Miyoo Mini Plus Game List 2026: 28,000 Games, 7.5/10

There is a specific genre of product listing that has quietly colonized the budget end of retro gaming, and the Miyoo Mini Plus is its patron saint. You do not buy a handheld. You buy a number. "25,000 games." "28,000 games built-in." "13,056 titles." The hardware is almost an afterthought, a delivery mechanism for a figure large enough to short-circuit the part of your brain that asks whether you will ever play twenty-eight thousand of anything.

So this review takes the marketing at its word and reviews the number. Not the plastic, which is fine, and not the screen, which is genuinely good for the money, but the thing the listing actually sells: the game list. Treated honestly, the Miyoo Mini Plus game list is not a feature. It is a proposition, a claim about what a sub-$70 slab of dual-core ARM can and cannot play. The gap between that claim and reality is where the entire story lives, and it is a wider gap than any reseller wants you to measure.

The Pitch: 28,000 Games, Zero Included

Every retro handheld has a headline. The Miyoo Mini Plus has a spreadsheet cell. To understand the device you first have to understand that the library and the hardware are sold by different people with opposite incentives, and only one of them is telling you the truth.

A review of a library, not a cartridge

The premise of a "game list" article is that you are choosing a catalogue the way you would once have chosen a console by its exclusives. That premise is sound, but the catalogue here is not curated by Miyoo. It is assembled, priced, and inflated by resellers, which means the list you are "reviewing" changes depending on whose storefront you landed on. One vendor promises 25,000 titles. Another slices the same idea into 13,056, 25,966, and 27,549 across three storage tiers. A third stamps "28,000 Games Built-in" on a 128GB card. These are not different libraries. They are different-sized copies of the same padded pile, and the number is a marketing variable, not a spec.

The number that sells the device

Retro Game Intensity lists a Miyoo Mini Plus 128GB version advertised, in the product title itself, as "28,000 Games Built-in." It is a useful data point precisely because it is absurd: 28,000 games is more than the commercially released software libraries of the NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, GBA, and PlayStation 1 combined, several times over. What the number actually describes is a ROM set, complete with every prototype, every bad dump, every region variant, and every hack, poured onto a card until the folder count hits a figure that photographs well.

What "included" actually means

Here is the part the listings bury. Miyoo's official firmware ships effectively empty. The card holds an operating system and maybe a handful of homebrew, not a library. Every one of those five-figure game counts is a third-party addition, a copyright-infringing convenience bundled by the seller and charged back to you as if it were value. The community firmware most owners actually run, Onion OS, also ships with no games. So when a review talks about the Miyoo Mini Plus "game list," the honest translation is: here is what this chip is capable of running, and here is the difference between that and what a reseller dumped onto the card to justify the price.

What You're Actually Buying

Strip away the number and a small, well-made, deliberately limited machine remains. The Miyoo Mini Plus knows exactly what it is, and its clarity of purpose is the best thing about it. It is also the reason the game list has a hard edge you cannot software your way past.

One chip, one ceiling

The Miyoo Mini Plus runs on a SigmaStar SSD202D: a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2GHz, paired with 128MB of DDR3 RAM and, critically, a 2D-only GPU with no 3D acceleration. That last clause is the whole review in eight words. Everything the handheld does well and everything it cannot do flows from a chip designed for smart displays and set-top boxes, not for polygons. The ceiling is PlayStation 1, and the ceiling is not a firmware update away from moving.

The Plus is ergonomics, not horsepower

It is worth being precise, because the resellers are not. The "Plus" in Miyoo Mini Plus buys you a 3.5-inch screen instead of 2.8 inches, a 3000mAh battery instead of roughly 1900-2000mAh, and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. It does not buy you a single extra frame of performance. The original Mini and the Plus share the identical SSD202D, the identical 128MB of RAM, the identical PS1 ceiling. I went through this in detail in the Mini vs Mini Plus comparison, and the short version is that this is an ergonomic upgrade wearing a performance upgrade's marketing. The original Mini is roughly $20 cheaper and largely discontinued new; the Plus is the one you can actually buy.

