Miyoo Mini Plus Game List 2026: All 62 Titles, 7/10

You typed miyoo mini plus game list into a search box expecting a 2026 release calendar. A roadmap. A slate of titles dropping this fall with launch trailers and pre-order bonuses. You will not find one here, because one does not exist, and pretending otherwise would be the precise species of marketing fiction this publication was founded to avoid. The Miyoo Mini Plus is an emulator in a candy-colored shell. It runs software written, roughly, between 1983 and 2001. The newest game any reasonable person plays on it shipped in 2021, and we will get to that single, lonely anomaly in due course.

So what, exactly, are we reviewing? Not a console's launch library, because there is no launch and no first-party library in any meaningful sense. We are reviewing the list — the curated 62-title collection that ships, semi-officially and semi-legally, as the device's cultural default. Forty-seven base games, fifteen extras, the whole thing stitched together by volunteers and poured through Onion OS. It is the closest thing the Miyoo Mini Plus has to a personality, and like most personalities assembled by committee, it is excellent in its safe choices and quietly maddening in its omissions. This is a review of that committee's taste. The rating waits at the bottom, as always. The short version: 7 out of 10, and the three missing points are about ambition, not quality.

There Is No 2026 Game List

Let us dispense with the premise of the search query before we build anything on top of it. There is no new-release pipeline for this device. There is no 2025 lineup, no 2026 lineup, no roadmap. What exists is a hardware platform and a body of preexisting software, and the only thing that gets "updated" is the firmware that runs the software. Understanding that distinction is the difference between reviewing this honestly and reviewing a fantasy.

What You Actually Searched For

The Miyoo Mini Plus is a retro handheld: a vertical, Game Boy-shaped device manufactured by Miyoo, a company based in Shenzhen, that exists to emulate the consoles of the past. It supports emulation of twelve-plus legacy systems — Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Sega CD, the 32X, PlayStation 1, Neo Geo, and a grab-bag of arcade and DOS-era ports. It does not produce its own games. No studio is writing original Miyoo Mini Plus software. Miyoo itself, per the available reporting through 2026, has released zero new game titles for the device, focusing entirely on hardware revisions and firmware. The thing you searched for, in other words, is a category error wearing the clothes of a reasonable question.

This is not a knock. It is the entire point of the object. An emulator is a time machine pointed exclusively backward, and the Miyoo's value proposition is that it points backward extremely well for under seventy dollars. But it means the word "list" has to be redefined before we can grade it. We are not grading what's coming. We are grading what's already here, and how well someone with taste arranged it.

The List Is a Curation, Not a Catalog

The "game list" that circulates for this device is a community artifact, not a corporate one. It comes in two tiers. The base list is 47 titles — the load-bearing canon, drawn almost entirely from the 16-bit era and originally released between 1991 and 1996. The extras list adds 15 more, reaching forward into the PlayStation 1 and Game Boy Advance catalogs, and was last meaningfully curated by community developer @MiyooDev in April 2025. Forty-seven plus fifteen equals sixty-two. That is the artifact. That is the thing under the microscope.

Critically — and this is the fact that detonates the search query — not a single one of those sixty-two titles was added in 2025 or 2026, and not one of them is new. The most recent curation pass simply re-confirmed and lightly reshuffled a body of work that was decades old before the Miyoo Mini Plus existed. The list is a museum wall, periodically re-hung. The hanging is the only thing that changes, and even the hanging changes rarely. When you review "the Miyoo Mini Plus game list," you are reviewing the wall, the lighting, and the curator's eye — never the paintings, which were finished long ago and need no defending from me.

The Law of the Thing

Here is where I am obligated to be the adult in the room, because the list arrives free and the law that governs it does not. The emulator is legal. This is settled. In Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. (9th Cir., 2000), the court held that reverse-engineering a console to build a compatible emulator was fair use; the related Bleem! litigation reinforced that a clean-room PlayStation emulator was lawful even as the legal bills bankrupted its maker. Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade (1992) had already established the underlying principle: intermediate copying for the sake of interoperability is protected. Onion OS, the software actually doing the emulating here, is in the clear.

