Mini-games don’t have to be awful to make a gamer groan in frustration, but a truly terrible mini-game will push you to the controller-breaking point. Still, whether you love ‘em or hate ‘em, mini-games are here to stay. Those little diversions within our favorite games have been around since at least 1987, when the 15 Puzzle appeared as an Easter Egg in Final Fantasy on the NES.
Fast forward to 2017, when fans finally got their hands on Gwent, a standalone version of The Witcher 3’s in-world, collectible-card game. In The Witcher 3, Gwent enhances the overall game experience without being more fun than the main event. More importantly, it’s compelling to play, even without the larger and more integral rewards of other mini-games✱.
But that’s just it: Gwent is a great mini-game. As such, it’s light years ahead of the myriad pointless and difficult mini-games that have populated the gaming landscape over the last 30 years. Even great games can fall victim to the bad-mini-game trap. For every The Witcher 3 or Fallout 4, there’s a Final Fantasy VII or Fable 2 — fun an♔d well-made t⛎itles with glaring flaws in their mini-game makeup.
Her✤e are 15 terrible mini-games that will make you angry enough to demand better games-within-games from your favorite dev🤡s.
15 Leblanc Massage (Final Fantasy X-2) ꩲ 🦂
Forget everything you thought about Dead Or Alive mini-games being 'adult.' Short of God of War’s opening threesome mini-game, the massage sequence at Chateau Leblanc is one of the most weirdly 'mature' mini-games out there. Summoner-turned-Sphere Hunter Yuna disguises herself as a mook, and must massage rival Leblanc to sleep in order to obtain the Awesome Sphere. The objective tells players they need to “satisfy Leblanc” by treating her to “the massage of a lifetime.” Yuna can ensure Leblanc’s “peak pleasure” by listening to her moans and touching her in just the right ways. Players may obtain one of two accessories for successfully massaging Leblanc to sleep, but let's face it: this mini-game is only included in Final Fantasy X-2 for the titillation, and even that is sparing.
14 Sneezing (Mario🤡 & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story) ⛦
At some point, someone at Nintendo thought it would be a good idea to make a mini-game in which Mario and Luigi twirl around inside Bowser’s nose, knocking pollen into his nasal walls to trigger a sneeze. Somehow, that mini-game made it into the 2009 Nintendo DS game, Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story.
Aside from being a really silly idea, the sneezing mini-game is unduly frustrating. The strange, floating, Mario and Luigi twin top is difficult to control with the DS stylus, and affecting all of Bowser’s allergen receptors requires twirly feats of plumber geometry most of us aren’t used to performing. Simply put, the aꦑmount of time you’ll spend trying to get that last nasal wall to change colors will leave you angry for days.
13 Dragℱon Feeding (Chrono Crosඣs)
This is a simple mini-game, really. Serge can hold and dispense three bales of hay to any of the three dragons before he has to go back for more, and the unfed dragons change color as their anger grows. A hungry dragon will cry and thrash in its stall to let Serg꧒e know it needs attention, but will often stop asking for food as soon as he approaches it. The dragons who pull this little temper-tantrum trick will still grow angrier at not being fed, but will not accept any hay from Serge until they cry out again.
Chrono Cross players only have to complete this mini-game once in order to proceed, but may return for the Stablekeeper’s prizes, the best of which goes to the intrepid gamer who can feed the dragons 100 times in one go. Gooꦏd luck doing that with those finicky dragons, thoඣugh.
12 Swimming (Tiny Toon Adventures: W💯acky Sports Challenge)
Tiny Toon Adventures: Wacky Sports Challenge is a mini-game collection centered on an Olympics-like challenge in Acme Acres. It offers more than a few great events in its lineup, but this godforsaken swimming mi🃏ni-game will make you pull your hair out. It lacks even the slightest hint of competition or skill-testing challenge, and ultimately comes across as more of an interactive load screen than 💖an actual mini-game.
In this event, four competitors swim through a shark-infested course to collect food, air, and monetary prizes, and the player with the highest score at the end of the race is declared the winner. Staying at the front of the pack guarantees that you’ll hit whatever comes at you, be it money or a hungry shark, but it also means you’ll likely miss out on the air you need tඣo survive the race without — literally — choking out.
