Miyoo Mini Plus 2026: 25,000-Game List, $63, 7/10

The box promises 25,000 games. Some 2025 and 2026 retail listings round that up to 28,000. A few braver sellers have printed larger numbers still, working on the sound commercial theory that nobody ever counts. This is a review of that number, and of the pile of files hiding behind it.

Here is the thesis, delivered early so you can leave if you disagree with it: the Miyoo Mini Plus game list is simultaneously one of the most dishonest things you can buy for sixty dollars and one of the most quietly satisfying. Both statements are true at once, and holding them together is the entire job of reviewing this device. The advertised library is padded with duplicates, region variants, broken dumps, ROM hacks, and a generous helping of games the hardware cannot physically run. Underneath that padding sits a genuinely excellent pocket-sized canon of 8-bit, 16-bit, and PlayStation 1 software that the little machine runs beautifully. The review is the act of separating the marketing arithmetic from the machine you actually hold in your hand.

So we will do exactly that. We will count what is real, name what plays well, expose what is filler, price it honestly, and put a number on it at the end. The number, spoiler, is not 25,000.

The 25,000-Game Lie

Every review of a preloaded handheld eventually collides with the game count, and every honest one has to admit the count is a genre of fiction. The Miyoo Mini Plus is the purest specimen of that fiction currently on sale, because its whole pitch is the number. Strip the number away and you are left with a very good three-and-a-half-inch d-pad machine, which is a harder thing to sell in a marketplace grid than the word 25,000.

What the box actually promises

Across 2025 and 2026, official-store listings market the Mini Plus as a retro handheld with 25,000+ games preloaded, at a headline price of $62.99 USD, with third-party retail pages drifting anywhere from about $69.00 to $109.90 depending on region and bundle. The spec framing is consistent: a 3.5-inch IPS panel, a Linux-based operating system, 3000 mAh of battery, and bundled libraries spanning Atari, NES and Famicom, Game Boy and Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 1, and more. Retro Game Intensity's 2026 writeup goes further, describing a 128GB package it labels as 28,000 games. That is the promise: a museum in your pocket, wing after wing after wing, all for the price of two new Switch cartridges minus tax.

Where the number actually comes from

The number comes from counting files, not games. A three-disc PlayStation release like Final Fantasy VII is three files, so it counts as three. Add the USA dump, the Europe dump, the Japan dump, a fan translation, two ROM hacks, and a bad rip that crashes on the third boss, and one game has become seven line items. Multiply that across every platform and you understand how a few hundred worthwhile titles bloom into five figures. staresback's own file-by-file teardown, in our count of the 28,000-ROM set that resolves to roughly 6,041 unique games, found that something like three files in four are duplicates, region variants, hacks, or shovelware. The 28,000 is real in the sense that the files exist. It is a lie in the sense that you will never play most of them, and could not tell the difference if half of them vanished overnight.

The number that actually matters

The useful number is small and nobody prints it on the box. A 2026 pixel-swish editorial narrowed the entire system down to six favorites across three consoles, on the correct instinct that the honest editorial angle is not the raw library count but the pick-up-and-play subset you actually return to. Handheld Picker's 2026 review lands in the same place, framing the Mini Plus as a short-session machine and naming Chrono Trigger, Pokemon, Castlevania, Final Fantasy VII, and Metal Slug as representative fits. That is the review in miniature. The device is not a 25,000-game library. It is a two-hundred-game library wearing a 25,000-game trench coat, and the two hundred are genuinely great.

What the Hardware Can Actually Run

A game list is only as real as the silicon under it, and the Mini Plus is a deliberately modest piece of silicon. It has roughly 128MB of RAM, which is the single most important fact about the entire library, because it draws a hard line through the list at the PlayStation 1. Everything below that line generally sings. Everything above it is a negotiation, and usually one you lose.

The comfortable ceiling: 8-bit, 16-bit, and PS1

A 2026 emulation guide from Playhouse puts the confident zone plainly: the Mini Plus handles Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES, SNES, Mega Drive and Genesis, Master System, Neo Geo, and most PlayStation 1 games well. That is a colossal amount of the medium's best work, and it is exactly the range that thrives on a 640x480 panel and a d-pad. Sprite art at this resolution is crisp and correct rather than muddy; the systems in this band were designed for exactly this kind of short, dense session. If a game defined a childhood between 1985 and 2000 and did not require a third dimension, the Mini Plus almost certainly runs it without complaint.