The firmware is the real product

Stock Miyoo OS is functional and forgettable. The reason this handheld still gets recommended in 2026 is Onion OS, the community firmware that layers a clean interface, box-art scraping, per-game save states, and its own tuned build of RetroArch over the hardware. Retro Handheld HQ calls OnionOS "the single biggest reason this handheld stays relevant in 2026," and that is not hyperbole. A game list is only as good as the shell you browse it in, and Onion is the difference between a toy and a tool. Base firmware 202305052130 or newer is required to install it; from there the on-device OTA updater keeps it current over Wi-Fi.

The Spec Sheet That Sets the Ceiling

You cannot argue with a game list. You can only argue with the silicon underneath it, and the silicon has already decided which arguments you get to have. Here is the full sheet, because in a review of a library the specs are the plot.

The full table

Attribute	Miyoo Mini Plus
Stock platform / OS	Linux (Miyoo OS); Onion OS v4.2.3 (community firmware, recommended)
SoC	SigmaStar SSD202D
CPU	Dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 @ 1.2GHz
GPU	2D-only, no 3D acceleration
RAM	128MB DDR3
Firmware storage	16MB SPI ROM + user microSD card
Display	3.5-inch IPS, 640x480, 4:3
Battery	3000mAh (~6-8h mixed use at 50% brightness)
Weight	~121g
Connectivity	2.4GHz Wi-Fi (no Bluetooth, no HDMI)
Ports	USB-C (charge + data); built-in speaker
Controls	D-pad, ABXY, L/R shoulders, Start/Select, Menu, Fn; no analog sticks
Local multiplayer	None (no link cable, no Bluetooth); netplay via Wi-Fi only
Emulation ceiling	PlayStation 1 (selective, 2D-friendly)
Released	~2023
Typical price (bare)	~$55-79 / £55.99-59.99, varies by seller

The three rows that matter

Ignore fifteen of those rows and read three: 2D-only GPU, 128MB RAM, and no analog sticks. The first caps you at PS1 and makes N64 and Dreamcast a novelty rather than a feature. The second is genuinely tight; DROIX's review notes the Miyoo "only has 128MB RAM, but in most cases this is all you need," which is true right up until you point it at anything the resellers claim it can play beyond the ceiling. The third means every 3D game that technically boots is being steered with a d-pad, which is its own kind of punishment. This is the same wall I mapped in the PS1-ceiling breakdown, and nothing in the 2026 listings has moved it.

What the numbers feel like in the hand

Specs undersell the experience in one direction and oversell it in another. The 640x480 IPS panel is crisp and dense for its size, and 4:3 is exactly right for the 8- and 16-bit era it was built to serve. The 3000mAh cell delivers a real 6-8 hours; Playhouse pegs it at "6 to 8 hours of mixed use with the screen at 50% brightness," which matches what the battery does when you feed it Game Boy and SNES rather than PS1. Handheld Picker's summary is the fairest one-liner anyone has written about it: a "tiny, inexpensive, vertical Linux handheld for 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PlayStation 1 gaming." Everything in that sentence is a system the chip runs well. Everything outside it is where the game list starts lying.

The Honest Game List, System by System

Here is the library the SSD202D actually earns, drawn from Playhouse's 2026 emulation guide, updated 10 August 2026 and the most current source in circulation. These are the platforms that run at full speed, with the example titles the guide itself uses as shorthand. This is the list you are really buying, whatever the folder count says.

The 8-bit and handheld tier

This is the tier the chip was born for. Game Boy, Game Boy Color, NES, and Master System run flawlessly, every one of them, forever. Playhouse's example Game Boy and GBC picks are the obvious ones: Pokemon, Zelda, Tetris, and Kirby, which is a shorthand so universal it barely needs a device. On the NES and Famicom side the guide names Super Mario Bros, Contra, Mega Man, and Gradius, a murderers' row of the platform's most punishing and most replayable software. Nothing here strains the hardware; the Cortex-A7 emulates these systems with cycles to spare, which is exactly why the battery lasts a full workday when you stay in this tier.

