Triple Triad

Triple Triad is a digital collectible card game and minigame first included in the 1999 Square-developed role-playing video game Final Fantasy VIII. Revolving around collecting and battling cards with images of different in-game monsters, many NPCs within the game world could be challenged to a match, which played out in a diegetic, in-universe manner. Triple Triad is known as one of the most popular minigames of all time, and was seen by many critics as equally as enjoyable as the game itself, if not moreso, gaining a large cult following. It was made into a homebrew PlayStation Portable massively multiplayer online game by fans in 2007, and was later included as a minigame in the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, where it became a regular fixture. In 2015, an official freemium Triple Triad mobile game was released by Square Enix as part of the Final Fantasy Portal. It is sometimes played in real life using fan-made physical decks. Future games in the Final Fantasy franchise introduced similar minigames, such as Queen's Blood in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

Gameplay
The player begins by choosing five cards from their collection, then places them on a nine-space grid with some spaces being marked with elements. Each card has numbers for each side corresponding to their stats. A matching element gives a card a +1 bonus to all stats, while a different element gives the card a -1 penalty. The next player places a card of their own, attempting to capture the opponent's card by matching or exceeding their stat on that particular side. If the stats are perfectly matched, the captured card will also capture any relevant adjacent cards.

Captured cards can be retaken, with the game ending after the board is full. The player who has flipped the most cards is declared the winner, and gains one or more of the opponent's cards. The rules change depending on the game, including hiding enemy cards, disabling the elements, or forcing the player to choose five random cards.

Development
In a retrospective interview, Yoshinori Kitase, original director of Final Fantasy VIII, said that Triple Triad was inspired by Magic: The Gathering, which had been popular at the time. He believed that adding a game played as a pastime by many characters in the world would make it feel more developed. He also sought to add realistic elements from physical collectible card games, like trading with friends and regional rule changes. Takayoshi Nakazato was the minigame's designer, and was contacted on short notice, having already been in charge of the game's battle system. Naoki Yoshida stated that the Final Fantasy XIV incarnation of Triple Triad, along with the Gold Saucer amusement park, was added in order to draw more new players to the game, maintaining a large playerbase.

Reception
A writer for GameFan magazine wrote that he liked Triple Triad more than "most 32-bit puzzle games on console", including Tetris, saying that he had spent so many hours playing Triple Triad that he had forgotten to play the rest of the game. Samuel Roberts of PC Gamer, in a retrospective, wrote that the minigame's music was "ludicrously catchy", and that it enhanced the player's experience in a similar way as Gwent from The Witcher 3. Noting that the game got "pretty tactical", he said that he enjoyed the fact that people could share the enjoyment of a card game in an otherwise war-torn world. Calling it "the perfect minigame", he noted that it was as satisfying as a real-life trading card game would be. Andy Kelly of TheGamer wrote that it was the greatest minigame of all time, saying that they "don't get much better", and describing its music as a "ridiculous earworm". He noted that "there are so many layers to Triple Triad that calling it a minigame feels almost insulting", describing the Nintendo Switch as the perfect console for it. Andrea Shearon of the same publication described the minigame's FFXIV version as so addictive she stopped playing the game, saying she was "way too deep" into it.

Tiago Manuel of Destructoid described Triple Triad as the best minigame in Final Fantasy history, summing it up as "the perfect companion to the quest at hand" and describing it as "the gold standard". Joshua Rivera of Kotaku called it "why I love card games", saying it was "incredibly rewarding to play" due to its seamless integration into the game's world. Saying that he never got into any physical card games during his youth, he stated that Triple Triad showed him how fun they could be, causing a love for "card games of all stripes". Matt Jarvis of Rock Paper Shotgun remarked that the lack of official Triple Triad physical decks was a "baffling exception to Square Enix squeezing every drop of merch money from its flagship series", forcing fans to play with fan-made decks. He noted that fans regularly brought cards to conventions to play and trade.

Legacy
In 2007, fans were noted as having created an unofficial homebrew version of Triple Triad on PSP, complete with servers that enabled online play. An unofficial browser-based version called Triple Triad Advance was also noted as having been active for more than two decades. A freemium version of the game was released by Square Enix in 2015 within the Final Fantasy Portal app. It only allowed a limited number of plays before the player had to wait to replenish energy or pay for more.

Future Final Fantasy games included similar minigames, such as Tetra Master in Final Fantasy IX, which later was included in the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI. In Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the card-based Queen's Blood minigame incorporated similar mechanics as Triple Triad.