Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 is a good game that features a variety of good-to-decent events and a wonderful ability to play alongside friends. The inconsistency of the game’s design with controls and the difficulty arc that spikes hurt the game but aren’t dealbreakers.
This is a game that would have been introduced last year had that stupid pandemic not shown up and ruined everything. SEGA has finally brought this out today and I have somewhat mixed feelings about how it was executed. Being a huge fan of track and field games, I have certain expectations on how they should function. Anyway, let’s dig right into it.
Track & Field – what makes it work – Konami Edition
I think Konami set the blueprint on how an Olympic game should be made when they released Track & Field in 1983. The blueprint goes like this: concentrate on button mashing and do little else. Buttons for running and jumping were the focus of Konami’s game. Were the simplified controls a huge plus for an Olympic-based game? Absolutely they were. Concentrating on as little player control as possible while competing in an event is how an Olympic game should be designed. It really does work out well. It also helps that Konami’s classic arcade game is consistent with those controls. The game came with three buttons and no joystick, which meant that the game was going to completely control your player, while you concentrated on player speed through button mashing. This design worked with several events in T&F including the long jump, hurdles, and even skeet shooting. How you played the game was designed around those three buttons, which ended up being quite enough for the game to work and become an instant hit. There was no complication to the design, just simple consistency to easy game design. It wasn’t rocket science as the focus of fun was more important than accuracy and complete player control. Who needs that? This isn’t a game that should come out yearly, rather it’s a game built on competing against another player without thinking too much.
Fast-forward about 40+ years and here we are looking at what should be SEGA’s Track & Field that has so many amazing parts to appreciate, but also some glaring faults because it took a left turn away from simplicity and consistency.
Good bones to this SEGA structure
Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 has some great parts. First and foremost, it has a bevy of sports to play. From basketball to biking to rugby, you will get short stints of fun that are somewhat representative of the sport they’re trying to emulate. If you don’t like game A, then you can go play game B. If you get bored playing one sport, then you can shift over to another. It’s easy stints of short gameplay that bring different experiences each time. You want that from a multi-event-based game and should expect it if not only for the ability to choose what you want when you want it. That’s an option that Konami’s oldie-goldie never provided, as you had to go in the order of operation that it gave you. The variety is amazing, as is the non-linear nature of the game. It’s a good buffet of an Olympic experience.
Another good part of this title is the customization. Customization is a HUGE deal for this generation of gamers. Hell, it’s what made Skyrim survive most of its years. You can customize your characters, even going as far as to dress them up like Sonic the Hedgehog (big shocker). You can choose clothing, change faces, form, etc. There are a lot of ways you can make your character your own and that works well in this type of game design, especially with a multiplayer option where you can show off your character to the world. People will enjoy this title if not only for this feature.
A huge plus for this game is having the ability to play the game with friends. Co-op and/or online is equally as good with competing against actual people. If Konami re-released their T&F and added that feature, the world would be an amazing place. It’s good for this style of gameplay and I suspect this reason alone will drive people to the title, and rightfully so. I look forward to playing this game with fellow gamers and having a goofy amount of fun in preparation for the games.
Having a lot of games to choose from, playing against others online, and having the ability to customize your characters to your style helps sell this game. It has a lot of good parts to it.
Fun, but not incredibly functional all the time
With the goods above, Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 has some mediocre parts that work more than they don’t, but still falter in some areas. For the most part, the actual Olympic games make sense in terms of function and design. For example, basketball in Tokyo 2020 is broken down simply to dribble, pass, and shoot (with some fancy footwork with a flick of the wrist via the L thumbstick). That’s really all you need to enjoy the game. The fault with basketball, which becomes apparent in about five minutes of gameplay, is that the gameplay lasts for a short amount of time (maybe a minute per quarter), and trying to play defense or block is a huge pain in the ass. The game doesn’t care that you might be concerned about defense. Blocking another player is easier in NBA JAM than it is here. You essentially just flail in the air with no payoff about 90 percent of the time. While I will admit the NBA is more offense than defense these days, and that makes sense when you’re playing Olympic basketball, I still want some sort of competent defense to my basketball game. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but please don’t make it inept, as it is in this game. I don’t hate the lack of defense enough to not enjoy the game, but I wish it was better.
The same thing goes for events like the Relay Race, where I love the concept of it, especially the control intentions, where you can press the run button (X) to death and flick the L thumbstick to hand off the baton at the right time. The downer to this process is that you must maintain a constant speed at a certain designated area of the run meter that accompanies the run process. If you go above or below it, you become severely off the pace from the rest of the field. The fact that you must maintain that speed in that area of the meter is damning, especially when other racing events in the title don’t require it. None of the other racing events. Ever. Anyway, consistency is key amongst all events and while this event is fun, it suffers a bit in the process because of what it’s asking.
That is the real issue with this game is consistency. If the game’s design works one way in a certain event, then another event like it should work the other way. For example, the 100m dash and the 100m hurdles have a button-mashing fest with no running meter to worry about. Why did the relay race have one? It doesn’t make sense. If you run one way in one event, it should work the same way in all running events. Again, it just doesn’t make sense to change it up. You won’t lose players if you keep it simple and just allow them to have fun consistently.
Easy, sorta easy, OMG…DIFFICULT.
The give and take with some of the games in Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 isn’t the biggest stumbling block for the game. The biggest issue I have with this title is how each event suffers from a final round difficulty arc that shoots WAY up and makes winning a gold medal a rough, unenjoyable ride. Granted, and as it was pointed out this morning during my Twitch stream of the game, the competition should be tough by the time you get to the final round of an Olympic event. You’re playing against the toughest of the tough and they’re just as gifted as you are by getting to that final point. That said, the difficulty arc goes from 0-2 (first round), 2-4 (second round), and then 4-100 in less than 2 seconds (final round). The arc is essentially not an arc in the final round, it’s a straight line UP. It is infuriating that the difficulty spikes so hard at the end of what is a good effort in the game. I tell ya, it’s going to be tough to convince me to go back through this game knowing that the payoff is so impossibly high. Going back to a comment a few paragraphs ago, this game is meant to be fun. It is meant to be easy and competitive, but it shouldn’t be a poor payoff at the end of a journey. So, what if the game is easy to beat, it’s meant to be. If players have fun and can deal with difficulty against other players, that’s all the experience should be. A slight challenge is nice, but an impossible challenge is frustrating. For example, playing table tennis in the game is fun for the first two rounds, but as soon as that final round hits, good luck. I was beating opponents 7-2, 7-1, and when the final round hit it was 1-7. I was lucky to get that ‘1’. The computer can get unbearably and impossibly difficult in most final rounds of the game. It’s just an odd shift of difficulty and one that is very noticeable.
Anyway, that’s the biggest issue in the game for me. I wanted Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 to be a modern version of Track & Field. What was delivered is in the same ballpark, but there is still work to be done.
Conclusion
Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 is a good game that features a variety of good-to-decent events and a wonderful ability to play alongside friends. The inconsistency of the game’s design with controls and the difficulty arc that spikes hurt the game but aren’t dealbreakers.