The games are a different statute. A copyrighted ROM is copyrighted whether or not the company that owns it still sells it; "abandonware" is a folk belief, not a legal category, and the oft-repeated "you may keep a ROM for 24 hours" rule has no basis in any code anywhere. It was invented on a forum and has been wandering the internet ever since like a ghost that never read the Copyright Act. Nintendo has spent years proving the point with judgments measured in millions — the LoveROMs operator famously agreed to a $12 million figure in 2018 — and the company's enthusiasm for litigation has not cooled. The 62-title list is distributed as a community package; whether you have the right to run any given title on it is between you, your shelf of physical cartridges, and your conscience. The device ships with no games in the box and Miyoo, sensibly, keeps it that way. I am reviewing the curation as a piece of editorial judgment. What you do about the legality is, as ever, your problem and not mine.

The Base 47: The SNES-Era Canon

Strip away the framing and the law, and you are left with the only question that matters for a curation: are these the right 62 games? We start with the 47 that carry the weight. The short answer is that the base list is a strong, conservative, almost suspiciously Nintendo-shaped greatest-hits compilation that would survive contact with any "best of the 16-bit era" listicle written in the last thirty years. That is its strength and its limitation in one breath.

1991–1996: A Five-Year Window

Every title in the base 47 was originally released inside a five-year window, 1991 to 1996. That is not an accident; it is the apex of the 16-bit console war, the years when the Super Nintendo and the Genesis were spending obscene amounts of money on first-party software and the medium briefly stopped being a toy and started being a craft. The list reads like a syllabus for that window. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991). Super Mario World (1991). Donkey Kong Country (1994). Chrono Trigger (1995).

What you do not get is range across time. There is nothing here representing the NES's odd, brilliant middle period, nothing reaching into the late-90s twilight of 2D before 3D ate everything, and nothing acknowledging that the medium kept producing masterpieces after 1996. The window is real, and it is well-chosen, but it is narrow. A curator who only ever programs the same five years is making a defensible argument about where the canon lives. They are also, quietly, refusing to argue.

The Nintendo Gravity Well

The base list bends, hard, toward Nintendo's gravity. A Link to the Past is, by most reputable accounts and the cold arithmetic of three decades of "greatest games ever" lists, one of the finest action-adventure designs ever shipped — a top-down dungeon-crawl so cleanly tuned that it became the template the next twenty years copied. Super Mario World introduced Yoshi and remains the platforming standard against which others are still measured. Donkey Kong Country was a technical stunt: Rare's pre-rendered "Advanced Computer Modeling" graphics made a 1994 cartridge look like it had escaped from a workstation, and it moved something on the order of nine million copies on the strength of that illusion. The folks at Hardcore Gaming 101 have spent years cataloguing exactly how those tricks worked, and the device's list leans on every one of them.

Then there is Chrono Trigger, the closest thing the 16-bit era has to a consensus magnum opus — built by Square's so-called "Dream Team" of Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest's Yuji Horii, and the Dragon Ball artist Akira Toriyama, and famous for stuffing a baker's dozen of distinct endings into a New Game Plus structure that was decades ahead of its time. The deeper cuts keep the Nintendo theme: Yoshi's Cookie (1991), a competent block-puzzler, and Wario Blast featuring Bomberman! (1994), a Game Boy crossover that exists mostly so Nintendo could put Wario's face on a Hudson franchise. It is a canon, and it is a good one. It is also so heavily weighted toward one publisher's worldview that you could mistake the device for a Nintendo product, which it emphatically is not.

What the Canon Leaves Out

The omissions are where a curation reveals its nerve, and this one's nerve is modest. There is no Sega Saturn here, which the hardware cannot comfortably emulate anyway, so that is forgivable. Less forgivable: the arcade and Neo Geo depth is thin at the base tier despite the hardware fully supporting it, the Western computer RPG tradition is absent entirely, and the genuinely weird, genre-bending experiments of the era — the stuff that makes a curation feel like a point of view rather than a sales chart — are nowhere. The list never once risks being wrong. It is the syllabus a committee approves, not the one a passionate teacher fights for.

