Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 (Switch)

Since the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Mario, Sonic, and their supporting casts have been getting together to compete in their own Olympic contest in lock step with the real events. Like many sports video games though, the game would end up coming out the year before it is meant to represent so it can ride the rising interest as the actual sporting event approaches. However, for Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, they couldn’t have predicted the postponement to 2021 the Olympics would receive due to the global pandemic. Already a bit of a fantasy version of the international competition though, it’s hardly strange for the two video game mascots to still be competing in a more idyllic situation where the city of Tokyo is open for exploration, packed with fans, and the games are played out in the open. Plus, being able to actually explore Tokyo helped the game take a bit more of a creative approach with how the games were represented than simply adapting the typical stadium sports one would expect to see.

Back in 1964, Tokyo held its first Summer Olympic Games, something Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 uses for a neat mix of the past and the present. In the game’s story mode, Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog are tricked by their longtime nemeses the fire-breathing turtle Bowser and the roboticist Dr. Eggman into playing a handheld video game device. A reproduction of the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo is contained in the game system but with far more rudimentary graphics, and when the system is turned on it ends up sucking in not only Mario and Sonic but Bowser and Eggman as well. Eager to leave and get back to normal life, the group eventually learns that they need to collect gold medals at the simulated sports contained in the game, but at the same time their friends outside are trying to keep the game system safe and assist them how they can. Conveniently, they’ll also be doing so by playing sports, but the way the sports are presented differs between the two groups.

Inside the Tokyo ’64 game system, characters are represented with graphics befitting their earliest games, Mario and his friends all using sprites from Super Mario Bros. while Sonic’s cast rely on their sprites from the Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy of games on Sega Genesis. The 1964 version of Tokyo is presented with the graphical style of a 1980s NES game though so Sonic and crew look a little more advanced than the characters they’re interacting with, but it’s actually more of a shame you only get eight possible competitors for these events in free play than it is a concern that not all of them completely gel with the art style. Out in the normal world with Mario’s twin brother Luigi and Sonic’s good friend Tails though, the sports they’ll be competing in are more faithfully reproduced and meant to more closely mimic the real sports they are based on. You will still have things like a tie-wearing gorilla joining in on the fencing or a crocodile with headphones riding a surfboard and most events also throw in a little special ability to give you a small boost, but you will compete in a 3D space that has a cleaner cartoon look with more details befitting a game made for the Nintendo Switch. Events that are available in one mode are not always available in the other though and those that are will even be a little different between the retro and modern representations of the sport like the modern version of hurdles including a super dash if you can clear them safely.

Conceptually this does add an interesting twist to how the Olympic games are presented, and in the story mode you even get to drop by locations past and present in Tokyo that come with little trivia bits to uncover. Perhaps a few too many of them pertain to mathematical details like the exact size of equipment or exact year something happened and they are presented as a little guessing game even though sometimes an image of a character is right next to a question asking what color their shoes are, but you can learn a little bit about modern locations in Tokyo and a little history on top of dropping by some of those locations to hang around out front of them. Unfortunately, the plot connecting you to these events and the little tours of Tokyo is a ponderous affair where characters spend an incredible amount of time talking while saying very little. Almost every new character in the pretty sizeable cast has be briefed on the situation, provide some justification for why they might help or hinder you, then introduce the sport you’ll play for a few minutes, then react to the results and potentially put you onto the next activity by talking about it for a fair bit. If the sport sections themselves weren’t so swiftly completed even if you retry them a few times it might sting less, but so much unskippable dialogue is placed in between the short bursts of action without really being interesting itself that it grows tiresome to have to read it all. I am not against a game concocting a little plot to link together a group of sports competitions but it feels like a good deal of fat could have been trimmed; there are only so many ways Bowser and Eggman can tell Sonic and Mario they won’t win the next event before the villains proceed to lose again after all.

Luckily, the actual sports when you get to them are decently done and the story mode does still pack an interesting idea to bolster its amount of content. Sometimes when you do arrive at a location you actually won’t be participating in an Olympic sport. Instead, a minigame will occur that tends to have some story tie like Sonic racing down a road to try and catch a taxi that Eggman seems to be escaping in. Some of these are reimaginings of other ways to play, Tails climbing the Tokyo Tower for example using the mechanics found over in Sports Climbing, but others are full on video game concepts like Mario and Sonic flying through the air in a side-scrolling plane level shooting down some of Eggman’s robots. Besides a rather dry sneak through a museum and an all too easy goal kick game though these are mostly interesting diversions from the expected competitions and can even be a bit meatier in their extra offerings when played in free mode, although they also seemingly replace the typical dream events found in most Mario and Sonic Olympic titles. Only three dream events are present here, these being more fanciful sports like a target shooting challenge where you walk around an area themed around an old Japanese castle or a hoverboard competition down a futuristic race course. The wrestling arena where you claim squares by knocking opponents onto them is a bit too bouncy and chaotic though while the other dream events feel fairly simple, so it was probably wiser to invest in the 1964 retro angle than dig in deeper with the imagined competitions.

In regards to the core events, there are 21 presented as events in the Tokyo 2020 style and 10 in the Tokyo 1964 style. While the 1964 games have a heavily limited character roster, the 2020 events have a much wider spread of potential players with different advantages per sport. There are 20 characters playable in every modern sport, 10 from the Mario series of games and 10 from Sonic’s franchise, and most of the faces you’d hope to see are present like the Princesses Peach and Daisy and Sonic’s dark counterpart Shadow. Some sports will have guest characters playable for that sport alone though, there being an additional 6 characters from both sides that refuse to compete in any other competition. For some you can at least extrapolate a reason why they were picked for their sport, a monkey like Diddy Kong would probably enjoy a game of Rugby and the hulking Zavok certainly has a figure fit for boxing, but it’s a bit harder to figure out why Toadette is only able to compete in 110m Hurdles despite being far shorter than the hurdles and not even really having legs since her feet attach directly to her waist. Some characters do have different outfits depending on the sport they’re participating in so perhaps some time was being saved in not dressing up some of these guest characters to participate in other events, but then you have oddities like Eggman Nega who shares animations with Eggman already and is almost just a recolor, making his cordoning off as a Karate-only character rather strange.