Where the list writes checks the silicon cannot cash

Above PS1, the promises get thin. The same guide is candid that N64, Dreamcast, and Nintendo DS are more limited or outright unsupported. It offers a lighter-3D shortlist that technically boots, including Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye, Star Fox 64, F-Zero X, Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, and Power Stone. Here is the deadpan catch nobody in the marketing department will say out loud: the Mini Plus has no analog stick. It is a Game Boy-shaped device with a d-pad and nothing else. Running Super Mario 64, a game built from the ground up around an analog stick, on a digital d-pad is a technically-true, practically-miserable exercise. If you genuinely want Nintendo 64 done properly, that is a different purchase entirely, and we covered the FPGA end of it in our look at the Analogue 3D and its 2x horizontal upscaling. On the Mini Plus, treat the 3D list as a party trick, not a use case.

OnionOS, stock firmware, and the 0628 label

Out of the box the device runs a Linux-based stock firmware, and LoMiyoo's 2025 to 2026 support materials document a concrete build labelled Miyoo mini+ plus 0628 firmware as one of the downloadable updates. Most owners who care replace stock with OnionOS, the community custom firmware that turned the original Miyoo Mini into a cult object and does the same favor here: cleaner menus, better box art scraping, RetroArch under the hood, and save-state handling that actually behaves. Whichever way you go, the emulation is standard RetroArch cores, which means you are never trapped inside the seller's bundle. If you would rather build a clean, curated library from your own dumps, you can install the cores yourself in about thirty minutes and never touch the preloaded card again.

Specs and the Library at a Glance

Before we praise the good half of the library, here is the machine and its list in one table, because a game list cannot be reviewed in a vacuum. Every entry below explains something about which games are worth loading and which are decoration.

The spec sheet

Reading the specs like a librarian

Read that table as a filter, not a brag sheet. The 128MB of RAM tells you which shelves are load-bearing: everything through PS1, nothing reliably above it. The absence of analog sticks tells you the library's center of gravity is 2D, where a d-pad is an asset rather than a handicap. The 640x480 IPS panel tells you sprite-based art will look intentional and clean while polygonal 3D will look like a rumor. And the lack of any video output tells you this is a solitary, held-in-hand device, which quietly deletes an entire category of the library, the multiplayer one, before you have loaded a single ROM.

The storage math

The 128GB bundle is where the 28,000 claim lives, and the math is instructive. A GB or GBC ROM is measured in kilobytes; a GBA cartridge in single-digit megabytes; a compressed PS1 disc in a few hundred megabytes. Pack a card mostly with tiny 8-bit and handheld files and you can list tens of thousands of entries while occupying a fraction of the space, which is precisely why the count balloons on the low-effort end of the library and thins out among the games you actually planned to play. The number is a function of file size, not curation. It measures the seller's willingness to paste in another archive, nothing more.

The Core Library That Justifies It

Now the good part, and it is genuinely good. Ignore the count entirely and the Mini Plus still delivers one of the strongest pick-up-and-play libraries you can carry, because the systems it runs best happen to contain a disproportionate share of the medium's canon. This is the section that turns a 3/10 marketing count into a defensible purchase.

The 8-bit and 16-bit backbone

The spine of the library is the third and fourth console generations, and it is close to definitive. Chrono Trigger alone would justify the SNES core; add the run of Mega Man 1 through 5, Contra, Double Dragon, and the Mega Drive and Master System catalogues and you have hundreds of hours before you leave the sprite era. The Neo Geo library is a particular gift on a d-pad: Metal Slug, the run-and-gun series Hardcore Gaming 101 has documented in exhaustive loving detail, was built for a two-button arcade stick and translates cleanly to a tight directional pad and face buttons. These are the games the hardware was born to run, and the ones you will keep coming back to long after the novelty of the file count has worn off.