There is a line about ambition that Shigeru Miyamoto is endlessly credited with and has, in his characteristically polite way, declined to fully own — some version of "a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." The base 47 is the inverse problem. Nothing here is rushed and nothing here is bad; everything here is safe. It was finished, polished, and beloved long ago. The curation's only failure is that it never delays anything for the sake of finding something braver. It picked the games everyone already agrees on and called it a day. That is a 9/10 list of games arranged with a 6/10 imagination.

The Extras 15: PS1, GBA, and Onion OS

If the base 47 is the conservative wing, the extras 15 are where the curation finally takes a small breath of air. This is the tier that reaches past the 16-bit window into the 32-bit PlayStation era and the handheld Game Boy Advance, and it is the tier most dependent on the firmware actually being good at its job. As of the curation's last meaningful pass — @MiyooDev, April 2025 — the firmware is, at last, good enough to justify the reach.

Onion OS 2.4.1 and the PS1 Question

The thing that makes the extras list viable is Onion OS, the open-source firmware that the community built and continues to maintain on, per its own developers, a development budget of exactly zero dollars. There is no corporate sponsorship from Miyoo, no check from Sony, Nintendo, or Sega — nothing but volunteer labor under the banner of a team that signs its work "OnionOS." That a free, unfunded project is the single most important component of this entire experience tells you everything about where the actual craftsmanship lives in the retro-handheld economy. The hardware is a commodity. The firmware is the art. If you want to understand how the underlying emulation cores are assembled and tuned, our walkthrough on building out 200 RetroArch cores covers the same machinery from the other direction.

The headline upgrade is PlayStation. Onion OS was bumped to version 2.4.1 in March 2025 specifically to improve PS1 compatibility, and the firmware's own notes claim coverage of roughly 98% of the original PlayStation library. That brings genuinely heavy titles into the extras tier — most notably Final Fantasy IX (1999), the medieval-fantasy return-to-roots that Hironobu Sakaguchi has on record as his personal favorite in the series, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, whose first two installments hit the PlayStation across 1999 and 2000 and effectively invented the licensed-soundtrack action game. The asterisk is hardware: the Miyoo Mini Plus has a D-pad and no analog sticks, so anything that leaned on the DualShock's twin sticks plays compromised. FF IX, a menu-driven turn-based RPG, does not care. A 3D platformer that wanted analog control absolutely does. The 98% figure is about whether a game boots and runs; it says nothing about whether a game feels right on a thumbpad.

The GBA Wing: Advance Wars and Apotris

The Game Boy Advance contributions are where the extras quietly become interesting. Advance Wars (Intelligent Systems, 2001) is a turn-based strategy landmark — sharp, replayable, and a far better fit for a button-only handheld than any 3D PS1 title will ever be. It is the kind of pick that suggests someone on the curation team actually thought about the hardware in their hands rather than just transcribing a top-100 list.

And then there is the one true anomaly in all 62 titles: Apotris, a Game Boy Advance Tetris-style puzzler released in 2021. It is the single non-legacy entry on the entire list and the lone reason the device's catalog touches the current decade at all. It is homebrew, it is modern, it is free, and it is genuinely excellent — a falling-block game built by someone who loves the genre, distributed without the licensing baggage that makes "real" Tetris a legal minefield on a device like this. That a 2021 fan project is the newest thing this machine plays is the cleanest possible summary of what the Miyoo Mini Plus is: a window onto the past with exactly one pane cracked open to let in a little recent air.

