Final Fantasyand awful minigames go together like twink protagonists and spiky haircuts - there is something about them thatjust works.The series is positively rotten with the bloody things, and over the years have been cheesed within an inch of their lives so completionists can abuse them for all their big rewards without much effort. I remember conjuring up a killer strategy inFinal Fantasy 10’s blitzballthat involved hiding behind the goal until time runs out because the enemy team is too dumb to figure out how to respond. I definitely cheated, but after a few hours of grinding I emerged victorious.
Despite their mediocrity, these minigames stand out so much in the context of a turn-based JRPG that millions of us can’t help but remember them. Cloud needs to stop Sephiroth, but the Golden Saucer is filled with arcade games begging to be conquered. Aerith is already dead anyway, might as well kill more time dunking some baskets in the arcade before the meteor comes crashing. I adore the absurdity of it all, although one has been committed to memory more than any other. Snowboarding down the Great Glacier is serious business.
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Your pilgrimage across the Great Glacier is rather serious in terms of the narrative. It’s the final location in your party’s worldwide hunt for Sephiroth, who is hiding inside North Crater waiting for us to stumble across him and set his apocalyptic plan into action. The music is fittingly eerie and confrontational, making it ever so clear that whatever awaits us could be the end of everything. The labyrinthe ascent towards the lip of the crater is defined by precarious cliffs and freezing temperatures as you’re forced to consider your chosen path in order to survive.
Cloud is even required to monitor his temperature, given his first unprepared journey into the wastes results in your entire party fainting and requiring rescue. It’s a fascinating mechanical idea, albeit one that’s introduced far too suddenly and cast aside just as quickly to have real impact. Most of the environments across Final Fantasy are static in their execution, so now having to treat them with attention as I comprehend new threats is strangely enticing. It’s all pretty serious too, until it comes time to descend the mountain and pull off some totes radical moves on our sick snowboard.
To this day, the snowboarding minigame controls like absolute garbage. None of the inputs are explained to you, so the majority of players sorta awkwardly stumble their way through it until coming out at the other end. That’s what I did, even if as a kid I found the pixelated snowmen and optional objectives and balloons to pop a cool little distraction from the base game. Whose idea was this in the first place?
Snowboarding is done solely with the directional pad (hooray) and is so sensitive that even lighter touches will send you careening into a nearby tree. Cloud is a trooper, quick to dust himself off and get back on the board before twatting into whatever awaits around the next corner. You’ll also find balloons to catch and objects to avoid that factor into your high score, although this is far more important on the Golden Saucer arcade machine than in the Great Glacier set piece. I suppose it’s intended as an introduction to an optional minigame players can return to later on, but it feels so out of place when put alongside basically anything else the glacier has to offer. Yet I also admire it, and how Final Fantasy is always down to butcher its own tone in favour of a good time. We all remember it, so it must amount to something.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake has been unpredictable when it comes to what parts of the original it remains faithful to and where it introduces changes. Gameplay and narrative are the same in some ways but unrecognisable in others, with Square Enix hoping to recapture the original spirit while simultaneously expanding upon it. Shinra HQ still has an exhaustively long set of stairs for you to climb, and battle system motifs linger even with the move to a formula driven by real time action. Even the squat minigame stuck around.
Snowboarding is a feature I can easily see being modernised to fit a linear set piece or a side activity for us to sink some serious time into. But I think Square should leave the controls untouched so it still feels like ass all these years later. Really lean into things, so we canlean into thingslike trees and rocks and other obstacles we’re definitely supposed to hit as much as I did Given that the standalone iOS release of the silly snowboarding session is no longer available - yes that really exists - I need a Rebirth to bring back awful snowboarding minigames with a vengeance.
