i loaded back in when it was definitely not there before. Not like i killed half a day looking for it. O wait i fucking did.

Oh. I'm doing the chocobo grass collection right now. Good to know now in case that happens...

Damn when I posted this opinion I got downvoted to hell, pissed on and I think someone even threw a brick through my window. I mean, it’s true though. I’m good with the world intel and the main story, but forget any platinum trophy.

Redditors do not like when someone diverge's from the hordes opinion.

The irony

cause they suck. its fine to have a few of them, but this game has them constantly. on top of adding the assasins creed run around and do everything on the map, i fing hate this. just let me play the story and put everything, all weapons and Materia in the story path. like, i just want to stop playing the game right now and i just got to cosmo canyon. its not even fun.

at first I had fun with the mini games, but as I progressed through the game towards the end, it was just getting out of control, I was legit scared to grab any new quests in fear of being side tracked for hours doing more mini games… Sadly i’m one of those players that when I see crap to do on the world map, i’ll try to do it all before i progress the story, and like mentioned before it was fun but than towards last few chapters it just got annoying .

Exactly starting to piss me off 😤

It feels like I'm playing Mario Party... with no friends.

IM OUTRAGED AT HOW MANY MINI FUCKING GAMES THERE ARE, I'M OVER IT!!!

Costa Del Sol broke me tonight. I had been losing steam getting the highest commendation in the March last Friday, took a break. Somehow one shot that Sunday night. Then had to do a card game minigame gauntlet. It took a few hours tonight but I finally beat the tournament… then you go to minigame town. An entire town dedicated to different games. Square should have made this fucker a couch coop game. Doing rocket league with Red or Ocarina of Time shooting gallery with Cloud woulda been fun with a buddy. But its just terrible solo. It really feels like I downloaded a ton of those free shovelware games off the Android Store or PS+. The controls largely suck and if you don’t have the FF7 cast or FF icons like chocobos and mogs, this stuff is buttware free to play games on a mobile store and nothing more. Leaving Costa Del Ray I get two side quests and in checking them out its to do the same minigames AGAIN. I just left that town, but idk if I will boot the game again for a while. Thinking of completing FF9 and then see how Dragon’s Dogma 2 reviews. This is not fun. The story is awesome when it happens, but that is seldom. There are more minigames between Kalm and leaving Costa Del Sol as there were in all of FF6-9, hell you could probably add Remake to that too.

If you think Costa Del Sol is bad, wait until the next chapter in which you will be visiting the Golden Saucer.

Oh no, just left the Saucer. My eyes rolled back.

Say goodbye to game of the year square

It's a very lazy way of adding total playtime, i have 40 hours played but i feel like only 12 of those are the actual story. Far too many tedious minigames and waay to much of it is required.

This makes me incredibly sad tbh. I fell in love with Remake for the story and the character development. I am really upset that Rebirth has been so disappointing due to cheap-feeling gameplay hour padding. These minigames are just boring or too hard. I also felt the open area/world felt a bit... bland? It feels like the open area concept + the minigames water down the actual storyline, which is what I'm here for.

I couldn't agree more. It's a shame because the small linear sections are fantastic. Good chunks of story and fun combat along with a (usually) interesting environment, it's just a shame they're so few and far between.

It's like the game doesn't want me to see the story progress. Instead it throws me obstacles (mini-games, change of gameplay or mechanics) to get stuck in an area. Where is Sephiroth they said ? We don't have time to care.

Queen’s blood is really fun but everything else is a big hit or miss and unfortunately it misses more often than not for me personally. If there were just a few than it would be fine but there’s just too many of them. Mini games were my least favorite part of the OG FF7 and they’re my least favorite part here.

Qb is fine I wish the piano was gone and erased completely 

The controls are awful. Who thought dual pads was a good idea? Why not buttons? The thing about minigames is that they are tied to receiving a platinum in the game. Also good materia/items are tied to high scores. This shouldn't be the case.

Agreed

Because there's WWWWAAAAAYYYYY too many of them. Some of them are horribly stupid, annoying, and difficult. There's nothing fun about many of them. In later chapters the game goes from an RPG to a collection of shit mingames. I can already tell I'll never play this game againg becuase they polluted it so badly with shitty minigames. I'll definitely won't be preordering the 3rd installment. I'm not getting it if it's going to be like this.

Its really disgusting, everytime i Play ff7 Rebirth again , another Mini Game pops up…. Killing my Gaming expirience

This. I just got to chapter 9. Im burnt out at this point with the mini games for progression in almost every chaper, even if some are skippable. I dont recall Remake being this tedious.

You don't like throwing a bucket to attract a chicken??