The Deep Cuts: TMNT III and Ren & Stimpy

The extras also indulge in a couple of genuine oddities, and I respect the curation more for it. TMNT III: Radical Rescue is an early-1990s Game Boy entry that, against all reasonable expectation for a licensed cartoon tie-in, is shaped like a Metroidvania — ability-gated exploration, backtracking, the works. It is the closest the list comes to a hidden gem, the sort of title a curator includes because they personally love it rather than because a spreadsheet told them to. Ren & Stimpy: Space Cadet Adventures (1993) is the other deep cut, a licensed Game Boy platformer riding the cartoon's peak notoriety.

Both have been unchanged since the 2024 iteration of the list, and neither received any new edition or re-release for the platform in 2025 or 2026 — because, again, nothing here is new and nothing here ever will be. But these two entries do something the base 47 never quite manages: they have a point of view. They are the curator winking. In a list otherwise terrified of being interesting, the deep cuts are the most human thing on it, and they are why the extras tier, for all its hardware compromises, is the more likeable half of the package.

Specs: The Hardware Running the List

A curation is only as good as the machine that renders it, so before the play-through, the spec sheet. Treat this less as a hardware review — we have done those elsewhere — and more as the technical envelope inside which all 62 titles have to live. The numbers explain both why the list stops at PS1 and why the experience, within those limits, is shockingly pleasant.

Reading the Spec Sheet

The table below is the device-as-it-pertains-to-the-list: what era it reaches, what runs the games, who owns what, and the constraints that shaped the curation. Read the "License (games)" and "Multiplayer" rows especially closely — they are the lines that quietly determine what this thing is actually for.

Battery, Screen, and the Six-Hour Reality

The Miyoo Mini Plus is small, light, and built around a sharp little display that flatters 2D pixel art the way nothing reaching it through HDMI ever will. That last point matters: this is a face-to-screen device, held at reading distance, and the base list — 47 games of crisp 16-bit sprite work — is the single best-matched content imaginable for that screen. Battery life lands, in real-world use, in the neighborhood of six hours, which is more than enough for the kind of session this device invites and which we have measured against its closest sibling in our Miyoo Mini Plus vs. RG35XX breakdown.

Where the hardware shows its edges is the moment a game wants more than the form factor offers. No analog sticks means PS1 3D is a negotiation. The vertical layout, lovely for Game Boy and SNES, is cramped for anything that wanted a full controller's worth of inputs. None of this is a defect; it is the deliberate shape of a sub-$70 object designed around exactly the era the base list represents. The hardware and the canon were, in effect, designed for each other — which is why the curation feels coherent even when individual extras strain against it.

The SD Card Is the Real Console

Here is the conceptual trick that makes the whole thing work: the device is inert. The microSD card is the console. Everything — the firmware, the BIOS files, the saves, the states, and the 62-title list itself — lives on removable storage, organized into a folder hierarchy that Onion OS reads on boot. Swap the card and you have swapped the entire machine. The structure looks like this:

/Roms
  +-- SFC/        (Super Nintendo - the base canon lives here)
  +-- GB/  GBC/  GBA/
  +-- FC/         (NES / Famicom)
  +-- MD/         (Sega Genesis / Mega Drive)
  +-- SEGACD/  THIRTYTWOX/
  +-- PS/         (PlayStation 1 - .bin/.cue or .chd)
  +-- NEOGEO/
  +-- PORTS/      (Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Diablo)
  +-- ...
/BIOS
/Saves
/States

That PORTS folder is worth a pause, because it is where the device quietly exceeds the 62-title list. Onion OS supports native source-port playback of Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and Diablo — the foundational PC titles of the mid-90s, all released 1994–1996, none of them on the curated list and all of them better documented than almost any console game of the era. Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian has written the definitive long-form history of exactly that id Software moment, and running Doom on a thing that fits in a coat pocket is a small, satisfying act of historical recursion. The 62 numbers I keep citing describe the curated list. The folder structure describes the actual ceiling, and the ceiling is higher than the list lets on. Here is how the curated 62 actually partitions:

