Breath of Fire IV's Minigames

Oh joy more freaking minigames! Like I ever wanted these. And they are from a Breath of Fire game! Only IV did a better job in not making the majority of them annoying, so that's good. What's bad is that almost all of them are still mandatory.

So the mainstays of fishing and faerie village are still around. The latter seems to be done well, but don't quote me on that since I didn't know much about the faerie village in the previous game. Here, it's somewhat easier to understand, having them do jobs to keep themselves alive and all. Hunting, by the way, can be a minigame in place of regular random battles sometimes, where you help the faeries by using Ryu's sword or Ursula's gun to hunt animals, and it's harder than it sounds since you leave one animal wounded, it's actual meat value drops, and heh, just watching them run away is a pain enough.

As for fishing, meh, I liked it a lot better in Breath of Fire 3. There's a difference between different kinds of fishing locations (there's river fishing in this game) and being able to see which kinds of fish you will be able to catch. Breath of Fire IV has the former. The overall mechanics for catching fish are still the same and still not too tough to do though.

So what about those other minigames? Well, there's one where you gotta feed an old man, forcing the player to be distinctive of what food and drinks are bought. It's pretty easy, all you need is money. Afterwards is a lame betting minigame, again having a ton of money really mitigates this one. There's an extremely dumb shovel game where the shovel actually breaks upon too much use. As someone who's used heavy duty shovels before, that's really not how shovels break.

The first real awful game is that sluice gate thing. It's one where you have to be rather slow at first when rotating a wheel but have to speed up later on until you hit the O button upon the high pitched noise. It's a bit reminiscent of the valve minigame from Breath of Fire 3, except at least you are not sacrificing a plot item, but rather trying not to get Ryu tired from the spinning.

Hide and Seek? Eh, I'll pass. This minigame is even stupider than the one in Breath of Fire 3 game mostly due to the new ability to change camera angles only making it so that finding the kids is hard because of the camera angles. Meaning it's not really hard at all. Also not hard, stopping a thief by blockading something. The cleaning of the storeroom minigame is actually pretty neat. Although timed, it's pretty good, because you remove barrels and properly get items placed and crates stacked. There's a chicken herding game really late without a time limit, and it's not too important either.

Not a whole lot of minigames happen afterwards. The one with the river rafting is way too fast, but at the skin of my teeth I did it on the first go. The sandflier one is okay. The one where Nina has to knock the sailor off the mast is the other really bad minigame, one that almost entirely can be cheesed if you know how, but is extremely difficult otherwise. And another really dumb sailing minigame comes afterwards! If it isn't obvious, anything involving water tends to be the worst minigames of the whole bunch. Hey, Breath of Fire 3 had two awful ones involving Garr, pulling something from water, and getting something from a water well.

So yeah, Breath of Fire 4 did only slightly better in minigames, where there really are only bad ones involving the water or anything associative of it. It had more than Breath of Fire 3, but they were at least decent enough. And the mainstays are still mainstays, nothing too terrible about them.