I recently had a discussion with a good friend about fishing minigames, and just wanted to share it online for no particular reason. ;)
In most other games where fishing is an optional side task, it either boils down to ....
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RNG / sheer luck with very little opportunities to improve anything. Most Pokémon games are an example here: you cast your line then push a button and you get what you get. There is no way you could learn to push the button in a more skillful way, so the player can not improve. This is especially bad if you can get a certain Pokémon or evolution item only by fishing, because it means you'll either get lucky and immediatly get what you want, or you spend three weeks straight sitting in the same spot without making any progress. And you can not change anything about that.
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Upgrades alone. To catch better fish, you need better rods and/or bobbers. That's it. There's no minigame to learn, just the "push button to reel in" mechanic again. An example for this would be Terraria, which offers a huge amount of possible upgrades for your equipment but ultimately no actual "minigame" because you just need to push one button to get your fish out of the water.
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Skill alone with no way of improving things in a meaningful manner. An example for this would be the Fishing Hole in Twilight Princess. Beautiful environment, nice animations, gorgeous music - but if you suck at the minigame, then you suck forever. There's no way to make the process easier without "in-game" cheating (Sinking Lure, but the owner will not accept anything caught with it so it is pretty pointless to get it in the first place).
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Obnoxious button mashing. Personally I just hate this so, so much ... it is uncreative and annoying. As much as I like Dragon Quest Builders otherwise, but their fishing minigame is a prime example of this. Try catching an XXL Whale Shark without getting a cramp and/or ruining your controller....
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Minigame doesn't feel like fishing. An example would be FF12 where the "fishing" is done by repeating the button combinations on the screen as fast as possible. They could have used the same mechanic for drastically different minigames (like a crane game or a mini version of Street Fighter) and it wouldn't have made any difference. It only counts as a "fishing" minigame because the game says so. Oh and you don't even GET fish this way, because all rewards for this minigame are potions and rocks and money.
Now Stardew Valley on the other hand has, in my opinion, the best mix of all of these factors. There is RNG involved to a certain degree to keep things interesting, but you also get numerous ways to improve your odds.
It takes a certain amount of skill to keep the bobber inside the green line, so the player actually has a chance to "git gud" even without having to rely on in-game upgrades.
...but if you really can't get the hang of the minigame itself or have slow reflexes (for medical reasons etc.), you can still yield better results by using better rods, different bobbers, better bait, food bonuses and the like, or levelling up your character's fishing skill.
It is a super simple game (in a good way!) and has easy-to-understand mechanics without monotonous button mashing.
It also feels a lot more "lively" because the sole dev made sure that different fish behave differently, like that the bar barely moves when you reel in a slow fish like carp but will jump around like Sonic on crack when you hook a Lava Eel. The green bar "darting" also has a kinda similar feel to IRL fishing (better than repeating button combinations at least) since you have to respond to the fish's movements and give the line some slack in the right moment (not just bluntly reeling in until the line snaps).
Plus, there's actually lots of other stuff you can DO with the fishing minigame that overlaps with other tasks and features the game has to offer, like crafting worm bins to get your personal source of bait or tossing your catch into your own pond on the farm where they multiply over time and can net you other produce like for example caviar from sturgeons. You also sometimes need specific fish to cook a certain dish, there are villager requests centered around catching certain amounts of lake / river / ocean fish to "reduce their numbers" and many more.
There's even a villager request to fish garbage out of the lake to clean it up, and some fishing garbage can be recycled into valuable crafting components. This is a massive improvement over some other games where the respective minigame feels disconnected from the rest of the gameplay, and you simply fish to sell the catch and nothing else.
Also a nice touch that the only non-legendary fish that doesn't reproduce in a pond is the tiger trout. This hybrid species is infertile IRL and I was pleasantly surprised that Concerned Ape would include such a small but crucial detail in a game that isn't even primarily about fishing. ♥
There are a ton of other things I love about Stardew Valley, but this particular minigame is simply peak top tier fishing minigame design.