The PlayStation 1 shelf

The PS1 shelf is where the list stops being nostalgic and starts being serious. Playhouse's 2026 guide lists the reliable set: Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX; Crash Bandicoot 1 to 3; Spyro 1 to 3; Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; Metal Gear Solid; Tekken 3; Gran Turismo 1 and 2; and Resident Evil 1 and 2. Retro Game Intensity's list adds the cult tier, including Xenogears, the half-RPG, half-visual-novel whose famously truncated second disc, as Hardcore Gaming 101 recounts, had to be reduced to characters narrating what would have happened because the budget ran out. The history here is dense enough to have its own scholarship: the Digital Antiquarian's essay Putting the 'J' in the RPG, Part 2: PlayStation for the Win notes that Final Fantasy VII's English translation was completed in roughly a couple of months by a single unsupervised employee, a detail that explains a lot about the era and nothing about why the game still holds up. The Mini Plus runs all of it, three-and-a-half inches at a time.

The handheld canon

And then there is the device's spiritual home: the Game Boy line. This is a handheld running handheld games, and the fit is exact. The GeekBuying list surfaces the early-numbered classics such as Donkey Kong, Double Dragon, and Final Fantasy Adventure, then rolls forward into the GBA era with Mega Man Battle Network, Crash Bandicoot XS, and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. Add the Pokemon generations Handheld Picker singles out and you have the exact library the hardware was, quite literally, shaped to hold. On the handheld shelves the count and the quality finally converge: nearly everything here is worth the microSD sector it occupies.

How the List Is Actually Distributed

To understand why the count is dishonest, you have to look at how the list is physically organized, because the structure is the tell. This is not a curated storefront. It is a stack of numbered archives someone unzipped onto a card, and the seams show.

Numbered archives and ROM filenames

A GeekBuying post, first published in 2023 and still hosting the expanded list into 2024, shows exactly how sellers distribute the library: as numbered archives with raw ROM filenames, in the thousands. A representative slice of what lands on the card looks like this, and the numbering is the whole story.

/mnt/mmc/Roms/
  GBA/
    0001 - Donkey Kong (USA).gba
    0002 - Double Dragon Advance (USA).gba
    0146 - Mega Man Battle Network (USA).gba
    0512 - Crash Bandicoot XS (USA).gba
    0733 - Kingdom Hearts - Chain of Memories (USA).gba
    1187 - Jurassic Park III - The DNA Factor (USA).gba
    1994 - Frogger's Adventures - Temple of the Frog (USA).gba
  GB/
    0004 - Final Fantasy Adventure (USA).gb
  SFC/            # SNES / Super Famicom
    Contra Spirits (Japan).sfc          # NOT a GB game, despite the seller lumping it in
  FC/             # Famicom / NES
    Mega Man 1.nes ... Mega Man 5.nes
  PS/             # PlayStation 1
    Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 1).chd
    Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 2).chd
    Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 3).chd   # three files, counted as three "games"
    Castlevania - Symphony of the Night (USA).chd

Note two things. First, Contra Spirits is the Japanese title of a SNES game, yet the seller's own description filed it beside Game Boy entries, which tells you how much hand-curation went into this: none. Second, one three-disc RPG occupies three numbered slots. Multiply both effects across the whole card and the five-figure count assembles itself automatically.

The long tail of junk

The GeekBuying list keeps climbing into later-numbered GBA territory with entries like Jurassic Park III: The DNA Factor, American Bass Challenge, and other releases nobody has requested since their launch quarter, before spilling into a 2000s-numbered section headed by curiosities such as Frogger's Adventures: Temple of the Frog. This is the long tail, and it is where the count goes to inflate itself. It is not malicious, exactly. It is simply what happens when the organizing principle is add another archive rather than choose the good ones. The presence of an obscure bass-fishing GBA licence in slot four thousand is not a feature; it is a symptom.

The repackagers and the 28,000 claim

The 128GB repackagers push the same logic further. Retro Game Intensity's 2026 article, built around a 128GB Mini Plus package it bills as 28,000 games, name-checks series including Ace Combat, 40 Winks, Xenogears, Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles, and Tetris the Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus. Read that list carefully, because it convicts itself: Crisis Core and The Dracula X Chronicles are PSP titles, and the Mini Plus does not run PSP. They are on the card. They will not boot. That is the clearest possible proof that the 28,000 is a count of files, not of playable games. And one point the author, The Machine, is contractually obliged to make: every one of these ROMs is somebody else's copyright, redistributed without a licence. The seller counts them as an asset; legally, they are a liability they have quietly handed to you along with the microSD.

Game List vs Peer Handhelds

A game list does not exist in isolation. The question is never whether the Mini Plus library is good in the abstract, but whether it is the right library for the money against the obvious alternatives. Here it is against its closest peers, judged on what the libraries can actually do rather than what the listings claim.

