Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games (3DS) Review

While I’ve been a long time casual fan of the Olympics, a life long fan of the Mario franchise, and somewhat confused by the Sonic franchise, I never got around to giving the Mario and Sonic at the Olympic games franchise a shot at all. I always assumed I wasn’t missing out on terribly much, seeing as it’s not as heavily hyped or discussed as, say, Smash Bros, or Mario Kart. But they’ve been making them for a while, so surely there’s something to them that keeps them selling and being made… right?

I really went in with no expectations. I had no idea what level of detail they would be adapting the Olympic sports to the Mario and Sonic play-styles. And by that I mean, I wasn’t sure if I was going to get FIFA, or Super Mario Strikers. At least in this example, soccer is adapted to it’s very basic form to allow for so many sports on the cartridge. But that’s just an example- there’s many sports here that are done well, or not so well, that I would be describing the whole thing poorly by painting with a broad brush.

So, what does it do well? Well, the Mario and Sonic part is surprisingly well integrated. If you go into it’s version of the campaign, you’re given a choice between picking between joining the Mario gym, or the Sonic gym. Having a Toad speak on behalf of Luigi is kind of amusing, when you realise that Luigi isn’t the most verbose character, much like his brother.

The selection of sports is both wide, but also not extremely so. While you have a choice between soccer, golf, athletics, and much more, the controls are designed in such a way that it’s easy to translate between sports. You could be mashing A to sprint in hurdles, 100m, or long jump, for example. You even have BMX and Equestrian in there! I can’t remember, is BMX in the actual Olympics now? I think so!

It might be bias, or it might be that Mario has a longer history of sporting games, but the game still feels very Mario dominated in terms of level design, and gameplay. The golf courses look very Mushroom Kingdom-ey, and the aforementioned BMX sport is very Mario Karty. It didn’t really detract from the experience, and even made it easier for me to jump in and understand a lot of the mechanics easier. However, it makes the Sonic parts feel much more gimmicky, and if you’re a bigger Sonic fan than a Mario fan, you may feel a bit alienated from it.

And it wouldn’t be a proper review without a few gripes- firstly, a lot of the games at first attempt will seem unintuitive. For example, when I first played the soccer game, I didn’t realise it auto-switched control of my players, so I’d constantly run out of bounds looking at the wrong character. The golf mini-game didn’t really explain that hitting the ball from slightly different angles will actually affect the curve of the ball (as obvious as that sounds reading it, trust me, the game doesn’t imply that much depth at first glance).

I also felt like the single player ‘story’ mode had way way way too much dialogue for what it is. After playing through a lot of Fire Emblem, or Pokemon, I can kind of dig a bit of reading to figure out what’s happening. But when I’ve played only 3-4 rounds of the same sport in the first hour of the game, it feels like the priorities might be a little out of whack. I ended up having a lot more progress and experience with the game in just jumping into the quick play mode.

Having said all that, this game is not by any means bad. It’s solid, it’s responsive, it’s fun. But there are simply a lot of other games that do everything that Mario and Sonic is trying to do, and do it better. It’s a classic case of “Jack of All Trades, Master of None”. If you want Golf, you have World Tour, if you want soccer, you have Super Mario Strikers, if you wanna race bikes, you have Mario Kart 8. It’s a good time waster, if you want to just have a bit of fun between meetings, without the heavy Fire Emblem plot, or the meta-gaming of Pokemon. But if you’re after something substantial, which is something the 3DS has an abundance of, you might be better off holding off, unless you’re really sure (or it goes on sale!)