The 16-bit and Neo Geo tier

The SNES and Genesis are where the Miyoo Mini Plus becomes a genuinely great machine rather than merely a cheap one. Playhouse's SNES examples are Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, and Street Fighter II, three games that between them justify the purchase. On the Mega Drive it names Sonic, Streets of Rage, and Gunstar Heroes, the last of which points at Treasure's whole extraordinary Genesis run. The Geekbuying "MD games list" reveal that still surfaces in 2026 search results fills in the texture: Aladdin, Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, Alien Soldier, OutRun, and OutRunners. Alien Soldier is another Treasure masterwork, and its presence next to two Sega arcade OutRun ports tells you the Genesis folder, at least, has real gems buried in the padding. Neo Geo rounds out the tier, and the guide's picks are the canon: Metal Slug, The King of Fighters, and Samurai Shodown, all of which run at full arcade speed because Neo Geo hardware, for all its prestige, is a 2D machine the SSD202D eats for breakfast.

The GBA and arcade tier

Game Boy Advance is where you feel the chip work a little, but it holds. Playhouse's GBA examples span the library's breadth: Pokemon, Castlevania, Final Fight, and Metroid. The 2D Castlevania entries in particular are close to perfect here, which matters, because the series' single greatest entry lives one tier up on PS1. Arcade coverage via FBNeo and MAME2003-Plus is strong for the CPS-1 and CPS-2 boards, the Capcom fighting and beat-em-up canon, and thins out fast the moment a board wanted more than 2D sprites. The pattern is consistent: if the original hardware pushed pixels, the Miyoo Mini Plus is happy. If it pushed polygons, hold that thought.

The PS1 Question and the N64 Mirage

Every buyer's research ends at the same query: what is the highest thing this can play? For the Miyoo Mini Plus the honest answer is PlayStation 1, and the entire value of the device turns on how well it clears that bar. It clears it. The trouble starts when the listings pretend the bar is higher than it is.

PS1: the crown jewel and the ceiling

Playhouse's 2026 guide states plainly that the Miyoo Mini Plus "can handle most PlayStation 1 games," and this is the sentence that sells the device to anyone who did their homework. The original PlayStation library is where the handheld peaks, and it peaks highest on 2D-forward software. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Koji Igarashi's 1997 masterpiece and the game that gave the "Metroidvania" its second half, is the sweet spot: a 32-bit console running essentially a gorgeous 2D game, exactly the workload the SSD202D was built to handle. Push into heavier 3D and the ceiling shows itself. Final Fantasy VII is playable and worth playing, but you will catch the occasional flicker and hitch that marks the outer edge of what 128MB and a Cortex-A7 can do with pre-rendered backgrounds and real-time battles. That flicker is the truest spec on the sheet: it is the sound of the ceiling.

The N64 mirage

This is where I part company with the listings, and gently with the guide. Playhouse's 2026 write-up names "lighter" N64 titles it says will run: Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and GoldenEye, while explicitly flagging the more demanding ones, Majora's Mask, Banjo-Kazooie, and Donkey Kong 64, as too much. Read that carefully. The verb "run" is doing an enormous amount of work. On a 2D-only GPU, N64 emulation is entirely software-rendered on two Cortex-A7 cores, and "runs" means "boots and produces frames," not "plays the way you remember." You are steering Mario with a d-pad because there are no analog sticks, at a framerate that turns Peach's Castle into a slideshow. These titles are technical curiosities, proof-of-concept demos you show a friend once. They are not a reason to buy the device, and treating them as library entries is how padded game lists inflate their credibility.

