The official Olympics game (Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 - The Official Video Game is its full title, but that’s too many words to type over and over again) is a little bit strange. It was advertised with the “you can play as Sonic!” angle, but it’s really just a dude in the kind of Sonic get-up you’d see in Times Square, which adds an extra level of weirdness to the e꧙xperience. What surprised me most of all, though, was how anime the whole thing is.
As an Olympics game, it’s pretty solid. I say as much in my 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:review of Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, with a good mix of events making the cut, along with some that probably didn’t need to be there and some notable absentees. There’s no real story at all though, not even a day-by-day run through of the Games themselves, and that’s a bit disappointing. The Mari🧸o & Sonic version of the title has a wider variety of events and includes a substantial narrative mode, and you’d expect the official version of the game to go bigger than the cartoon spin-off.
This is where the ‘dress 🌌up as Sonic’ mechanic comes back into things. While you get the Sonic costume for free, there are several more you can unlock with the points you get for competing in different events. There’s a huge range here, but you don’꧙t unlock them in any order, so after you’ve done a couple of events, you’ll have enough to buy your favourites, and you can write yourself into an anime saga in lieu of a proper story.
I’m gay, and I love sports. These two aren’t mutually exclusive, but they feel like they exist in different circles. That’s clearly not true - just this week Carl Nassib became the first active NFL player to come out as gay, while Robbie Rogers, Megan Rapinoe, Gus Kenworthy, Nicola Adams, Tom Daley, Colin Jackson, and Gareth Thomas are all gay too. Still, they feel like very separate concepts to me personally - the queer circles I exist in never discuss sports, and the sporting circles I occupy are extremely straight. That’s why it ma༒de sense to marry the two in the Olympics game.
I primarily used two outfits - a blue maid cafe outfit with bunn♋y rabbit ears, and a school uniform with cat ears. This game gay.
There’s still no narrative even with these outfits, but you can’t be a bunny rabbit maid slam dunking Great Britain’s way to glory in Olympic basketball and not imagine there’s a story there. Strong Britain Great Dunkers. You’re the star💟 of this game by default, in that you make one athlete and they compete in all of the events, b💖ut when you start putting them in outfits like these, they become a little anime protagonist. Like if Haikyu!! was about every sport ever (or at least the 20 events included here) rather than just volleyball. Beach volleyball does make the cut for those interested, by the way.
You really start to notice this impact in the team sports. For the first few games, I thought only the star athlete (i.e. the protagonist) could be customised, so I was a bunny rabbit maid playing up front for Team🎐 GB while my teammates were dressed in very serious football kits. Soon though, I discovered everyone could be customised. Unfortunately, as gay as this game can be, it🐻’s also quite heteronormative. All of the events are co-ed, but the custom outfits are not. That meant that while I could wear a very fetching maid outfit, the guys on my team were relegated to a drab waiter’s garb - that’s not very anime, so as disappointing as it was to not be able to win the gold medal with a bunch of femboys, I made the switch to the school uniforms.
This gave us much more of an anime togetherness spirit, even if in the rugby especially we looked less like anime heroes and more like the local private school. The weirdest part was that one of my teammates looked far too old to even be at the Olympics, let a🐽l🌌one in an anime high school. I called him Grandpa, because his real name - Lewis - didn’t seem to fit. It was odd to see this gruff old man with thick shoulders, white hair, and a stiff army general moustache cutting about with anime catgirls, but I guess that’s the Olympics for you. Grandpa can be grateful for the waiter’s outfit fiasco, otherwise I would have had him in a maid’s outfit.
It’s a real shame there’s not more of a story to the Olympics game, or even some sort of structure beyond the total free form event selection. I’m not asking for The Last of Us Part Olympics, but I do think a little bit more could have been included here. Since it’s not, the game will be an occasional anime simulator I boot up whenever I feel like dominating the hammer t🧔hrow as a 🐎catgirl.
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