Hey now that the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Summer Games are happening, let's totally not-be-active and sit back on a sofa to play some virtual Olympic games. It's actually a solid effort by SEGA themselves, who outside of Sonic / Yakuza series, is known for pickup & play Arcade titles, and the alternate Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 (Demo impressions).
Let's talk about the good things:
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The theming: The game starts out with a stunning intro seeing the transition from real-atheletes into their digital counterparts. It's backed by a BEAUTIFUL vocal song One (Youtube link), which is used as a recurring theme through the game. The presentation is clean and feels rather prestigious with the simple vocals/strings music for the menus. Also, I like how there's a dedicated fully-animated and dynamic title-screen cutscene depending on the previous sport you just played!
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Character Customization: It's crazy scary how in-depth this is, considering you'd need to be able to create a character representing any nationality! You could easily create cartoon versions of real-life figures or straight-up meme characters. Or if you just want to be silly, just wear a Sonic mascot costume! It's worth noting this game is more cartoon / stylized than the London 2012 game.
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Hints of SEGA: I hear a lot of snippets of other SEGA game music used in the intermission sequences, such as the Sonic Adventure's Snowboarding song, and the Beach level from Sonic's Lost World.
In seriousness, this is just a minigame compilation of 18 sports. Some are just literal button mash, like the track 100m "Mash A as fast as you can to win". However, there are a few sports with good depth that could be fleshed out as a separate game, like tennis which straight-up plays exactly the same as SEGA's Virtua Tennis series, albeit slower-paced. Not all sports are winners, like how BMX bike race plays pretty much like NES's Excitebike where you just time a jump button off-ramps. However, it feels like there's a good handful missing, like how there's no target game like Shooting / Archery, or Sport Climbing is the only "new sport" added and you'd have to look to Mario & Sonic to get Skateboarding / Surfing. I feel a lot of sports have been cut...
... To make way for team sports like basketball, football/soccer, and baseball! Sadly I find these ones the least fun to play, because of how slow-paced and mechanically simple this game makes them feel! Then again, these are much more fleshed out in other franchises like EA's FIFA or 2K's NBA games.
It's worth mentioning this game leans on a more cartoon arcade presentation than the London 2012 game. This also means one thing... many sports have some kind of unrealistic "Super move" like what is featured in the Mario & Sonic. Tennis, for example, has super-fast power shots kind of like Mario Power Tennis, while Boxing has Dragonball Z-like super punches. It's just something to be aware of especially if you're hoping for a more "down-to-earth" Olympic sport, which you won't find here (on top of every event being co-ed).
There's not really a single-player mode aside from winning gold medals in a 3-round tournament for each event. Even if you were to get this as a local multiplayer party game, it only supports up to 2 local players as opposed to 4 players multiplayer for Mario & Sonic.
That's all there is to talk about this game. Considering the game's design direction, I still think it's better to just get the outright full-cartoon Mario & Sonic version instead for parties, especially since it has 4-player multiplayer. That being said if you don't own a Switch, this is a fine game too with a presentation that I just really like, where I feel there's more effort put in than Mario & Sonic 2020 (which still doesn't hit the franchise peak in 2010/2012). It's also cheaper at base $40, compared to Mario & Sonic's $60.
Now a note about the REAL Tokyo 2020 Olympics:
It's honestly amazing how this still happened despite the COVID-19 circumstances! This is the first time I've actually been watching the sports (even though I don't follow sports otherwise), and I personally enjoyed watching Olympic Cycling, Skateboard, and Golf. That being said, it's really too bad the Opening Ceremony was redone from the original plans to have a mainly somber COVID-19 social distancing theme, as otherwise from the design documents this could've been one of the greatest massive public tributes to Video Games & Anime culture. I expect the Closing Ceremony to be lowkey too.
Having many Square Enix, Namco, Konami, Capcom, and SEGA music for the Parade of Nation segments is cool though. I got to see countries march to Final Fantasy, Sonic, and Monster Hunter. This just makes Nintendo's absence more apparent, considering the entire MARIO theme for the announcement message back in Rio 2016.