As for how the actual games unfold, the complexity never really gets too deep, this fairly obvious for some sports like the Long Jump that would probably be hurt through overcomplication. Oftentimes the focus will be on performing better in the event by timing actions perfectly or finding a rhythm. If you move your control sticks too quickly while swimming you’ll tire out your character, if you pull the stick back too much in the discus throw you’ll end up hitting the guard barrier instead of flying across the field for measurement. The 100m dash will really be as simple as mashing a button for the most part though, but as mentioned before almost every event has a super move thrown in for some extra spice. The 100m dash has a powerful burst of speed you can activate for a last surge, your character choice potentially impacting how effective it is. In the javelin throw, instead you get this special boost if you throw the javelin just right, some factors like the angle of the throw still important to the distance but a nice advantage awaits players who can get the exact setups right in certain sports. At the same time though, some sports are a bit too basic to provide staying power, the inputs easy enough to master that chasing a record isn’t too interesting when you potentially beat the supposed world record on your first try. Competitive multiplayer at least gives you the range to potentially have performance in the moment matter more than a single saved record, but the events with a bit more room for exploration end up the more exciting ones to compete in.

Skateboarding and Surfing for example both utilize a combo-focused trick system where different actions provide different points, mixing up your choices is more valuable, and you have to move through the 3D space of the events so figuring out when to do tricks or how to chain them together is a more involved task than doing something like jumping over hurdles that are always spaced the same. A few events certainly had more potential if they had variability, Sport Climbing and Equestrian – Jumping both having stamina management ideas at play that could be helped by having more than one standard course to conquer. Marathon over in the 1964 games actually has some randomization in relation to catching the slipstreams of other competitors and trying to walk around them to make for play sessions that feel a bit different, and the 10m Platform dive and Vault over in the old games also have different inputs every time so nailing them and adjusting the difficulty of them means shooting for a good score is more layered. The competitive sports feel like they could have been a space where more longevity could be found, but games like Badminton and Table Tennis will automatically move players around to make it a bit too simple in how you participate and the fights over in things like Karate and Fencing are a bit too quick due to their 10 point scoring system based on hits. The instructions can often be a little rough, especially in the story where you’ll be thrown in to play a game once and then move on, so something like the 1964 Judo competition deciding it needs to explain all its jargon ends up obfuscating the fairly basic competition information you will need to know to participate. There are enough solid options for some multiplayer fun and only things like guest characters and minigames are unlocked through story mode, so there is room to jump in and just enjoy a decent set of Olympic sports with familiar video game heroes.

THE VERDICT: Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 provides a decent selection of Olympic sports with some special moves and considerations so that even some of the simpler ones aren’t too basic, only a few of them really given the room to grow but most of them at least enjoyable in small doses. The dreadfully tedious story mode spends far too much time on bland dialogue, but it also lead to nifty concepts like exploring Tokyo in two time periods, playing a few minigames, and participating in a handful of sports with a retro presentation. While there was room to draw out more from the sports on offer to add more longevity beyond multiplayer competition, most have a solid enough execution to at least provide some Olympic fun with a twist.

And so, I give Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 for Nintendo Switch…

An OKAY rating. The story mode’s writing really does almost drag down the good and goofy ideas that came with it. The premise of video game heroes trapped in an actual Olympic video games is the fun sort of silly you’d hope to see out of a sports game plot where some of the competitors are anthropomorphic animals, but too little was left up to the imagination and characters constantly need to talk about the same ideas both as updates on their progress and to fill in a new person on the ongoing events. The constant chatter wouldn’t have been so bad if the action was peppered throughout it better, but with so many sports barely taking any time to compete in, the single-player adventure becomes more about the plot and it’s not really one that has many ideas on what to say. The trivia, digital representations of Tokyo in two different eras, and the actual sports when you play them are pretty sound and interesting despite some oddities, but it is a shame you have to push through so much talking to get small tastes of it. The fact you can just jump into most sports does mean you can always leave the story aside and just compete in the actual events, some certainly lacking the staying power with their simple concepts but a good enough mix exists that you can still find some parts worth playing. Naturally you would be better off finding a Skateboarding, Football, Boxing, or even Track & Field game to get the most out of the sports you’re playing, but while some are a bit too straightforward even with special moves added on top, you are likely to find a few worth playing more than once. Dressing some of them up in a retro style helps to differentiate the competition a bit more too, things like the Long Jump and Triple Jump separated by their visual style despite their similarities as events. Very few options for events exist outside of making things like Volleyball or Rugby last longer though, this potentially a way the individual events could have extended their life by having the rules change or little complications so you can dive into more video game inspired play outside of the lean dream events and the minigame options.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 did make an interesting effort to be more than just the latest time two video game mascots met up to compete in sports, but perhaps more effort was spent dragging out a basic plot than giving extra life to the simpler events. The Tokyo 1964 concept is a nice way to gussy up some competitions and help the package feel a bit more diverse, but more complexity or more imagination along the lines of the super moves feels like the next step the game would need to take to help make the Olympic events more enjoyable in video game form.