11 Juꦓmping Rope (Final Fantas▨y IX)
Square tried to come up with an interesting mini-game that allowed Final Fantasy IX players to interact with the background characters in one of the game’s major cities, but the end result was one of the most a🌱ngry-making mini-games of all time. The mini-game offers a lot of great prizes, including four Tetra Master cards. The ultimate reward of jumping rope, however, is an exclusive Key Item name𝔉d King of Jump Rope, and it’s truly awful to obtain.
This mini-game involves repeatedly pressing a button to c🅠ommand Vivi or Eiko to jump over the little Alexandrian girls’ rope. Simple enough, right? But King of Jump Rope may only be won by jumping 1,000 times in a row without failing. That’s about seven minutes of constant button-mashing, played against a computer that changes up the tempo and gives really bad button prompts. Even completionists want to skip this one.
10 ও Right In The Eye (WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$!🐼)
WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! is a GameBoy Advance mini-game compilation that features a whole bunch of games that don’t make much sense. That’s OK, because it’s all part of the Wario charm, and needle-threading fits right i🗹n alongside toast-catching a▨nd nose-picking.
The problem with Right in the Eye is that the game’s coding occasionally renders it unbeatable. Players have a lim🌟ited amount of time to guide a thread toward the eye of a randomly placed needle, which they must do over and over again in order to clear the challenge. But in the third level, when the difficulty has already increased twice, the needle will sometimes spawn too low to be threaded, making it imposs𝕴ible for even the most experienced player to beat. Pretty sneaky, Wario.
9 Chicken Petting (Harvest Mooꦅn: The Tale Of Two Towns)
When everyone’s favorite farming-simulator franchise moved to the Nintendo 3DS, it added a new way to increase the happiness of your livestock: petting. Harvest Moon: The Tale of Two Towns randomly initiates a petting mini-game whenever a player approaches one of their animals. It’s not the most riveting mini-game in the world, but being boring isn’t what leads to Tale of Two Towns’ mini-game downfall. Instead, it’s the rarꦰity with which𒈔 the game allows you to commune with your chickens that really does this one in.
The chicken-petting mini-game only rarely shows up, and it’s only available for a limited time when it does. There’s no known way to force-spawn the mini-game, which leaves Harvest Moon players — and their relationships with their chickens — at the mercy of the game’s 🦩unpredictable and unforgiving algorit൩hm.
8 Hacking In Pretty Much Everything 𒅌
Oh, hacking mini-games. You have to love them, even as they disappoint the heck out of you. In truth, some of the best mini-games in recent memory have been hacking-themed, but all that glitters is not gold. There a☂re some truly terrible hacking mini-game𒉰s out there, so here’s a quick overview of what makes a bad hacking sequence.
BioShock 2 backed off of the liquid flow-connection mini-game of its predecessor by switching to a needle-stopping mini-game that felt more akin to disarming a bomb than hacking a Circus of Value machine. Mass Effect 2 had players hunting down segments of scrolling code by color and shape alone. The worst by far, though, was Alpha Protocol, which challenged you to line up short sequences over the unmoving titles in a shifting grid, to disorienting effeꦍ൩ct.
7 𒆙 Flash Forward (Mario 🦄Party 10)
Flash Forward would almost certainly top a list of pointless mini-games. This Mario Party 10 staple pits four competitors against each other and a clock ticking down to a camera flash. The goal is to be standing on a riser, p𒆙osing for the camera, when the flash goes off. You can sp🐷end the countdown trying to push your adversaries off of the riser or out of the shot, or you can wait until it’s almost showtime to jump on the little stage and light it up with your best pose.
Unfortunately, as is the case with many Mario Party mini-games, there’s no logical explanation for Flash Forward. No one can tell you why Mario, Luigi, and their friends are trying to be the most ♔selfish camera෴ hogs in video-game history. They just do, and so do you, if you want to win the game.
6 ꧒ Yoshi Racing (Super Mario RPG: Legend Of The Seven Stars)
Long before Crypt of the Necrodancer had you moving to the rhythm of the music, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars wanted you to race to it. After reaching Yo’ster Isle, Mario finds his old pal Yoshi, who tells him that a blue Yoshi named Boshi is ruining the Yoshis’ racing fun. In order to restore balance to the Mushroom Derby, Mario must ride Yoshi to victory against Boshi. It doesn’t make much sense, but it could have been a fun mini-game, even if the sole purpose was to incorporate the Yoshis into Super Mario RPG. The fatal flaw in the Yoshi-racing mini-game’s design is that players must rely on their beat-matching skills to defeat Boshi, and the Mushroom De🍎rby theme proves difficult to🅰 follow for non-musical gamers.