Dreamcast, and the value of a caveat

The same asterisk applies to Dreamcast, only more so. Playhouse names Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, and Power Stone as "lightweight" Dreamcast titles, and again, some of them boot. But the honest counterweight comes from Playhouse's own broader coverage, which elsewhere states flatly that "N64 and Dreamcast are hit-and-miss" and that "PSP is not recommended." That is the sentence to trust. A guide that both lists lightweight N64/DC games and warns you they are hit-and-miss is not contradicting itself; it is describing the exact texture of a 2D chip being asked to do a 3D job. My rule stands: if a game list folder promises N64, Dreamcast, PSP, or DS, treat those folders as the fastest possible tell that you are looking at padding. Anyone who genuinely wants those systems should be reading my Retroid Pocket 2026 rankings instead, where a real GPU does the work.

The Padding Problem: 28,000 vs 300

Now we can weigh the number honestly. The Miyoo Mini Plus runs, at full speed, a canon of maybe a few thousand genuinely great and good games across eight or nine systems. The listings claim 28,000. The delta between those figures is not library. It is landfill, and you are paying for the tonnage.

Anatomy of a bloated list

The Geekbuying "GB games list" reveal, a 2023 post that stubbornly resurfaces in 2026 search results, contains a single filename that explains the entire genre. Sitting in the Game Boy list is: Shikakui Atama wo Marukusuru Advance - Kokugo Sansu Rika Shakai(JP).zip. Read that. It is a Japanese-language educational cartridge, roughly "make your square head round," bundling national-language, arithmetic, science, and social-studies drills. It is a Game Boy Advance title, filed in the Game Boy list, in Japanese, that no English-speaking buyer will ever open. Multiply that one file by twenty-eight thousand and you have the real product: an archive optimized for a folder count, not for a human being who wants to play Chrono Trigger tonight. This is what "28,000 games" means in practice, and I traced the full picture in the companion piece on 28,000 games and one PS1 wall.

Build your own list instead

The cure is trivial and free: wipe the card and build a curated list yourself. Onion OS organizes ROMs into a clean, tagged folder structure under /Roms, and populating it by hand takes an evening and produces a library you will actually browse rather than drown in. Here is the skeleton:

/Roms
  /FC        NES / Famicom
  /SFC       SNES / Super Famicom
  /MD        Mega Drive / Genesis
  /GB        Game Boy
  /GBC       Game Boy Color
  /GBA       Game Boy Advance
  /PCE       PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16
  /NEOGEO    Neo Geo (MVS)
  /ARCADE    CPS-1 / CPS-2 / MAME sets
  /PS        PlayStation 1
  /WS        WonderSwan

Three hundred well-chosen files in those folders is a better "game list" than thirty thousand scraped ones, and it fits on the cheapest card Miyoo sells. The big number is not a library. It is a browsing tax you pay every time you scroll past four hundred bad dumps to reach the game you wanted.

The legality you are not being told about

There is a reason Miyoo ships empty firmware and lets resellers do the dirty work: distributing copyrighted ROMs is infringement, full stop, and the pre-loaded cards live somewhere between a legal gray zone and a straightforwardly black one. The device is perfectly legal. The 28,000 games on it, as sold, generally are not. Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian has spent years on the uncomfortable truth that emulation and preservation are inseparable from the legal murk around ROMs, and the cleanest way to stay on the right side of it is boring but bulletproof: own the cartridge, dump the cartridge. My Retrode 2 guide walks a SNES cart from shelf to card in about twenty minutes, and a list you dumped yourself is a list nobody can send a takedown for.

The Curated Core: 30 Games That Earn It

If the honest library is a few thousand titles, the essential library is far smaller, and it is where the Miyoo Mini Plus stops being a value proposition and becomes a genuinely lovely object. PlayRetro markets the device around "30 iconic games," and for once the marketing is more honest than the 28,000-count crowd, because a tight list of classics is a truer picture of what you will play than any scraped archive.

The evergreen thirty

PlayRetro's shorthand list is exactly the one I would hand a newcomer: Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Pokemon Red/Blue, Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter II, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. That is six systems, six all-time greats, and not one of them stresses the hardware past its happy place. This is the difference between a game list and a game collection: the collection knows that A Link to the Past on a crisp 4:3 IPS panel is the entire pitch, and that no reseller's five-figure folder count improves on it by a single minute of joy.

