[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.