The best games within video games
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth features a card game so compelling that many of us at Polygon have struggled to focus on the main adventure. Who wants to save the world when they can be playing a round of Queen’s Blood at the tavern, humiliating the locals by deploying a perfectly timed chocobo card?
We’re marks for this sort of distraction: the beloved game within a game. Likely you’ve come across one of these novelties before, like Gwent in The Witcher 3 or (speaking of Final Fantasy) Blitzball in Final Fantasy 10. These aren’t typical minigames but meaty experiences that, given the chance, could and sometimes do stand on their own.
Queen’s Blood is part of a trend of modern games within games. In the first two months of 2024 alone, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (discussed below) crammed multiple games into its sprawling RPG world, and Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash featured Jujutsa 2024 Baseball, a retro baseball game arguably better than its parent fighting game.
To celebrate Queen’s Blood and its ilk, the Polygon team has collected our favorite games within games. We’d love to hear about your favorites in the comments!
Found within: Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
A sprawling RPG with a heart of gold, Infinite Wealth continues the Like a Dragon (née Yakuza) franchise’s commitment to earnest narratives about the power of friendship, variety in play, and ridiculously silly fun.
Infinite Wealth’s story stretches across Hawaii and multiple cities in Japan, with a seemingly endless array of activities. There’s the usual buffet of bite-sized minigames — sports games, card games, dating games, collectible games, and so on. But the trio of the Animal Crossing-inspired Dondoko Island, the Crazy Taxi-inspired Crazy Eats, and the hilarious returning Pokémon parody Sujimon are each fun, engaging, and deep enough to justify their own spots on this list. And they’re all just a part of theInfinite Wealth experience.
At the heart of it all is sweet Ichiban Kasuga, always relentlessly
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