BASE LIST (47)   - SNES/NES/Genesis/GB canon, 1991-1996
EXTRAS (15)      - PS1 + GBA reach, curated by @MiyooDev (Apr 2025)
  +- PS1:  Final Fantasy IX, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater ...
  +- GBA:  Advance Wars, Apotris (2021) ...
  +- GB:   TMNT III: Radical Rescue, Ren & Stimpy ...
TOTAL            - 62 curated titles, 0 of them new in 2025-2026

Playing Through: Five Scenarios

A list is an abstraction until someone holds the device and plays it. So I played it the way five different people would, because the same 62 titles produce five completely different verdicts depending on who is holding the thing and what they want from it. A curation that is perfect for one of these people is actively wrong for another, and pretending there is a single "experience" is how reviews lie.

Casual: Twenty Minutes on the Bus

For the casual player — someone who wants twenty minutes of competence on a commute and nothing more — the base list is close to ideal. Boot, save-state, suspend, pocket, resume. Super Mario World and A Link to the Past were engineered in an era when games respected the player's time without insulting their intelligence, and the device's instant suspend-and-resume turns them into the perfect interstitial entertainment. This is the use case the Miyoo Mini Plus is best at, full stop. The conservatism of the base 47 — the very thing I criticized — is a feature here, because the casual player does not want to be challenged by the curation. They want comfort food, and 47 of the most beloved games ever made is the most comfortable food there is.

Completionist: Chrono Trigger's Thirteen Endings

For the completionist, the list offers exactly one bottomless well and a handful of shallower ones. Chrono Trigger's roughly thirteen endings, unlocked by beating the final boss at different points in the New Game Plus structure, are a hundred-plus hours of structured obsession on their own. Final Fantasy IX in the extras tier adds another sixty-to-eighty-hour sink with its own thicket of optional content. But here the curation's narrowness bites: a completionist will exhaust the list's "deep" titles and find that the other 58 entries are mostly two-to-six-hour experiences with nothing to 100%. The list is a sprint canon, not a marathon one. It has two or three games you can live inside and dozens you finish in an evening. For a certain kind of obsessive, that is a feature; for the trophy-hunter temperament, it is a short runway.

Speedrunner: Input Lag Is the Enemy

For the speedrunner, the curation is almost beside the point and the hardware is everything. A Link to the Past and Super Mario World are two of the most-run games in the entire speed community, and the device hosts both. But emulation introduces input latency that a frame-perfect runner can feel in their fingers, and the Miyoo's software-emulation pipeline — however good — is not the cycle-accurate hardware a serious runner trains on. You can absolutely run these games here for fun. You cannot submit a competitive time from a software emulator and expect the leaderboards to accept it without an asterisk. The list contains the right games; the platform is the wrong platform for the discipline. Anyone chasing frames should read our note on why purists reach for FPGA hardware like the MiSTer instead.

Co-op: The Two-Player Problem

Co-op is where the form factor simply says no. This is a single-screen, single-controller, single-player handheld. There is no second set of buttons and no couch-co-op story. The one exception is genuinely charming: Onion OS supports LAN multiplayer for Doom and Quake, a feature added back in 2024 and unchanged since, which means two of these tiny devices can theoretically deathmatch each other across a local network. It is a party trick more than a co-op platform — and it covers exactly two titles, neither of them on the curated 62 — but it is a delightful one. For anyone whose definition of co-op is "hand the device to a friend after I die," the base list's bite-sized arcade-adjacent titles work fine. For anything resembling simultaneous play, look elsewhere.

Mobile vs. Couch: The Commuter's Calculus

Finally, the question of mobility versus the living room, which the Miyoo answers with brutal clarity: it is a pocket machine and nothing else. There is no HDMI-out, no docking, no путь to the television. The screen that flatters the base list at reading distance is the only screen you get. This is the single sharpest line between the Miyoo and its closest rival, the RG35XX, which trades a little battery for the ability to throw the picture onto a TV — a tradeoff we dissected in full in our 6-hour-battery-versus-HDMI comparison. For the commuter, the Miyoo's portability-first design is exactly correct. For anyone who imagined projecting Chrono Trigger onto a 55-inch panel, the answer is a flat, deadpan no.

