I loved the original Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games back on Wii in 2008, it's still surreal for me that my two favorite videogame characters of all-time get a game together. After the first one, I've played a bit of Winter Games, and Rio 2016, wich I didn't like that much cause it felt a little barebones. I've seen people say that London 2012 is the best one but I've never played it, but Tokyo 2020 for me is the best since the original, Japan is the home of Mario & Sonic after all and I think Sega did a great job portraing their home country. The story mode lets you walk thru famous spots from Tokyo that are beautifully modeled, and the 1964 part is really well done visually. The minigames themselves have more depth than I tought and you can choose between motion and button controls. There's a great variety between real olympic events, and more unrealistic, fantasy events that I missed in the previous games. Dialog in story mode isn't like, stellar but it's fun enough, and the trivia collectable cards were fun to find and read. In conclusion if you liked previous games or never played a M&S game before this is a great place to start or come back. I also want to point out that Donkey Kong's eyes in this game are extremely creepy, I wanted to post a picture here if I could, I don't know what happened maybe they wanted to scare the kids.

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I got a digital code of this for Christmas in 2019 and just never got around to it until now. I was expecting a solid and fun mini-game collection, and in that regard, you could suppose it does its job with mini-games. They function well enough! However, the game hardly kept my positive attention throughout its slog of a story mode, with unskippable cutscenes and a thoroughly uninteresting two-tone storyline. Mini-games are either piss easy, frustrating, or just really boring.

About the nicest thing about this game I can say is that it's not broken and it looks pretty. If this was a $30 budget title, I'd probably be a bit kinder to it. It's full-price and was rushed to a deadline that was already months before the event that was supposed to happen, but didn't. The result is a high-effort yet ultimately dry-feeling collection of sports mini-games.

Oh man, this one took all my willpower to see it to the end. A collection of minigames that somehow all manage to either be too long or too short, many of them featuring broken controls and wildly overcomplicated rules that would frustrate even the most patient of kids. The soccer game can be chaotic fun if played with friends and the campaign has a cute story (and is thankfully saved by a mechanic that allows you to skip specific events if you fail the mission enough times) but I'd never recommend buying this over a Mario Party.

My favourite game of 2019. Don't listen to the general distaste for this game because it's "just another Mario & Sonic" from an internet critic who likely hasn't played it. Mario & Sonic Tokyo 2020 provides a silly, lighthearted story for fans of both franchises and sprinkles little bits of Olympic history and trivia in for those with an interest or a potential interest in that sort of thing. The plot is nothing Oscar worthy or mind blowing, but serves as a fun little wrapper for a minigame collection, with the minigames themselves being a blast. Unshackling this game from required motion controls allows the minigames to shine as delightful Mario Party minigame-esque affairs rather than bland, wagglefest tech demos.

After you've finished the story and unlocked all the bonus content, multiplayer (either online or offline) is the way to go, and I found myself having a great time gathering round with friends. The online can be a little flaky, but as long as you play with friends with a good connection in private matches rather than matching with randoms, you should be fine.

All-in-all, my favourite M&S game to date and one which has been unfairly shunned due to its status in an otherwise uninspiring franchise and the strange limbo-like status the real Tokyo 2020 found itself in.

[Replay] This is the last game I played from Marathoning every Mario & Sonic Summer Olympics Game (including Tokyo 2020 Arcade). I cannot understand why most people generally don’t like this entry, it’s easily my favorite in the series. I had played this once before back in August 2020, so I knew going into this why I love it so much. This is the culmination of almost everything I have loved about all the previous entries, combined into one package. The Olympic records are back again, and accurate to the time period entering the games. Trivia from the first game is finally back, and has way more and more interesting facts than ever!! The stadiums and artstyle is probably the most accurate and detailed the series has ever been, probably taking advantage of the fact that the game was obviously developed in Japan. The music is once again phenomenal, once again keeping the tradition set by Rio 2016’s Orchestra being recorded from Rio de Janeiro alive by recording this soundtrack in Tokyo. They FINALLY removed the Miis. And for once, THE STORY MODE IS ACTUALLY ENJOYABLE! Ive hated every single player run of each of the games leading up to Tokyo 2020 so much, aside from the tolerable 2008 Circuit modes. This story isn't particularly well written, but theres something so bad about it that its actually good. I cant quite put my finger on it, but I think a large reason I enjoy this story mode, is because theres so much love put into representing Tokyo itself. Walking around Copacabana beach in Rio was nice, but imagine being able to digitally walk around like 25 different venues and landmarks, with NPCs telling you fun facts and trivia to find. I love games the digitally preserve real places and Tokyo 2020 does it SO well. The writing feels straight out of a devientart fan fic, but in the best possible way. Its so dumb, but I love it so much more to the garbage fire that was London 2012s 3DS story mode, which was one of the most boring stories I've ever played. I love that at one point in this one, Bowser and Eggman are scheming for like the 5th time on how there going to get gold medals, and it plays it up really dramatically. A chapter passes and it is revealed that there ultimate master plan was to just push Mario and Sonic over and take there medals. And it doesn't even work. The events themselves are even great, the best they have been since the Wii in my opinion. The standard events all have the option to play with motion or buttons, which is super cool. The 1964 events are actually really fun, being much more simplistic one or two button NES styled games. And then there are the Minigames, that take place at a variety of Tokyo landmarks, these are fun single-player games to break up the events.The one area where the events do kinda suck are the dream events. There are only 3 and they all really blow, but thats okay because I was never really a fan of the dream events to begin with (plus the minigames are clearly the replacement for it, and I’d much rather have minigames based on landmarks of the host city, than dream events based on fan service from Mario and Sonic) . When I play these games, I play for the Olympic stuff first (since the official Olympic Video games are always cheap garbage), and the Mario and Sonic stuff second. And there are so many events represented in this entry thanks to taking the focus away from Dream events! They all feel good to play, but its worth noting that there aren't really any full sports like sometimes featured in previous entries, like Golf or Football or Rugby. Rugby and Football are in this one, but they do feel slightly stripped down compared to like Rio 2016s version of them, but there still fun. Overall, this is inarguably to me the best Mario and Sonic game and the one I’ll be replaying for years to come. It feels like as the series progressed, it kept getting sloppier and sloppier with each entry because the focus was being so thin spread, but with this one, they really improved on Rio 2016’s structure and tightened the game up, and it payed off immensely. I really hope going forward, Paris 2024 uses this backbone and improves this structure even more. Lowkey, this is one of my favorite multiplayer games on the Switch.

The minigames in this one are still that nice blend of simplicity and technique, following series tradition. Unfortunately, this game is too lightweight for its own good.

The story is kinda cute, but it's fairly boring in execution and writing. I do really like visiting all of the nicely rendered areas and landmarks. Presentation doesn't disappoint, it's never really been a problem with the Mario and Sonic games.

The real issue I have is how "Dream Events" have mostly been phased out in favor of demake/NES-styled "Tokyo 1964" games. Their simplicity is charming, but it also wears off extremely quickly. It is also extremely weird to see the 16-bit Sonic sprites alongside the entirely 8-bit everything else, it clashes really hard.

All in all, it's an extremely short and lackluster collection of minigames for $60. I'd honestly recommend either the London or Winter Games on the Wii over this one. Much more fanservice and content to sink your teeth into.

Also, Sega. Please stop trying to make "The Deadly Six" be a thing that sticks around. We all want to forget. You don't need to insist on bringing them back. Quit it.