Month of Mario: Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – Arcade Edition (Arcade)

While I have previously covered its home console equivalent on the Switch, to say Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – Arcade Edition is the same game would be ignoring how much a change in controls can impact an experience. Mashing buttons or moving a controller can be a challenge, but when an arcade machine actually wants you to run in place and jump to compete in events like hurdles and surfing, the difficulty and the enjoyment change quite a bit.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – Arcade Edition features a specialized arcade cabinet with a footpad you stand on to play. With two rails at the side to assist you if you need support, the player will find that some but not all of the 12 sports on offer will involve actual movement to compete in. The footpad is able to pick up the speed of your running as well as having a decent sense for what might count as a jump, a simple hop not often getting detected so you do need to get some air if you want it to count as a leap. An event like the 100m dash is very quickly completed though so it’s not meant to match the rigors of the real sport, but the events are often made up of a few different actions so you’re not going to fatigue yourself spending too long running in place at any point. In fact, the cabinet also has three buttons in front of you, a red, blue, and yellow one that often are necessary controls as well. It’s not uncommon for a sport to have you switching between body motions and button pressing to make an event a bit more involved, these lightly complications making it more likely you’ll stick with the cabinet for a few rounds rather than wiping yourself out with anything too demanding.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – Arcade Edition can be played in multiplayer with up to three other players, provided the arcade you’re at has four cabinets all hooked up for a competition. If you elect to go solo though, you’ll instead compete in a set of five events, four of them featuring visuals similar to the Switch version of the game and thus meant to mimic the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic Games that in reality occurred instead in 2021. The cabinet’s graphic fidelity is not perfect, the event’s mascot Miraitowa having some notable pixelation on the edges of his character art for loading screens and some of the cartoon characters you play as look a bit fuzzy at times. Mostly, their cartoony appearances help to make it negligible, the game featuring 20 cast members to choose from. While playing as your favorite character from the Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has some appeal, especially since many of them will change into unique outfits for events like Gymnastics or Swimming, your character choice can also give you an edge or hold you back a bit. Characters all have a different rating when it comes to their Power, Speed, or Technique, and by organizing the competition into five events, you can’t guarantee you’ll pick someone with a persistent advantage throughout. You can at least pick from a set of three events whenever it’s time for a new sport, allowing you to pick your favorites or go for ones your character may excel at.

Naturally, your performance will hinge most of all on your ability to manage the motion controls and the three buttons. If you choose to play on Easy though, the game will be far more lenient in determining if you got the timing down for the right action or require less vigorous movement for running, although at the end of solo play there will be a showdown with either Mario or Sonic that ups the difficulty no matter your choice. For four of the five events in a session, you’ll find yourself playing sports that were meant to be played at the 2020 Summer Olympics. Triple Jump, Surfing, 100m, Discus Throw, Gymnastics, Rugby Sevens, Sport Climbing, and Swimming make up these events, and not all of these events could reasonably be mapped to running and jumping motions. Rugby Sevens for example divides the sport into a sequence of actions and choices, leaping for the ball, pushing through blockers, and running down the field having you swap between different inputs that make it more a quick minigame than an authentic competition. Others like 100m still try to shake things up beyond running, holding buttons and releasing them being how you kick off at the start and a jump will give your character a super boost near the end of the race. Sport Climbing perhaps makes the best use of the buttons though, the artificial rocks on the climbing wall color-coded so pressing them quickly and accurately is a challenge and one that stands above the game’s quite common reliance on mashing all three buttons as quickly as you can.

The added physicality to the events does make them more engaging than they might otherwise have been, timing a leap for a Triple Jump or needing to leap to mimic a kick off the swimming pool wall better than simple button presses, and it’s a shame the cabinet wasn’t more sensitive since Gymnastics does feature some running and jumping but the balance portion is purely button-based. However, these are only 8 of the 12 events featured, because after you play your first two, a retro event might be presented as a break. Here you don’t necessarily need to perform well to continue, this bonus event actually meant to hearken back to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and thus Mario, Sonic, and their friends are also presented in a visual style closer to their initial video game appearances. This can mean you pick an athlete like Wario or Vector the Crocodile only to be swapped to Bowser or Knuckles due to limited available retro athletes, but these events are more an amusing diversion rather than something that heavily impacts your overall performance.

