Congratulations on the good day. Each one counts.
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I just recently got Yakuza 6, after it finally ported to Steam, and while playing it I had the following thoughts:
When the Remastered Editions of 3, 4, and 5 came out on Steam, I happily gobbled them up, but when I was done I realized I played through them too quickly, and there were a couple weeks still until 6 released. Until then I had to see other games behind Yakuza's back, and I have to say I had a revelation. I was playing Sekiro, beating my head against a bull with flaming horns for the 20th time, just getting a headache and wishing for a diversion from this frustration. I so wanted to have Wolf to have some minigames he could go to and blow off steam, like Ninja Mahjong, Samurai Horse Shoe Throwing, Geisha Cabaret, A substory where you have to sneak some Feudal era erotica for the curious young master, just anything that wasn't throwing my corpse at powerful enemies until I finally squeak out a narrow victory.
My revelation being that the minigames in Yakuza make me appreciate its main content that much more, because I'm not being led by the nose from story mission to story mission, with almost no change in theme or tone at all throughout. The side content lets you appreciate the game from many different angles. And I'm only using Sekiro as an example here, the idea applies to any given game, but it is especially apt to me because a game like Sekiro so badly needs a "Pressure Release Valve" built into it, something to do that'll take the player's mind off of their recent failures and let them refresh themselves with a change of pace and tone. The player can always just quit out of the game, but that so often feels like rage quitting and leaves a sour taste in my mouth, and probably other players' mouths as well.
Then when I got sick of Sekiro, I picked up Omori, and fell in love with the extremely funny side content. There's an optional side job where you're a pizza deliver boy, and your boss gives you handwritten directions, and the challenge comes from reading his gawdawful shit handwriting and I just appreciate how awesomely funny this entire little sidequest was. The fact that it was totally optional, nothing at all was steering me towards it, and that it provided a pleasantly surprising change of pace and tone from the 'main content' of the game, was what tickled me silly and elevated my overall opinion of the game.
So yeah, my personal perspective on what constitutes "good game design" has been updated to be very preferential towards minigames and side content. Thanks Yakuza.