The List vs. the Competition

No curation exists in a vacuum, and the Miyoo Mini Plus's 62-title list competes not against other games but against other libraries — the default experiences offered by every rival handheld and platform in the same genre of "box that plays old games." Judged that way, the Miyoo's list is neither the biggest nor the most ambitious. It is the most coherent. That is a real virtue, and it is also, sometimes, a euphemism.

Comparing Curations, Not Just Hardware

The table below compares the Miyoo's curated experience against four peer libraries in the same category. Note that "curated default size" is doing real work here: most rivals either preload a chaotic thousand-game dump or hand you an empty machine and a homework assignment. The Miyoo's 62-title list is unusual specifically for being small and chosen.

Where the Miyoo List Wins and Loses

The Miyoo wins on coherence and price. Sixty-two well-chosen titles on a sub-$70 device that boots instantly and fits in a pocket is a tighter, more inviting proposition than a thousand-game data dump you will never sort through, and it is far less work than the "here is an empty Android box, go forth and configure" model. For the person who wants to play A Link to the Past tonight, the Miyoo's curated default is the path of least resistance in the entire category.

The Miyoo loses, decisively, on ceiling. The moment you want anything past the PS1 era — PlayStation 2, GameCube, Dreamcast, Saturn — the Miyoo is simply the wrong machine and no firmware update will change that, because the silicon cannot do it. That is the entire reason a device like the Retroid Pocket 6, which is genuinely PS2-ready, exists at roughly three and a half times the price. The Miyoo's list is a complete experience inside its era and a brick wall at the edge of it. Whether that wall is a problem depends entirely on whether the games you love live on the right side of it.

The Accuracy Tax: FPGA vs. Software

There is a final axis the table cannot capture: accuracy. The Miyoo emulates in software, which is to say it approximates old hardware with clever modern code. That approximation is excellent and, for 95% of players, indistinguishable from the real thing. But it is an approximation, and the purist community has spent years arguing that only field-programmable gate arrays — chips reconfigured to become the original console at the logic level — deliver true fidelity. That is the entire philosophy behind the MiSTer multisystem platform, and it is why a MiSTer costs several times what a Miyoo does for a fraction of the convenience. The reference documentation at Hardcore Gaming 101 is full of the kind of frame-by-frame minutiae that separates "close enough" from "cycle-accurate." For the 62-title list, software emulation is more than good enough. For a museum, it is not. The Miyoo is not a museum. It is a paperback edition of the canon, and a paperback is the correct format for reading on a bus.

Price and Availability

Money. The single most persuasive fact about the Miyoo Mini Plus is that it is cheap and has stayed cheap, and the single most important caveat about the list is that it arrives free precisely because someone else is absorbing the cost — sometimes in volunteer hours, sometimes in legal risk. Both halves of that sentence deserve a table and a hard look.

What $69.99 Buys

The device is $69.99 in the US as of June 2026, and — remarkably, in an era when nothing holds its price — that number has not moved since the 2023 launch, per current retail listings including LitNxt's product page. What that $69.99 does not buy is a single game; the box ships empty of software in the licensed sense, and the firmware and curated list that animate it are worth exactly $0 because they were built and distributed for free. The full cost picture, including what you cannot run at any price, looks like this:

The Hidden Costs: microSD and ROMs

The seventy-dollar sticker hides two real costs. The first is storage: a serious library wants a larger, faster microSD than whatever ships in the bundle, and a good card runs ten to twenty-five dollars. Since the card is the console, this is not an accessory — it is the second half of the purchase, and skimping on it is the most common way new owners sabotage their own experience.

The second cost is the one nobody prints on a box: the games themselves. The list is free to download and the legality of running any given title is, as established, your responsibility and not the device's. There is no storefront, no licensing layer, no Nintendo eShop quietly handling the rights. The $69.99 is for the hardware and the convenience. The moral and legal accounting for sixty-two copyrighted works is an off-balance-sheet item that the marketing will never mention and that I am contractually obligated, by my own sense of precision, to keep mentioning.