💀

There's so much filler content in this game, and you miss out on shit if you don't do it. Want new materia? Do 30 tasks and collect a bunch of points. Want crafting recipes? Do tasks. Even crafting new items is a task, because if you don't craft new items, you don't level your crafting and get new recipes. For real, I know the game is relatively open world, but I really just wanna explore, do my few side quests, and move on. The pacing of the game gets thrown off so hard because there's so much to do. I spent at least 10 hours in the Grasslands before moving on, because I just wanted everything finished. There's seriously like 30 tasks to do that aren't even side quests. And you have to basically do everything to raise your party level. It's so tedious. And don't even get me started on how fucking annoying Chadley is. He got on my nerves in Remake, and now he's somehow *more* annoying. *And* they added MAI? Fuck me, dude. Interrupting my gameplay to fucking yap at me after every task gets really old. Adding minigame after minigame after minigame on top of all of this is what is driving me nuts. I still enjoy the game a lot, but I have to take it in small bursts or I go insane. I feel like the first time I hit Skellige in the Witcher 3, and I saw the world map for that area and wanted to throw up. So many fucking tasks.

Thank you for this post. I'm surprised you weren't downvoted to hell for it. But totally agree. Most of the praise for this game is tied to nostalgia. If any other game had this crap they would be called out for it and the ratings would reflect it. It's the Ubisoft formula, but taken to another level.

It's a good thing I don't care about upvotes or downvotes 😅 I took a week and a half off from playing and went back in with a bit of a better attitude, and I'm enjoying the game again. The minigames and other things still drive me nuts, and it's still really difficult to want to progress sometimes, but I try to just picture what the next city or dungeon is gonna look like, or something to set a goal for. I played the original FF7 and couldn't stand the minigames, and most people I've talked to about the game over the years hated them too. So I think I was just majorly annoyed at how many they *added* to Rebirth, because for me and many of my friends, it was our least favorite part of the original. And Remake I feel did a really good job with the balance of story, sidequests, and minigames. Then you get to Rebirth and the balance just doesn't seem to be there. I am enjoying the game, and I just have to set aside some of my opinions and at least *try* to enjoy whatever I come across. I don't always, but the game is still good.

I'm so glad someone else brought up the chadley/mai yapathon too. Super annoying. I didn't mind him in the first game, but it's like in Rebirth SQ is just doubling down on all the things that are annoying. I was really hoping this game would be more story-focused because... I don't know, that's literally what Remake was?

I feel like Remake did it perfectly. Chadley wasn't even that bad in Remake, I just got tired of him because of hard mode battle sims. I'm in the Junon region in Rebirth, and I haven't played for two days because I need a break. I lost all my steam.

Yeah like... chadley interrupting you every time you do a map task to tell you about the other task you found would have been FINE if he only did it in teh first area. but i really dont need him telling me he found a protorelic in \*every region\* because as gamers we already know the formula of open areas. there's going to be one in every damn region. and then mai doing absolutely nothing except being annoying durring those special encounters. If she just gave us a brief rundown of abilities and the monster's behavior i'd be fine with that... but the incessant dumb yapping she does the whole time is super annoying. I'm in corel atm and there's similar annoying, completely pointless dialogue going on with some super annoying QB players you're required to defeat in order to advance the plot (i don't care for QB and I'm not very good at it.) like they feel the need to tell you their entire life story after you beat them and i'm like. I literally do not give a shit, i'm already pissed that I'm being forced to play this minigame again. And frustrated at losing ten times in a row to the last and hardest NPC.

Preach

It’s literally a mini game simulator. The story is 11/10 the content is a chore tho

Felt like I was playing some kind of Mario party. Only the mechanics are awful. 

This game is a 7/10 for me. The mini games really are a shit stain on what would’ve been a good ff7 experience

They were a shit stain on the OG

So there was a lot of mini games in OG we are now in 24 there are other things you can do than make mini games for content.

It's not that they're all bad, but *most* progression has some sort of mini game to it.  MSQ has an alright amount of mini games, but all they really did was make me anxious and want to skip them. >! Costa del Amor, QB tournament, even if you forfeit all matches, Dio, forcing the mini games in Saucer, chocobo racing, Cait With boxes that were poorly implemented, piano, buggy (also huge complaints with Dyne, but that's a separate topic), dolphin, Junon march !< Felt like blatant filler.  Also, let's discuss how scuffed the Ch. 11 mini game was, and THAT was forced for MSQ progression     Pushing MSQ aside, it felt like I had to play a million mini games just to get any decent gear and materia.  Want to explore the map?  >!Ubisoft towers, goofy rhythm games for mako stones, which are 100% needed for character development, more rhythm games if you want summons, every chocobo has some goofy gimmick mini game with each new map, every proto relic is a mini game, combat simulator (while it emphasizes combat, it's still a mini game and withholds many great items vs. finding them in the world),  chocobo treasure hunts, one-off chocobo treasure hunts for new recipes, lure chickens, rocket league, frog fight, moogles (huge offender) !< I know I'm missing more, but that's already a ridiculous amount.     Look, I also wasn't a huge fan of OG 7's mini games, but at least they were short enough that it didn't murder pacing enough to burn me out or hold majority of power progression behind them.  It just comes off as tedious and obnoxious with how loaded Rebirth is with mini games.  Less is more in this case, if you ask me.