The flagship five, benchmarked

To compare like with like, here are five system-selling classics, the games people actually buy a retro handheld for, measured against the one metric that matters on this device: how well the SSD202D runs them.

Game	System	Year	Genre	On the SSD202D
Chrono Trigger	SNES	1995	JRPG	Flawless
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night	PS1	1997	Metroidvania	Flawless (2D-on-32-bit sweet spot)
Metal Slug	Neo Geo MVS	1996	Run-and-gun	Flawless (full arcade speed)
Pokemon Red/Blue	Game Boy	1996/1998	Monster-collector RPG	Flawless, but no link trading
Final Fantasy VII	PS1	1997	JRPG	Good; occasional flicker at the ceiling

Why these five and not the other 27,995

Because each of them is a document as much as a game. Chrono Trigger was the 1995 product of Square's so-called Dream Team, Final Fantasy's Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest's Yuji Horii, and Dragon Ball's Akira Toriyama on character design, and it plays as flawlessly on this handheld as it did on a Super Famicom. Metal Slug, Nazca and SNK's 1996 run-and-gun, is the reason Hardcore Gaming 101 describes the original as combining "gorgeous animated sprite artwork with dark comedy violence," and every frame of that artwork lands intact here. Symphony of the Night is the 2D game hiding inside a 32-bit console, which is why it is the single best thing the Miyoo Mini Plus does. These are not entries in a spreadsheet. They are the argument for owning the device, and they would be that argument if the card held thirty games instead of thirty thousand.

How It Actually Plays: Five Scenarios

A game list is an abstraction until a specific person picks the thing up with a specific intent. Here is how the Miyoo Mini Plus, and its library, serve five of them. The pattern that emerges is consistent: it is superb at the thing it was built for and quietly hostile to everything else.

The casual and the completionist

Casual pick-up-and-play: this is the device's home turf. Onion OS resumes exactly where you left off, save states erase the tyranny of the password screen, and the form factor means a fifteen-minute Streets of Rage session on the sofa costs you nothing in setup. GamesRadar's reviewer captured the mode precisely: "I used to insist nothing beat the real deal, but now nothing beats curling up with the Miyoo Mini Plus handheld and my favorite retro games." For the casual player the 28,000-game list is actively harmful, because it buries the ten games they will replay forever under a scroll-wheel of noise. Wipe it; keep fifty.

Completionist: mostly excellent, with one cruel exception. Long-form RPGs, the Chrono Triggers and Final Fantasies, are perfect on this hardware; you can 100% them across a commute-week with save states smoothing the grind. The exception is any game built around a link cable. Pokemon's Pokedex cannot be completed without trading, and the Miyoo Mini Plus has no Bluetooth and no link port. You can catch them all except the ones you can't, which is a very Pokemon problem to be left with in 2026.

The speedrunner and the co-op partner

Speedrunner: better than you would expect for 2D, useless for 3D. Onion's tuned RetroArch build keeps input latency low and frame pacing honest, which is what a 2D runner needs; save states also make practicing individual splits painless. But the absence of analog sticks and the software-rendered framerate rule out any 3D category outright, and for official leaderboard runs you would want documented, verified latency figures this device does not publish. Great for personal-best 2D routing on the bus. Not a competition rig.

Co-op partner: here the deadpan answer is simply no. There is one screen, one set of controls, no second controller port, no Bluetooth pad support, and no link cable. Local co-op, the beating heart of Streets of Rage and Metal Slug, is physically impossible on the hardware. The 2.4GHz Wi-Fi does enable Onion's netplay, so two owners can in theory share a session over a network, but it is fiddly, latency-prone, and nobody's idea of the couch experience these games were built for. If co-op is the point, this is the wrong device, full stop.