What It Will Never Run

For clarity, because the search query implied otherwise: this device will never run a 2025 or 2026 release. EA Sports FC 26 ($69.99, May 2026) and Nine Sols ($29.99, May 2026) are not merely absent from the list — they are categorically impossible, because the hardware tops out at the PS1 and GBA era and current games are built for silicon that did not exist when this machine's emulation envelope was drawn. The Miyoo Mini Plus is a window into 1983–2001 with one 2021 homebrew exception. Anything newer is on the far side of a wall that price cannot climb.

Who the List Is For

A curation this conservative is not for everyone, and the honest thing a reviewer can do is name the people it is genuinely for and the people who should keep their wallets shut. The 62-title list rewards a very specific relationship with old games — affectionate, casual, and uninterested in completeness — and punishes the opposite.

Five Reasons to Load This List

The strongest cases for the Miyoo Mini Plus's curated list, in descending order of how completely it nails them:

1. The pocket canon. You want the most-beloved 16-bit games ever made, instantly resumable, on a device that fits in a jacket. This is the use case the list was built for and it is unbeatable at the price.
2. The backlog redemption. You missed these games the first time and want to finally play A Link to the Past or Chrono Trigger without setting up a TV, a console, and a cartridge collection.
3. The commute machine. You need exactly twenty to ninety minutes of high-quality, no-friction entertainment on a train, and you want it the same every day. The list's suspend-anywhere comfort food is purpose-built for this.
4. The gift. You are buying for someone nostalgic who is intimidated by emulation setup. A pre-curated 62-title list on a $69.99 device removes every barrier to entry.
5. The single-player JRPG den. You live for turn-based menus and have no need of analog sticks; Final Fantasy IX and Advance Wars are the menu-driven extras tier's quiet justification.

Two Reasons to Look Elsewhere

The list is wrong for you if you need anything past the PS1 era — PS2, GameCube, Dreamcast, Saturn — in which case you want a more powerful Android handheld and should read our Retroid Pocket 6 review before spending a dollar. And it is wrong for you if you want a comprehensive, do-it-all retro library rather than a tight curated one; for that, the right move is to skip the pre-built list entirely and flash a full-fat distribution — our guide to flashing Batocera in 30 minutes is the cleaner path to "everything" rather than "the canon."

The Sweet Spot: A Backlog Machine for the Nightstand

The single use case where the Miyoo Mini Plus's list outperforms every more expensive, more capable rival is the nightstand. This is the device you reach for in the fifteen minutes before sleep, when you do not want to boot a PC, configure a core, or hunt through a thousand-game menu. The 62-title list is small enough to actually know, beautiful enough on its little screen to actually enjoy, and resumable enough to never punish you for stopping.

In that role, the conservatism that costs the list points elsewhere becomes its highest virtue. You do not want surprises at 11 p.m. You want Super Mario World exactly where you left it. The Miyoo's curated canon, judged as a low-friction nightstand object rather than as an ambitious collection, is something close to perfect — which is precisely why so much of its negative criticism evaporates the moment you stop asking it to be a different product.

The Ledger: Pros and Cons

Every review owes its reader a ledger, stripped of prose, that can be scanned in fifteen seconds. Here is the accounting on the Miyoo Mini Plus game list, with the asterisks that the bullet points cannot hold.

The Pros

• The games are unimpeachable. The base 47 is a genuine A-tier canon — A Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, Donkey Kong Country — with nothing on it that anyone would call a bad game.
• The price is extraordinary. $69.99, unchanged since 2023, for a device that plays all of it. The firmware and list cost nothing.
• Onion OS 2.4.1 is excellent. A free, community-built, $0-budget firmware that opened up ~98% of the PS1 library in March 2025 is the most quietly impressive thing in the whole package.
• Coherent curation. 62 chosen titles beat a thousand-game dump for everyone who wants to actually play rather than scroll.
• Form factor. Pocketable, instantly resumable, and the screen flatters 2D pixel art better than any TV.

