I remember enjoying Incredible Crisis when I first played it on my modded PSP over a decade ago, but I got stuck on a minigame around halfway through. Returning to it, I understand why: this is an incredibly frustrating game, and often not in an endearing way.

The minigames are pretty short, so repeated attempts don't take much investment. This would be fine, except for the fact there are lives. Run out at any point, and it's back to the previous checkpoint, where you may have to replay minigames you've already beaten just to practice the hard ones. There's no reason not to reload a save file if you lose a life at the first minigame of a set, which adds to the tedium. If you don't reload, you risk losing more time from replaying minigames. This is a consistent problem with video games (especially Mega Man), but you don't tend to see it in games of this type, and rarely of such inconsistent difficulty.

In another player-unfriendly move, Incredible Crisis does something unprecedented (?), where it unloads your save file after a game over, for no reason. You're sent back to the title screen and have to manually load your save and sit through more bullshit. If you exit a minigame via the start menu, however, your save remains loaded, so it's faster to do so if you're repeating initial minigames.

The minigames themselves have a lot of negatives. There's only 24, and they still find room to repeat a couple, with one minigame being done three times. Even for concepts that aren't reused outright, many minigames share fundamental gameplay, notably with how many involve button mashing. It's not uncommon to lose one of these marathons due to sheer physical exhaustion. For the final minigame, I would play (mash) for 15 seconds, pause to rest, then resume. It was either that or play this game for another session, which I couldn't stand.

The rhythm minigames, which are among the more enjoyable gameplay, can be utterly ruthless with their input windows. I was stuck the longest on Etsuko and the Golden Pig, which devoured my inputs as greedily as an actual porker. I just barely made it after realizing it preferred inputs after they crossed the metronome, but even that never felt guaranteed.

I also feel insulted that the English localization cut two minigames. They were a karaoke and bomb defusal minigame, which relied heavily on Kanji's nuances. Instead of dealing with the localization challenge, Titus just gave up and removed content. They would've given the game some much-needed variety, and their gameplay sounds like it would've been the most novel of the entire set. There are still cutscenes alluding to the cut minigames, even.

So much of Incredible Crisis feels like the developers laughing at your pain, or desperately trying to extend the game's playtime. It's short no matter what, so they should've just leaned into the brevity and mined replayability from alternate play modes. It's such a shame, because I think the general style of the game is fantastic, and it's pretty funny until it inevitably puts you into a sour mood. Oh, and many minigames' rules aren't fully explained, or are explained poorly, leading to bad feedback as you try and figure shit out. Again, this might be fine if you didn't have lives at stake. Yeah, it's an Incredible Crisis, all right, but crises suck, don't they?