The snowboarding picture on the ToCS2 store page concerns me. I already got plenty annoyed by the swimming (3x!) and festival minigames in ToCS 1. Are there a lot of real-time mini-games in 2 with AP or other story effects (thus essentially unskippable)? How hard is snowboarding? Why is it even in the game? I should probably just forget about it until all 4 games are on gog, and deeply discounted, given that it barely works for me, anyway.

Snowboarding in ToCS2 is entirely optional. You can win some cool quartz and accessories, but otherwise it's in no way connected to the main plot. There's one sidequest that makes you go snowboarding, but even then it's skippable unless you want the full AP yield.

Otherwise it's quite an easy minigame; I maybe restarted a run once in the entire game. Each run lasts for about a minute, and the goal is to collect the prescribed number of flags (e.g. 19/21) and go past the finish post within the alloted time. It's all fairly simplistic, with some jumping and going around obstacles, but nothing difficult.

The only other minigames are swimming (used rarely) and fishing (as a sidequest line). I don't remember any other.

Thanks for the response. I consider "affects AP" and "provides a unique item" to be "unskippable" (because I am a completionist, although only mildly insane). The fishing minigame is trivial (assuming it's the same as 1). Swimming is a bit of a pain, but possible with retries and holding my fingers in exactly the right configuration. Anything that requires precision steering, though (e.g. the festival horse race in 1, which I expect is similar to the snowboarding) kills me (and always has, so this isn't just about me being old and decrepit), so this kind of bothers me, a lot. If I wanted real-time challenges, I'd play Ys or Xanadu or some other ARPG. On the other hand, my completionism also forces me to play the whole series, so I guess I can only hope that they don't keep making things worse. I mean, I realize I'm not the target audience (and never have been), so I guess I just have to accept this kind of crap if I want a decent game.