Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 is the sixth installment in the Mario & Sonic series based on the real-world 2020 Summer Olympics, which will take place in Tokyo, Japan. The game includes a number of events, including returning ones from previous Mario & Sonic titles, such as boxing, soccer, swimming, and gymnastics, and new ones, such as karate, skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing. It will also feature a mode with 2D Events where players can compete in classic 2D versions of events from the 1964 Summer Olympics. Based off older sports games, these events are played using button controls only and will only feature eight playable characters. These 2D Events' animations reflect the 8-bit Mario and 16-bit Sonic game art style.
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This has a full story mode which involves Mario, Sonic, Dr. Robotnik and Bowser getting sucked into a video game made by Dr. Robotnik based o the 1964 Tokyo Olympic games. This is a pixelated game that features the famous classic looks of Mario and Sonic, with Sonic based on his Mega Drive games and Mario based on the original Super Mario Bros. The story switches back and forth between retro and current times, going through each Olympic event in the game, so no need to repeatedly do the same event or grind. It’s the best story more in the Olympic titles.
Throughout the story you’ll also encounter minigames, both 2D and 3D which, for the most part are a lot of fun. There’s ones where Sonic is chasing a train or a taxi, Mario flying a plane in a side scrolling shooter, Mario sneaking through a museum, finding toads in a crowd and some more. These are a great addition and can be played on their own once you’ve gotten past them in the story.
The 2D events are a lot of fun. They’re simple, but they’re supposed to be (apart from Volleyball, which I couldn’t figure out). Diving is surprisingly a lot of fun, Shooting is a bit like Duck Hunt and there’s just a lot of charm across all 10 of them.
The 3D events, for the first time, contained none that I had trouble with or flat out hated. The standard events still have character powers, making returning games like Rugby Sevens even more fun. Skateboarding and Surfboarding are fun new trick-based ones and Karate has a surprising amount of depth to it. You have different controller options, with all except Discus having options that don’t involve motion controls.
Dream events also return, although there are only three of them. Dream Racing is a lot of fun, and is essentially a simplified Sonic Riders as characters race downhill on hoverboards. Dream Shooting is also a target shooting third person shooter and very enjoyable. Karate is the weakest dream event, but still enjoyable.
The Tokyo 2020 Olympics is easily the best one in the series, there is a lot of love and detail, right down to lots of trivia about the Olympics.