Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 is a 2019 sports video game based on the Tokyo 2021 Summer Olympics. It is the sixth installment of the Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games series. Developed and published by Sega for the Nintendo Switch and arcade machines.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) After the divisive reception of the Rio 2016 installment, Sega decided to return back to basics but actually do something more innovative with the Mario & Sonic sub-series. And they succeeded.
 * 2) Very enjoyable sporting events.
 * 3) *Karate that can be difficult to master, but not too difficult to enjoy,
 * 4) *Marathon (in the 2D events) is a race to the finish to see who gets first place in the Japanese streets, with several competitors such as Toads and Flickies trying to pass you to get to the finish line before you do. It's quite fun trying to get 1st place against a crowd of people is, but you have to use your stamina to run as fast as you can before they get there first.
 * 5) **If you run out of breath, though, there are drinks of water on the table at the side of the road for you to restore your stamina to run even more with strategic speed against the crowd of people you are competing against, which can get a bit hectic at times but still very fun and enjoyable.
 * 6) A well-done story mode that allows you to interact with characters and play cool mini-games.
 * 7) The Dream Events are back, as the previous entry removed them for unknown reasons.
 * 8) Great opening cutscene.
 * 9) Even though the motion controls are great, you can still switch to simply just button pressing for most of the games.
 * 10) Most of the characters now wear unique costumes depending on the events, which look more polished and realistic.
 * 11) This is the first entry in the series to introduce 2D events, and all of them are filled to the brim with endless fun.
 * 12) As usual, both casts of the Mario and Sonic games have their own great stats and perks.
 * 13) ASTONISHING graphics that capture the environment very well, with breathtaking visuals, smooth and crisp character models, and beautiful light texturing, making this the best-looking game in the series.
 * 14) Amazing soundtrack.
 * 15) While the main character roster hasn't changed at all, the amount of guest characters make up for it, as there are guest characters for a certain event such as Rouge for Sport Climbing and Toadette for 100m Hurdles, and most of them are very fun to play with and have rather unique attributes that make them stand out from the usual main playable cast.
 * 16) It features a regular online mode just like Rio 2016 and Sochi 2014, and while it is pretty bad, it's still nice for a Mario & Sonic game to have a mode like this since its introduction in Sochi 2014 for the Nintendo Wii U,
 * 17) You can even play more events in Online Mode than in Sochi 2014, which is a nice improvement over the aforementioned title since it gives out a little bit more variety and doesn't make the game feel limited in terms of content.
 * 18) The game has a nice amount of fanservice that fully celebrates both of the franchises' histories and are relatable for fans to point out to and have a blast seeing how genuine they are instead of being shoved down their throats in a pandering way that feels unnecessary and forced, like most modern Sonic games as of today.
 * 19) The voice acting is superb, with the actors putting a lot of energy into their lines.
 * 20) *This is even better considering that some of the voice clips for the Mario characters come from Mario Kart 8, where the characters sound a lot more hyped-up than before.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The online mode is very poor as the game continuously lags and you can't make a playlist of sporting events.
 * 2) Sadly, you can only play as 8 characters in the Tokyo '64 mode. It would have been cool to see the modern characters in 8-bit form.
 * 3) There are only 3 Dream Events, which is disappointing.
 * 4) While the story mode is good, it can get slow at times and that most of it is spend with lines of text with mediocre cutscenes that tend to drag on for a while and really have nothing in them mostly.
 * 5) The game has less events than the previous Summer Olympic entries, Beijing 2008 and London 2012, which doesn't make any sense since it's meant to be on a more newer system. And since the Switch is a far more powerful system than the Wii by a large margin, it becomes confusing as to why they didn't add more events to highlight the Switch's power more since Sega had plenty of time to make more events than the previous entries in the Mario & Sonic sub-series, which makes the roster of events rather lacking and a huge disappointment for the standards of the entire Mario & Sonic sub-series as a whole.

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