Miyoo Mini Plus vs Anbernic RG35XX

The natural rival is the Anbernic RG35XX, and the two are close enough that the choice comes down to two or three specifics. Both ship enormous bundled libraries, both share the same practical PS1 ceiling, and both run essentially the same RetroArch cores. The differences that matter are memory and outputs. We laid out the full split in our 128MB-versus-1GB breakdown of the two handhelds; the short version is that the RG35XX's extra RAM buys a slightly more forgiving experience at the ragged top of the PS1 range and, crucially, an HDMI output the Mini Plus lacks. If your library dreams involve a television, that single port decides it.

Miyoo Mini Plus vs Retroid Pocket

Step up to the Android-based Retroid Pocket line and the comparison inverts. The Retroid ships with no bundled library at all; you bring your own dumps. In exchange you get analog sticks, gigabytes of RAM, and a ceiling that reaches Dreamcast, PSP, and beyond, which is exactly the tier the Mini Plus fails. We ranked the whole family in the Retroid Pocket lineup, ranked, and the takeaway maps cleanly onto this review: you pay roughly four times the money for the generations the Miyoo cannot touch. If your must-play list is Super Mario 64 and Sonic Adventure played properly, the Mini Plus is the wrong tool and no amount of bundled files fixes that.

What the comparison actually tells you

The pattern is consistent. The Mini Plus wins decisively on pocketability, on the tactile quality of its d-pad for 2D and fighting games, and on raw dollars. It loses on ceiling, on video output, and on the honesty of its library count. Nobody buys a Mini Plus for its top-shelf 3D catalogue; they buy it because it is the most charming way to carry the sprite era in a jacket pocket, and because sixty dollars is a rounding error. Judged as that, the library is not just adequate; it is one of the best-value collections in the category.

Five Ways the List Actually Plays

A list is an abstraction until someone plays it, so here is how the library behaves for five different kinds of player. This is where the marketing count finally stops mattering and the actual experience takes over.

The casual and the commuter

For the casual player, this is the ideal machine, and every credible reviewer agrees. Handheld Picker's 2026 review frames the Mini Plus squarely as a short-session device, and the whole design cooperates: instant sleep and resume, a 3000 mAh battery that clears a commute with room to spare, and a library dense with games engineered for the ten-minute burst. A round of Metal Slug, a gym battle in Pokemon, three screens of Mega Man: this is the natural rhythm of the device, and the commuter is its patron saint. For pure pick-up-and-play, nothing at this price does it better.

The completionist and the speedrunner

The completionist gets a mixed verdict. The JRPG shelf, from Chrono Trigger through Final Fantasy IX to Xenogears, is deep enough to swallow entire seasons, and RetroArch save states make the grind portable in a way a real PS1 never could. The counterweight is the screen and the single-handed ergonomics; a sixty-hour RPG on 3.5 inches is a commitment, not a lark. The speedrunner gets a sharper split. The d-pad is precise and low-latency enough that 2D platformers, shmups, and fighting games feel legitimate, and Metal Slug on this pad is a genuine pleasure. But save states are not runs, the absence of an analog stick rules out the entire 3D speedgame canon, and no serious leaderboard will accept an emulator this casually configured. Treat it as practice hardware, not submission hardware.

The co-op player

The co-op player is simply out of luck, and this is the library's quietest failure. There is no HDMI to throw a two-player fighter onto a television, no second controller port, and no functioning link-cable emulation for the trading and battling half of the handheld canon. A library that contains Tekken 3, Contra, and generations of Pokemon and can share none of them is a library with a hole in it. If your retro memories are social ones, the Mini Plus is the wrong shape, and a device with video output such as the RG35XX is the better answer.

Pricing and Where to Buy

The list only makes sense once you know what it costs, and the pricing is a small ecosystem of its own, complete with traps. The good news is that the honest price and the best price are nearly the same number.

Official versus street

The official Miyoo storefronts anchor the device at $62.99 USD and run periodic sale promotions in both euros and dollars. On the street the number holds steady: a 2026 report from Pocket Retro Gamer put the Mini Plus around $65.99 at LitNXT, and Retro Handheld HQ's 2026 review estimated a comparable $55 to $65 through marketplaces like AliExpress and Amazon. The spread is narrow because the hardware is a commodity; what varies is the size of the microSD card and the ambition of the bundle stapled to it.

