I maintain that the minigames aren't bad in and of themselves, but their fatal flaw is that for the rewards that actually matter you need to play them to an absolutely unreasonable degree of perfection or time, and that just makes them a horrible chore instead of the fun optional momentary diversion they should be.

So the real question is, whoever in the hell thought it was a good idea to lock a part for the main character's ultimate weapon behind doing a chocobo race with a clear time of below 0 seconds.