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I think I may have said this before, but it's worth saying again: Final Fantasy X has the stupidest minigames of any game I have ever seen. Ever. Some of them could be kind of fun, if not for the fact that all of them are horribly frustrating because of idiotic design flaws.
First off, about the only half way decent minigame in FFX is Blitzball, but even that seems like it was really rushed. There've been times where I didn't have the ball at all for a whole game, except when the other team scored and I got to start with it -- and then they'd immediately steal it again. So I sat there, watching as I lost and not being able to do a thing about it because you can't do anything when you're on defense. The whole thing seems really unbalanced. I've either lost horribly without ever scoring, or totally trounced the other team; only one game has come down to a matter of a single point.
Then there's the Chocobo training thing in the Calm Lands, which I did yesterday. Now, this could be fun, if it weren't totally screwed up by two things: One, the control for your Chocobo is absolutely horrible. Worse than for the Chocobo racing in FFVII, and certainly worse than when you're just running around on a Chocobo in FFX. If I had real use of the analog sticks, instead of the crappy eight way directional control of the d-pad, it would've been about twice as easy, but no, that would've been smart. I mean, they let you have full analog control on the Sphere Grid when you use the sticks, but of course they can't let you have that for control of your character.
And two, there are invisible walls that like to push you towards the center of the "track," which tends to get you hit by the homing birds. Nevermind that the actual cliff wall is still ten feet away, and it's a straight shot to the finish no matter what, it still doesn't want to let you get over there. Even though the only way to dodge some of the birds is to go over there, and even though there are balloons over there. It still tries to push you back towards the center.
Finally, then, there's the butterfly catching game in the Macalania Woods. Again, this had the potential to be fun, except for the fact that you can't actually see where the butterflies are. Giving them shadows on the ground would've been smart, since it would've let you see where you actually have to step to run into them, but no, that would make it too easy. As it is, you basically just have to run through the path over and over again, memorizing the positions of the butterflies through trial and error. And even then, on the first course that I've done, there was a red butterfly that was simply impossible to avoid, so you had to lose some time from that no matter what.
Overall, it looks to me like Square was rushing to try and come up with ways to lengthen the game, since the actual story is so short. And so they came up with this whole big "quest" for the Celestial Weapons, which involves not only finding the weapons, but two other things that you need to actually make them any good.
And of course, what better way is there to make the things hard to get, besides horribly shoddy minigames that will have people cursing the developers' names as they try to complete them? Certainly, having them really well hidden and providing hints and clues to make you solve a puzzle to find them would be far less effective. I mean, that would require the use of actual thought instead of making you fight with bad controls, go through exercises in trial and error, and hope that the game doesn't just decide to screw you by making something impossible to dodge. Really, there's just no comparison.
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