Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 Review.

Developer: Sega

Publisher: Sega

Platform: Switch

Release Date November 5th, 2019

Price: $59.99

No more chasing, now we beat the stuffing out of each other.

As with previous entries in the series, the cast consists of characters from Nintendo's Mario Brothers and Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog franchises. You can play single events as the character of your choice, earning achievements and unlocking new characters, or you can attempt to thwart the evil duo of Dr. Eggman and Bowser in story mode.

The short version is that there aren’t a lot of surprises here. From the main menu, you can choose single events to compete in, dream events that take you back to old-school gameplay or dive into story mode. Regardless of what mode or event you chose, you are in for a lot of button mashing. Your performance depends on how well you time your button presses and in some cases how fast you can push them. While this sounds terrible when you read it, it works surprisingly well. It’s Mario and Sonic, not a simulator, but it does, at times feel like you are tempting carpel tunnel. That said, the events are as well designed as possible under the circumstances and some such as Fencing and Boxing are not bad as fighting games. And even the button intensive contests like the Relay and Triple Jump were not pushovers. It takes some effort to figure these out, and you are going to spend some time experimenting. This was fine for my nine-year-old, but younger kids might be frustrated by the parade of button prompts.

Hold it, Wario needs his parking validated!

Team sports are once again what fans will expect with the player jumping in and out of team members at need. Adding some welcome complexity, each of the characters has their own strengths and weaknesses. Soccer (Yes I said Soccer, not Football.) and Rugby turned out to be two of my favorite events. They aren’t anywhere near as deep as something like FIFA 19, but then again it’s Mario and Sonic; they are going for fun, not accuracy. Despite some initial groaning on my part, I found soccer particularly fun, and it was a big hit with most of the family.

Story mode was a bit weaker, or at least I felt it could have been rather more. Dr Eggman has teamed up with Bowser, and they plot to do away with Mario and Sonic. I don’t want to give too much away, but Eggman’s plot is an Olympic themed retro video game system that plays games based on the 1964 Summer Olympics. Which were held in... Wait for it, Tokyo. Anyway the game sucks people, hedgehogs, and whoever happens to be standing nearby into its matrix, and they have to compete in a series of good old 2D pixelated games to escape. While Mario and Sonic fight to escape the game their friends on the outside quest through Tokyo to figure out where they disappeared to and how to help them. While in the retro world Mario and Sonic are transformed back into their former 8/16-bit glory. Nor is retro world as expansive as the 2020 version; only eight characters compete in only ten events. Most of the retro games are relatively simple, and longtime fans may find themselves yearning for more extended events like Volleyball. It’s all lovingly done and terribly nostalgic if you grew up on Sega or Nintendo.

Mario says Cowabunga and that we should gag him with a spoon.

I would be remiss not to mention that there is a multiplayer mode as well. Sadly I was not able to find anyone online to play with. This is unsurprising as we are talking about a pre-release copy, but I look forward to trying it out after launch.

The bottom line is that Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 is a well-conceived, well-executed offering of fan-service and predictable gameplay, with a Saturday morning cartoon story mode to hold the dozens of mini-games together. When you get the basics figured out there are achievements to win, and online multiplayer is available for the first time in the series. My kids love the silly thing, and the whole family plays at least some of the events. I don’t know if that justifies the top tier price, but I do know that Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 will be a game you will be playing for a while.

The Good.

Excellent overall design and execution.
Lots of fun to play as a group.
High replay value.

The Bad.

Carpal tunnel inducing amounts of frantic button mashing.
Button mashing gets a bit tedious.
Unsophisticated story and gameplay.