The bundle trap

The one decision that costs real money is the card size, and it is a trap dressed as a deal. The jump from a modest card to the 128GB, 28,000-game bundle is almost pure padding: you are paying extra for the long tail of duplicates, region variants, and unbootable PSP files described earlier. The incremental games you actually want are small enough to fit on the cheapest card offered. Buy the base bundle, or buy a blank high-endurance card and load it yourself.

What you should actually pay

Roughly $60 is the correct price for a Mini Plus, full stop. At that number it is a superb object. Every dollar above it is buying either a slightly nicer color or a larger pile of files you will delete, and neither is worth a premium. If a listing wants $100-plus because it promises the biggest library, you are being sold storage as if it were curation. Decline, buy the cheap one, and curate it yourself.

Who This List Is For

Recommendations, then, with the count set aside and the actual experience in view. The Mini Plus library is a scalpel, not a Swiss Army knife, and the buyers it fits, it fits perfectly.

Buy it if

Buy it if you want the best pocketable 2D and PlayStation 1 machine that money can buy for the price of a big pizza. Buy it if you value a proper d-pad, because the fighting games, platformers, and shmups that dominate the good half of this library live and die by it. Buy it as a first retro handheld or as a gift, because nothing else introduces the sprite era this cheaply or this charmingly. And buy it if your play style is short and frequent, the commute and the couch and the queue, because the whole device is tuned for exactly that rhythm.

Skip it if

Skip it if your must-play list lives above the PS1 line. N64, Dreamcast, Nintendo DS, and PSP are either compromised or absent, and no bundle count changes the silicon. Skip it if you want to play on a television or share a screen, because there is no video output and no real co-op. And skip it if you specifically want analog-native 3D games played the way they were designed; for that, the money belongs in a Retroid Pocket, not here.

The move nobody markets: bring your own ROMs

The recommendation the sellers will never print is the best one: buy the hardware, ignore the bundled card, and build your own library. Flash OnionOS, load a curated set of your own legally-obtained dumps, and you get a machine with none of the duplicate bloat, none of the unbootable filler, and none of the copyright baggage the vendor quietly handed you. If you would rather assemble a clean core catalogue than inherit a stranger's junk drawer, our walkthrough of how to install the emulation cores yourself in about thirty minutes is the honest path to the same library, minus the fiction.

Pros, Cons, and the Verdict

All of which leaves us with the reckoning. The Miyoo Mini Plus game list is two products wearing one label: a dishonest count and an excellent core. The score has to weigh both, because you are sold the first and you keep the second.

The pros

• A genuinely elite 8-bit, 16-bit, and PS1 core: Chrono Trigger, Symphony of the Night, the Metal Slug run, Final Fantasy VII through IX, and hundreds more that the hardware runs cleanly.
• A d-pad and 640x480 IPS panel perfectly matched to the 2D library that actually matters.
• Outstanding value: about $60 for the most pocketable sprite-era machine in the category.
• Not a walled garden: standard RetroArch cores and OnionOS mean you can rebuild the whole library yourself.
• Tuned for short sessions, with instant resume and a 3000 mAh battery that lasts.

The cons

• The advertised 25,000-plus / 28,000 count is padding: duplicates, region variants, hacks, and files that cannot boot.
• The list includes PSP titles like Crisis Core and The Dracula X Chronicles that the hardware simply will not run.
• No analog sticks, which makes the entire 3D shortlist a technicality rather than a feature.
• No video output and no working co-op, deleting the social half of the catalogue.
• The whole bundle is redistributed copyrighted software, a liability handed to the buyer.

The verdict: 7/10

Score the marketing and this is a 3. Score the machine and its real, playable library and this is a 9. The honest composite, the one that credits the superb core while docking hard for the dishonest count, the unbootable filler, and the missing outputs, is a 7 out of 10. The Miyoo Mini Plus is not a 25,000-game handheld, and anyone who tells you it is has counted files instead of playing them. It is a two-hundred-game handheld of unusual quality, sold at an unusually fair price, buried under a marketing number that does it no favors. Ignore the number, load the good half, and it becomes one of the easiest recommendations in retro handhelds. Just do not let anyone convince you that you bought a museum. You bought a very good pocket, and a very long receipt.