Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games (Wii U)
Every year in Rio de Janeiro an enormous Carnival celebration is held and with its vibrant parade floats and costuming it has become an inextricable part of the city’s identity. Unfortunately, on most years it is held in February, so when the Summer Olympic Games was held in the Brazilian city, it was long after any Carnival celebrations would be on show. Luckily, a video game that’s already starring rugby-playing monkeys and human-sized hedgehogs can get away with fudging some of the details on what should be happening in the city. Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games won’t let the time of year get in its way when it comes to celebrating the beautiful sights and culture of Rio alongside its sports minigames and its commitment to showing Rio de Janeiro at its best is perhaps the most captivating part of fifth installment in this crossover Olympic sports series.
When you first turn on Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games you’ll find yourself playing as the custom Mii character assigned to your Wii U profile. While a major part of the series’s appeal is seeing the heroes and villains from the Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog games compete in sports events, your Mii ends up getting a lot of focus instead even down to how you’ll be selecting which activities you wish to play. Starting on the lovely Copacabana Beach, you’ll actually be selecting what actions you wish to take by walking up to large colorful sand sculptures on the beach, and while you do later get a shortcut menu if you want to speed up the process, it is nice to walk around, listen to some music based around the setting and its instrumentation, and even see other characters milling about who you can speak with. Some of these are recognizable characters from the Mario and Sonic video game franchises, but a lot more of them are going to be the Miis you’ll be competing against in tournaments, many of them willing to share a fun fact about their home country.
Once you’re content with your time on the small beach, it comes time to participate in some of the sporting events, and you do so initially through the Maracanã Stadium sculpture which is essentially a free play mode for single player or multiplayer. Here you are allowed to pick from the crossover characters, each one having different stats so some will perform better at a specific type of sport than others although not often to such a degree you feel forced to play as someone. Some characters are restricted to appearing in only a single sport, someone like Sticks the Jungle Badger only showing up for Archery while the bunny-like thief Nabbit only wants to race in the 100m dash. These guest characters are not initially available though as you need to instead unlock them by defeating them in the game’s main mode: the Tournaments. Tournaments require you to play as your Mii and even in team events like Football (as in soccer) and Volleyball you’ll be receiving backup from other Miis on your system. Your Mii will start off with plain clothes and rather weak abilities, the player needing to gradually earn new outfit pieces by completing tournaments and spending the coins and rings your earn through them on the capsule machines that give out new clothes and goodies. Unfortunately you will get duplicates that provide nothing at times, but the new gear will up your Mii’s stats when worn so you can start tipping things in your favor.
The tournaments are all based around a single event and you need to work your way up through them, needing to complete all the Level 1 tournaments to make the harder Level 2 ones appear and then complete all those to finally tackle Level 3. These are based on the difficulty settings found in single play, although calling the lowest rating Normal feels a misnomer since you’ll earn gold medals with ease and by huge point differentials in it once you understand the controls. Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games does unfortunately decide to have special tips for the 17 available events only appear after you’ve already played them some and then found a Mii on the beach willing to share such info, and while it’s fine when it’s just pointers, there are important details just left out of event tutorials that directly impact how well you can perform like not telling you that you can gain extra distance in the Triple Jump by pressing a button repeatedly while in the air or you can get little speed boosts in BMX by pressing the right button when your bike reaches the bottom of a bump. The tournament mode does at least eventually get quite difficult and you can retry a tournament later if you fail to get a medal in it, but climbing up to the more challenging tournaments can get quite wearisome, especially since after each match in the tournament you’re forced back to the beach rather than able to keep up the momentum and energy by going right into the next match.
When it comes to the 17 minigames based on Olympic Sports, 14 are meant to be fairly realistic adaptations while 3 are known as Duel events and they add some extra fantasy elements to the sports they adapt. Football is normally played with typical 4 on 4 soccer rules, but Duel Football allows you to tackle other players without getting a foul and even fire plasma balls at characters to mess them up. Rugby Sevens and Beach Volleyball get items added to their Duel versions you can use to disrupt scoring or defensive attempts and both have more specific unique gimmicks like the beautiful Carnival-inspired Duel Volleyball court having octopus robots go under the twinkling light net that you can encourage to attack the other team. All three Duel games also have it where you score points in the traditional manner for the sport but the value of the points changes as each time you hit the opposition with an item or attack you’ll get some credit that is tacked onto your next goal. These Duel events give you many variables to keep track of and are surely the highlight of the experience, giving you reasons to stay consistently active and many ways for fortune to shift hands over the course of a match with comebacks and surprises always possible.
Standard Beach Volleyball on the other hand feels very slow and returning the ball isn’t too difficult much of the time, to the point the game even added super shots to standard play to try and energize it some. Some other sports will introduce some unrealistic techniques and boosts as well, and while the rather plain adaptation of Boxing having a super punch feels a bit more like extra effects applied to a standard attack, in something like the 100m Dash you can actually have your character fly across the track when a special is activated. These inclusions aren’t a bad idea mind you, in fact some of the weakest events are pretty straight adaptations of the real sport. Javelin Throw is just going to be a few button presses to line it up and Table Tennis can sometimes stagnate as your control over the ball isn’t often strong enough and it can even seem like you missed the ball for an unclear reason when it finally does occur.