The mobile player

Mobile / commute: this is arguably the single best thing the Miyoo Mini Plus does, and it is why it survives in a market that has otherwise passed it by. At ~121g it disappears into a jacket pocket, the 3000mAh battery clears a 6-8 hour travel day on 8- and 16-bit games, and the 3.5-inch panel is large enough to enjoy and small enough to be genuinely pocketable, a balance most rivals miss in one direction or the other. Handheld Picker's verdict holds: "In 2026, it is no longer the strongest budget handheld. It is still one of the nicest small ones." For the commuter who wants Metroid and A Link to the Past in a pocket, nothing this cheap is nicer.

Pricing and Availability: The Chaos Tax

There is no single price for the Miyoo Mini Plus, and the reason is instructive: the more games a listing brags about, the more it charges you for the privilege of deleting them. The device is cheap. The bundle is where they get you.

The listings, decoded

Seller / configuration	Claimed games	Price	Verdict
miyoo.co.uk, 64GB	bare	£55.99	Cleanest buy (UK)
miyoo.co.uk, 128GB	bare	£59.99	Fine; you don't need the space
Handheld Picker, 64GB (May 2026 sale)	bare	$56.99 (reg $79.99)	Good sale price
US street (typical)	varies	~$62.99-69.99	Reasonable
miyoominiofficial.com storefront	"25,000"	€109.90	Browsing tax; overpriced
officialmiyoomini.com (tiered)	13,056 / 25,966 / 27,549	varies by tier	Count = padding
Retro Game Intensity, 128GB	"28,000"	not shown	Marketing figure
Amazon clone listings	"11,000"	$25.00-25.99	Clone / scam trap; avoid
PriceHistory low (early 2026)	bare	~$51.99 (low $49.50)	Best-case bare price

The clone trap

Pay attention to the bottom two rows, because they invert the entire logic of the market. An "11,000 games" Miyoo Mini Plus for $25.99 is not a bargain; it is almost always a clone, a lookalike shell running a hacked or degraded firmware on cheaper silicon, and the enormous game count is the bait. A genuine Miyoo Mini Plus does not sell for $25, ever. When the price falls below the roughly $49.50 historical floor for the real thing, you are no longer looking at the real thing. The five-figure game count is doing double duty here: it inflates the price of legitimate sellers and it disguises the counterfeit ones.

What to actually pay

The honest target is simple. Buy the bare device, or the smallest card offered, in the $55-65 / £55.99-59.99 band from a seller who is charging for hardware rather than for a ROM archive. Ignore every listing whose headline is a game count. The €109.90 "25,000" storefront is asking you to pay roughly double for a folder of files you should delete on day one. You are buying a chip and a screen and a battery. Pay for those.

Who Should Buy It, and Who Shouldn't

A game list is only a recommendation once you know who is holding it. The Miyoo Mini Plus is a precision instrument for a narrow, honorable purpose, and a bad idea for anyone who wants it to be something bigger. Six use cases, sorted.

Buy it if...

The commuter / pocket player. If your gaming happens in fifteen-minute windows on trains and sofas, and your canon is 8-bit through PS1, this is close to the ideal object. Small, light, long battery, crisp screen. Buy it bare and load fifty games you love.

The lapsed SNES/PS1 RPG player. If what you miss is Chrono Trigger, A Link to the Past, and Symphony of the Night, the Miyoo Mini Plus runs your entire nostalgia stack flawlessly for the price of a nice dinner. This is the purest fit there is.

The collector who wants a clean library. Buy the hardware, wipe the card, and build a curated list, ideally from carts you dumped yourself. You get a device that does exactly one thing beautifully and a library with no legal cloud over it.

Buy it, but bare

The gift-giver / parent. The Miyoo Mini Plus is a wonderful gift and a terrible one to buy pre-loaded. The pre-loaded cards are legally dubious and the cheap ones are frequently clones. Buy the genuine device bare from Miyoo's own store or a known retailer, and set it up yourself. The recipient will never know the difference except that theirs works and is legal.

Do not buy it if...