The Cons

• No ambition. The list never risks an unfamiliar pick; it is the canon everyone already agreed on, arranged without a point of view.
• Nothing new, ever. Zero 2025–2026 titles, one 2021 entry (Apotris), and a hard wall at the PS1 era. No PS2, Saturn, or anything modern.
• No analog sticks. PS1 3D titles play compromised; the hardware was built for the D-pad era and shows it the moment a game wants more.
• Single-player only. Co-op is a non-starter beyond a LAN Doom/Quake party trick.
• The legality is yours. Free list, off-balance-sheet copyright risk. The device ships empty for a reason.

The Asterisks

The cons are softer than they look, and that is the honest complication. "No ambition" only matters if you wanted ambition; most buyers want comfort, and comfort is exactly what 47 beloved games deliver. "Nothing new, ever" is only a defect if you misunderstood the product, which the search query that brought you here suggests is a real risk. And "no analog sticks" is irrelevant to the menu-driven JRPGs and 2D platformers that make up the overwhelming majority of the list. Nearly every weakness here is a weakness only against expectations the device never set for itself. That is the most important sentence in this review, so I will not dress it up.

The Verdict: 7/10

So we arrive at the number. The Miyoo Mini Plus game list is a strong, conservative, beautifully convenient curation of some of the greatest games ever made, run by free software that punches three weight classes above its budget, on hardware that costs less than a single new release. It is also unambitious, frozen in time, and entirely uninterested in showing you anything you do not already know to look for. Both things are true at once. The score reflects the tension.

The Score: 7/10

Seven out of ten. The three missing points are not about quality — the games are flawless, the firmware is a marvel, the price is a gift. The missing points are about imagination. A curation is a piece of editorial work, and this one plays it safe at every fork: the same five-year window, the same Nintendo-heavy canon, the same titles a committee approves without argument. The deep cuts in the extras tier — the Metroidvania TMNT, the homebrew Apotris — are the only moments the list reveals a personality, and they are exactly the moments I wanted more of. A braver curator could make this an 8 or a 9 without adding a single dollar to the price, simply by being willing to be a little bit wrong in the service of being interesting.

But seven is a genuinely good score, and I want to be clear that it is praise. Most products in this category are either incoherent or incomplete. The Miyoo's list is neither. It knows exactly what it is, executes that vision without a wasted gesture, and asks for almost nothing in return. That is rarer than ambition and, for most people, more useful.

Who Should Stop Reading and Buy

If you want the 16-bit canon in your pocket, resumable on a commute, on a device cheap enough to lose without grief — stop reading and buy it. You will not be disappointed, because everything that could disappoint you here is a thing you do not actually want from this object. The casual player, the nostalgist, the backlog-redeemer, and the nightstand-gamer are all served at or near the top of the category. For them the score is effectively a 9, and the missing points are abstractions they will never feel.

If, on the other hand, you came here wanting a 2026 release calendar, a PS2 library, couch co-op, competitive speedrun fidelity, or a comprehensive everything-machine — you are in the wrong store, and no amount of affection for A Link to the Past will fix the fit. The wall at the edge of the PS1 era is load-bearing and permanent.

The Machine's Final Word

The Miyoo Mini Plus does not have a 2026 game list, and it never will, and after a week with the thing I have come to think that is the most honest feature it has. In an industry that ships $69.99 sequels by the annual quarter — the EA Sports FC 26s and the rest of the treadmill — here is a $69.99 object whose entire pitch is that the past was already good enough and somebody just needs to arrange it nicely. The community did. They did it for free, on a $0 budget, and they keep a running list of their favorites going on places like the active r/MiyooMini top-ten thread, which is exactly where I would point a new owner before they ever touch the curated 62. The list is the wall in a small, well-lit museum. The paintings were finished decades ago. Seven out of ten is the score I give the curator. The canon, as ever, grades itself, and it has been passing for thirty years.