The 1964 Olympics only feature four unique events, 110m Hurdles, Diving, Shooting, and Vault actually focusing on button presses as befitting their qualification as a break event likely to help you catch your breath some. These can still be competitive, timing a button press well to do a hurdle jump or doing the indicated inputs to do an impressive dive are still challenges and ones where you can try to achieve high scores or beat the people on other cabinets in. Perhaps the side-scrolling 2D presentation also motivated the designers to not make them feature body movement since it’s a bit more unusual to map your actions to characters viewed from the side than characters you’re viewing from behind like in the 3D sports, but with some like Shooting still willing to be demanding but not exhausting, it is actually an enjoyable break and one you won’t likely resent pulling you away from the main competition.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – Arcade Edition can be surprisingly generous as well. Competing in five total events sounds like a lot for a single credit and technically, it isn’t guaranteed. Beyond trying to outscore both a set of unseen computer players and others playing on cabinets at the same time, you’ll need to focus on a specific event challenge if you want to continue on without paying more. This will usually be some threshold like throwing the discus a certain distance in Discus Throw or scoring enough in Surfing by riding the waves right and pulling off tricks, but you can always put in money to continue if you fail and wish to see the competition through. The cabinet doesn’t treat a player playing on Easy or Normal much differently in terms of goals surprisingly and so there’s an interesting bar set when playing. You want to do well enough to continue on and so you’re watching more closely, trying to time jumps perfectly or figure out the events a bit more even though many are simple enough. Their rule introductions can be a bit daunting with how many times the controls will be swapped, but during the event instructions appear on screen anyway so you’re never lost. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – Arcade Edition ends up feeling quite fair, rather involved, and surprisingly, despite far fewer events and structure, perhaps more enjoyable than the Switch counterpart, the fat trimmed into an experience that is exciting and energetic especially once you know the sports enough you can start skipping instruction screens and keep the events coming at a quick pace.

THE VERDICT: Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – Arcade Edition may seem slight compared to home console games in its series, but its tighter focus and emphasis on multiple control types makes each event feel more important and challenging. The mix of button presses, running, and jumping keeps you active and engaged, and having to do well enough to keep playing also adds an interesting motivator to do your best and care more about successes and stumbles. The retro events are a nice breather that still presents some challenge so it’s not a shallow break, and since the game doesn’t overemphasize the physical component, you get the enjoyment of having to actually move to compete in some virtual athletics but won’t exhaust yourself since the game shifts focus to less demanding controls to keep things fresh.

And so, I give Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – Arcade Edition for arcade machines…

A GOOD rating. While Easy mode can be ridiculously easy, to the point that the Swimming event that wants you to time button presses to match a measured stroke pretty much lets you get away with pressing buttons seconds before and after it’s indicated to do so, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – Arcade Edition shouldn’t be faulted for a mode to accommodate younger players or those who might not be able to do physical activities too well. The cabinet’s handlebars are great for allowing you to embrace the jumping and running without feeling in danger of falling off and thus the game is actually allowed to properly sense what it considers a valid sprint or leap. You can’t lazily cheat your way through events by toying with the detection, especially since changing between control types means even outsmarting one with a positioning trick will likely leave you scrambling when it’s time for the next action. Most important of all though is the events aren’t too easy to perfect because of the variance involved in managing the control methods, and ones like the retro sports that would be possible to master due to their simple inputs up the challenge over the course of the events so doing superbly is an actual reflection of some good reflexes. It’s surprising the game is so kind in letting you continue on after clearing goals that don’t feel unachievable, and the event structure also means you have bigger goals to shoot for than doing well in a singular event. More events would be nice of course, although some like Rugby Sevens do feel a bit out of place already since it has to adjust the sport a little too much to fit the fast-paced physical action on offer.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 on Switch does offer the benefit of ease of access, but its arcade counterpart feels the better adaptation of the Summer Olympics and not just because it is inherently more physical. The small range of sports are valued more, their presentation in a sequence feels more important, and the desire to mix up their controls leads to events having more depth. It doesn’t get too complicated despite how it presents its event instructions either, and while you’ll likely need to be in the right mood to run and jump on a machine you found in public, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – Arcade Edition presents it an enjoyable way that is the right amount of demanding so getting a medal isn’t too difficult or too much of a given.