You want N64, Dreamcast, PSP, or DS done properly. The 2D-only SSD202D cannot, and no listing's game count changes that. You want a device with a real GPU; start with the Retroid Pocket 2026 lineup around $200 and up.

You want cycle-accurate, latency-perfect purity. Then you want an FPGA, not an ARM emulator, and you want a MiSTer, at a different price and a different philosophy entirely. The Miyoo is a wonderful approximation. It is not a recreation.

Pros, Cons, and the Ledger

Every honest review eventually has to stop admiring the problem and total the columns. Here is the ledger for the Miyoo Mini Plus game list, weighed as a proposition rather than a pile of files.

The pros

• Flawless 8-bit through 16-bit and Neo Geo. The core library, NES, SNES, Genesis, GB/GBC/GBA, Master System, PC Engine, Neo Geo, arcade, runs perfectly and forever.
• Genuinely strong PS1. "Most PlayStation 1 games" per Playhouse, and the 2D-forward ones (Symphony of the Night) are the device's peak.
• Best-in-class portability. ~121g, 3000mAh for a real 6-8 hours, a crisp 3.5-inch 640x480 IPS panel.
• Onion OS. The community firmware is superb and free, and it is the reason the device stays relevant in 2026.
• Cheap, when bought honestly. ~$55-65 / £55.99-59.99 for a device that does its job beautifully.

The cons

• The 28,000-game claim is padding. The count is reseller marketing, uncorrelated with playable value and often legally dubious.
• Hard PS1 ceiling. The 2D-only GPU makes N64, Dreamcast, PSP, and DS novelties at best. "Runs" does not mean "plays."
• No local multiplayer. No Bluetooth, no link cable; co-op and Pokemon trading are off the table.
• No analog sticks. Every 3D game that boots is steered with a d-pad.
• Price and clone chaos. Listings range from £55.99 to €109.90 to $25 counterfeits, and the game count is the bait on all of them.

The one-line ledger

Add it up and the shape is clear: this is a nine-out-of-ten machine for the library it was built to run, dragged down by a five-figure marketing fiction, a legal gray zone, a hard ceiling, and the total absence of multiplayer. The hardware keeps its promises. The listing does not. Your job as a buyer is to pay for the former and ignore the latter.

The Verdict: 7.5/10

The Miyoo Mini Plus game list is two products wearing one price tag. One of them is a tightly curated, gorgeously portable window onto the greatest 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PlayStation 1 software ever made, and it is worth every penny of its honest $55-65. The other is a 28,000-file archive of duplicates, bad dumps, Japanese edutainment carts, and unplayable N64 demos, sold to you at a premium as if quantity were the same thing as value. The review is a subtraction problem: buy the first product, delete the second.

Scoring the proposition

Judged as a game list, the curated core earns something close to a 9, the padding and the copyright murk and the multiplayer void and the PS1 ceiling pull it down, and the device lands at 7.5 out of 10. That is not a lukewarm score; it is a precise one. It says: exceptional at a narrow job, oversold on everything past it. Handheld Picker's line remains the fairest summary in the market, "In 2026, it is no longer the strongest budget handheld. It is still one of the nicest small ones," and Retro Handheld HQ's claim that it is "still the most polished sub-$70 emulation handheld you can buy in 2026" is defensible precisely because of Onion OS.

The Machine's bottom line

Ignore the number. The Miyoo Mini Plus does not have 28,000 games and never did; Miyoo ships it empty and a reseller filled the void with landfill and charged you for the weight. What it has is a chip that runs the finest 2D library in gaming history flawlessly, in a pocketable shell, on an eight-hour battery, for the price of a modest night out. Buy it bare, wipe the card, build a list of three hundred games you will actually replay, dump a few carts you own to keep it clean, and you will own one of the most quietly satisfying objects in retro gaming. Buy the "28,000 games" edition and you will own the same thing plus a browsing tax and a legal headache. The verdict is 7.5, and the whole 2.5 you are leaving on the table is the reseller's, not Miyoo's.