Man, do I hate these minigames. I did try them because I didn't want to miss out on content, but the timers are ridiculously short, so there was no fun to be had there. In the end, I only got it working with the mouse instead of the keyboard, but it was frustrating.
It's great that they are skippable, but when you then miss out on content, you could just as well play the minigames and loose. Not a fan of this approach. It's also something I don't understand from devs at all.
Like, I get it, some devs just don't want to accept that a visual novel doesn't have to have gameplay, and so they decide some stupid button-mashing NEEDS to be in their game, but don't lock content behind it, if you do.
NO ONE plays a Visual Novel for minigames, at best they are a fun distraction, at worst they break your immersion into the story and annoy you.
Don't punish players for not wanting to play them or not being good at them, this isn't a FromSoft game.
This game has great production values, looks absolutely gorgeous, great animations, good writing, fun characters, all is great, but then you lose out on content when you don't want to play minigames or for fuck's sake just don't have the energy or drive to practice pressing buttons fast enough IN A VISUAL NOVEL.
I mean, do you actually WANT to punish players for not being good at them or not wanting to play them?
Again, it's a visual novel, it's not about reflexes or learning a sequence of buttons, it's about experiencing a story. The only thing you need to do should be making choices which hopefully have an influence on that story.
It's not like adding annoying minigames suddenly turns this into a fantastic gameplay loop. You have a badass visual novel here, you are doing great, minigames don't make it more of a game or better.
And before the white-knights get their panties in a bunch, it's still a great game and I accept that this is how digi b. wants it to be, but I don't have to like that particular part of it, that doesn't mean I badmouth the game or attack the dev, I just don't like minigames locking me out of content.