Rhythmic Gymnastics gets a good amount of attention in that there are plenty of unlockable songs for your character to dance to, and while the event is mostly a fairly standard rhythm game challenge of pressing buttons at the right time, on higher difficulties and with more energetic songs it can put up a good fight. With classical music as well as tracks from Mario and Sonic’s home games, there’s at least more reason to return to this than something like the 4x100m Relay where it’s not only fairly plain to compete in but even getting a high score or the world record won’t likely feel out of reach. Since a lot of these Olympic events are solo performances judged against other competitors it can dampen some of the enthusiasm for seeing through every tournament as well, the most basic and plain events often undermined by the fact you’re just going to be repeating them until you get an acceptable score rather than interacting with opponents and earning your way through a bracket by directly defeating someone else.
Essentially, for every event like Archery where thought was put into making it more exciting by having multiple target courses and the need to make judgment calls on how to approach them, you’ll also have an event like 100m Freestyle Swimming where it’s more a performance test and there is usually some way to perform as close to optimal as possible to figure out. The mix isn’t bad, but the minigames could have been more exciting if they were more substantial or embraced the fictional universes its characters come from a bit more with how powers and special items are integrated. It is nice that Rio de Janeiro isn’t being forgotten though, especially since after beating all the Level 1 Tournaments, sometimes a Carnival parade will kick off and floats will come down the street carrying a few Nintendo and Sega characters. This event is already backed by an incredibly energetic original vocal track, but these floats also bring with them challenge events where you compete in a sport and need to meet certain conditions like blocking a certain amount of times when playing Beach Volleyball or winning the 100m Dash without utilizing the speed boost you can get near the end of the track. Some of these are pretty simple while others can be surprisingly hard as they might expect you to know things about the sports that were barely taught and you had little room to learn, but since the reward for these is just Mii clothing based on Mario and Sonic characters it doesn’t hurt to let them pass if you can’t clear them. The Tournaments contain some similar challenges, more about winning events with a certain amount of specific maneuvers or score differentials than specific maneuvers, but these provide extra currency to spend on the capsule machines so again its nice to win them but not a big loss if you miss out.
Besides some online modes like competing against ghosts that imitate the actions of other players or just playing people directly, there is also a Heroes Showdown mode to unlock where Mario and Sonic actually get to take center stage. Each one of them now leads a team of the other characters from their series that are attending the games, the idea being that Team Mario and Team Sonic are trying to perform the best at a random series of Olympic minigames. Characters who lose an event can’t be selected again during this little competition, but there’s also a somewhat chaotic power system where the athlete you use might grant you a special power if you win that can influence the strength of your team or hinder the other one. The powers are a bit too random and often have inconsequential footprints, but at least this mode allows for the simpler minigames to have more purpose in multiplayer since a win or loss can have long-term effects on the Showdown’s results.
THE VERDICT: The wonderful Rio de Janeiro theming of Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games gives the game some strong musical accompaniment and plenty of lovely sights, but the Olympic sports are a more mixed bag and not always presented in the best way. The Duel sports can definitely provide some lively and varied matches thanks to their items and special conditions, but the normal sports can feel a bit basic and occasionally without much wiggle room on what you can do better besides get the timing on a button press a bit better next time. Tournament mode starts slow but eventually gets legitimately tough, a few minigames like Rhythmic Gymnastics and Archery interesting to replay and offsetting the quick and plain ones well enough. Still, the Olympic competition can sometimes feel far less vivacious than the city hosting it at times, making it a little harder to commit to playing the game for long periods.
And so, I give Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games for Wii U…
An OKAY rating. While it captures a broad picture of Rio in both its sights and sounds, Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games hinges on the strength of its 17 sports minigames and each one that comes up short weighs it down a little. Admittedly, it is probably preferable that a speedy event like the 100m Dash is simple and can be completed in a few seconds since otherwise it might feel at odds with the sport it is adapting, but then you have things like Beach Volleyball that just seem to drag while being rather plain. The Duel events were a strong concept, providing a more energetic twist to the sport in focus without fully replacing it, meaning players can have the authentic experience (for the most part) and then a more exhilarating and unique experience as well. Perhaps the relatively reserved selection of events could have made room for Duel events for most of them, and while some like Rhythmic Gymnastics don’t feel like they need it because they’re fully featured already, adding more considerations to swimming or more courses for the Equestrian event would make returning to them more compelling. The Tournament mode having the Mii clothing element at least gives you something to focus on beyond slowly climbing up to some more challenging difficulties, although it does feel a touch odd the title characters and their friends are on the sidelines for much of the solo play. You can still likely find some decent fun with Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in multiplayer too, especially in events involving direct competition instead of comparing scores, but at times you might just wish something like Duel Rugby Sevens was the game’s sole focus so it could build it up into a proper sport instead of just one of the best minigames on show. Thankfully, you can at least adjust how long team events go so you can push it a little closer to something like a full match of that sport rather than just a quick taste.
Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games paying some extra loving attention to the host city is definitely a nice step for the series to take and one that ensures this installment has a distinct identity compared to some other Mario & Sonic Olympic Games, but it still feels like the minigames themselves can’t quite find a nice format for how they should be generally handled. The Duel games feel like they could have been a great avenue for evolving even the most basic events into more exciting formats, but this installment only dips its toes lightly in the concept and misses out on what could have made it really excel. You can still find a good deal of decent events and even a few fun ones, but it still feels like there’s not enough special about this Summer Olympics game besides the aesthetic touches.