Not a minigame, but Maniac Mansion being within The Day of the Tentacle is probably my fav.
Let’s be real, Witcher 3 is just a Gwent launcher.
Also I’ve definitely played more Pazaak than KOTOR.
In another life I wouldn’t understand a word of these sentences lol
I fucking love Gwent AND the fact that it’s horribly unbalanced (in The Witcher 3)
Puuure pazaak
I literally could never understand how to play Pazaak. To me it’s just a weird version of Blackjack
So you do understand it.
I honestly don’t like Gwent. Maybe never got into it enough.
Probably not what you are asking for, but the character creation process in the Traveller ttRPG is a great mini game. You basically take a person from 18 to however old you want, and their life path is dictated by your choices and random dice outcomes. It’s a lot of fun. You can end up with a retired admiral, a prisoner or criminal, psionic, etc. Going through this process with a table of friends let’s you build in rich fun connections along the way. The actual RPG then starts with mature, connected characters with a history, instead of 4 randos meeting in a tavern. In the classic Traveller you can even die in character creation. Current iterations removed the death component but you can be maimed from accidents in your career and start the game with a mountain of medical debt.
The full 4K version of Timesplitters 2 inside Homefront: The Revolution, but you have to play something like 75% of Homefront to reach it. I’ll reach it one of these days.
The minigames in shenmue/yakuza. They are literally full games.
Treedude in superhot
And… Umm
Mario party
Caravan from Fallout: New Vegas has a notoriously bad tutorial, but is easy enough to grasp and fun as an early-game money source. Would have benefited from a Gwent-style sidequest chain.
I thought of another one. There is a minigame in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 called Tiger! Tiger that is great. it is basically an arcade game where getting certain scores gives you credits that can be redeemed for upgrades for some characters. The minigame is randomized and has three different difficulty tiers and is overall really well done.
Not sure if it will count, but the Ancient Cave in Lufia 2 (SNES) was a game in and of itself. It was basically a roguelike dungeon. 100 random floors, it reverts you to level 1 and there were rare special items you could sometimes find in runs that could be brought back in. Beating the Ancient Cave is much, much harder and more rewarding than beating the game itself (storyline aside).
I loved the Chao Garden in the Sonic Adventure games.
YES YOU KNOW IT
Sonic Adventure 2 on Dreamcast was peak Sonic. Those things in the controller had a minigame within a minigame for extra costumes and food for the chao.
Pretty much every minigame in Majora’s Mask is making you forget the world is ending
The hunting game in Oregon Trail.
Triple triad from Final Fantasy 8.
Triple triad + Card mod ability = broken game
It might have had a factor in my not enjoying the Triple Triad mini game, as I sometimes get bogged down in just collecting cards to convert into spells and items. Also, the Queen of Cards is a huge pain. And the CC Club sidequest.
CC Club side quest and Queen of Cards spoilers
Completing the CC Club side quest is necessary to complete prior to Disk 4 if you want to have access to them on Disk 4 (they’re inside the Ragnarok). Queen of Cards is available on Disk 4 by default (she’s on the Lunar Pod crash site in Esthar), so you can just play her there for a quicker access to the cards only accessible through her.
I loved Triple Triad, and loved the way it broke the game!
Shout out to all the hours I wasted soft resetting so I could eliminate the Random rule from Ellone. Honorable mention to the Laguna card, which refined into 100 Heroes and made every single fight after it complete child’s play.
I always found the Gilgamesh -> Holy War conversion far more useful for the Omega Weapon fight, especially if the fight is over before I even manage to use half of the 10 items the conversion gives me.
With a low enough level, and a powerful enough junction setup, every single fight (even the final boss fight) is complete child’s play. Too bad I didn’t already know that on my first playthrough.
Never bothered with Queen of Cards quest, as the walkthrough of that is… Sizable, to say the least. Also, there’s only one relatively decent reward out of it (Doomtrain).
As for CC: they are a source of all rare cards besides the ones Queen has. Thus, if you want to have Vit/Str/HP Ups - they’re your best bet (also, getting enough of those makes Omega Weapon fight a breeze, you can reliably kill it without ever reaching Megido Flame and foregoing Holy War usage).
But yeah… Triple Triad is fun, especially since it translates to sth that will impact your game.
EDIT: also, you can get 3x100 Flare on your entire party on the first disc, but it’s a major PITA to get (iirc, 300 Red Dragon cards, so good fuckin’ luck). So yeah… Triple Triad brekas the game if you have the patience for it 😄
EDIT 2: also also, Queen of Cards is available at the crash site on Disc 3 as well
Oh, I know! 😅
In my current playthrough, I used just a few of the techniques I know to get 3×100 Flare for my party to junction to STR and 3×100 Thundaga to junction to Elem Atk (you can get two of them, and the Siren has the third IIRC–it’s been a while since the SeeD exam and the playthrough proceeds at a snail’s pace) before the SeeD exam in order to defeat the “Crab Mecha” on the first available opportunity. All that, while keeping my levels at a minimum (under lvl 10, ideally).
I have the patience for it, but it still gets incredibly tedious and dull.
It’s always fishing.
Loved the fishing in FF15.
Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal had a side scrolling Captain Quark game that was quite good
