Mario and Sonic at the 2020 Olympics announced

Ok awesome, thanks for that, I'll pick it up when the price drops a little, or perhaps 2nd hand

 

Forgot to post here when the report came out, but NPD reports for November 2019 were released during mid-December.

Mario & Sonic is nowhere to be found. Neither in the general Top 20 or the Nintendo Switch-specific Top 10.

Also, on the topic of charts: I did a quick check on NintendoEverything to see how it performed on the weekly Switch eShop charts (all listings are the general charts):
11/9 (Debut week): #16
11/16: #11
11/23: #17

The game was gone afterwards. (As an aside, Mania did show up at least once at #28 on the week of 12/7.)

Some brighter news outside America, though. According to Famitsu, Mario & Sonic was the 8th best-selling game in Japan for November 2019, with over 55,000 units sold (physical + digital).

 

Mobile version is out May 7th.
There's a neat remix of Eggman's Adventure 1 theme, too.

Did this game not get many remixes like the others?

 

The Switch version has been out for months, but the OST uploads on YouTube don't seem to have any remixes.

 

Time to bump this old thing. Sonic at the 2020 Olympics came out on mobile, and after some server issues, is ready to roll. It does that thing Mario Run did where you play a few levels for free and then buy the rest of the game (it's $4.99 if I remember correctly, but it's also on sale I think). I'm a good ways through the story, which isn't much more than, "Gotta stop Eggman from turning Japan into Eggmanland!" The events are fun, but I can't help but wonder if some of these aren't meant to be won yet. There's a trampoline one I swear I'm doing perfectly, yet I'm coming in well behind first place, so maybe I get something to power me up later? I dunno. It's not always clear how to do stuff and the terminology is weird. There's an awful Sonic Jump-esque minigame early on that tells you to swipe to move Sonic left and right. So I do, repeatedly, and he won't move more than a few pixels. Frustrating as hell. Turns out the game wants me to slide my finger back and forth, not swipe. The game calls swiping flicking. Ugh.

The game dishes out TP after completing events that you use to enter special challenges, challenge other players, etc. Once an area, there's a paywall that demands thousands of them, and I'm around 1500 short for the one I'm on now that wants 7000. It won't take me forever and a day or anything to get what I need, but I've done everything so far, gotten Gold on maybe 97% of the events I've done, and here I am in grindland. It would have made sense to have this stupid TP grinding mechanic in a free-to-play version of this game, but come on, I bought the game, just let me play it. One of the worst things about it is the confirm button to get past notifications. I swear you have to hit the damn thing two or more times before it decides to press, even if you see the button animate. There's too much of this little crap that gets in the way and builds up over time; I don't know if it's just me, but the "Attempt X/3" text hangs around for what feels like an eternity, and you can't skip tutorial text. Quit holding me up, I know what number attempt I'm on, and you told me the first out of the six times I've played fencing how to guard. The experience as a whole just feels kinda clunky.

Gripes aside, the music is fantastic. Plenty of great remixes in there, and some you wouldn't expect, like the Sonic Dash menu theme. Weird, right? Guess we know where they all went, cause they sure as hell weren't in Mario & Sonic on Switch. Anyway, here's a playlist.

I need a break for now. Something about the game gives me a headache, and it probably has to do with how inaccurate doing stuff on a touch screen is as opposed to actual buttons. The story's hinting that I'm about to finish it, but that can't be right, there's still 2 or 3 cities I haven't gone to. Oh, and one final thing. You're stuck as Sonic the whole time. If you replay an event after passing it, you can then change your character, but the first time you compete you have to use Sonic. It's not a deal breaker, but it was annoying until I figured out why I was getting "YOU UNLOCKED SO-AND-SO" messages, but still seeing question marks in the character select.

Edit #47: One quick thing - the text for "Miss," "Failed," "Foul," etc. is the same font/color as the Sonic '06 logo (a darker blue with a silver outline). What a weirdly self-aware touch.

 

I'm having fun with the mobile game. I've never played any games in the Olympics series, but now I'm generally curious about the other titles... I suck at the diving stages though, however I was miraculously lucky to get a gold medal in the first diving stage. xD

 

Spurned by a recent comment about Sonic's historical sales in Japan, I ended up finding out from this website (which list historical videogame sales in Japan) that M&S Tokyo 2020 has, to date, sold about 370K in the region. This is a pretty big deal for a few reasons.

For the Sonic franchise....this is the fifth best-selling Sonic(-branded) game in the region, based on the historical references we have on hand (the above site and this list of MSC numbers for some of the Mega Drive Sonic games); after the original Mario & Sonic [Beijing 2008] and Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast (whether you only count the first release, or all releases of the game). It's also the first Sonic(-associated) game to surpass 300K sold in the region since the DS version of the original M&S, released back in 2008.

For the Mario & Sonic series, it's the best-selling M&S game overall after the aforementioned M&S 2008, and third best-selling individual M&S entry after the Wii (2007) and DS (2008) versions of M&S 2008. The DS version itself of M&S 2008 also topped out at 383K units, so Tokyo 2020 has a decent chance of surpassing it to be the 2nd-best selling individual M&S game if it still has legs.

This is all especially impressive given the following additional factors.
- The M&S series being on a worldwide sales decline after Wii/DS games, with the 3DS and Wii U games (London 2012, Sochi 2014, and Rio 2016) selling less than the previous titles. The diminishing returns were enough that Sega skipped out on picking up the license for the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics altogether, with Ubisoft acquiring it to help promote their Steep snowboarding game.
- The game was initially released to a very slow start--the game only moved a little above 19K units in its first week. Granted, this is better than many Sonic(-branded) game published after 2003, but it was also the lowest debut for any M&S game outside of Sochi 2014 on the Wii U (which did a quarter of that amount, above 5K). The fact the game has since gone on to sell that much in the country indicates a rather substantial shelf life for the game.
- The elephant of the room of the actual Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics Games --you know, the very thing the game is supposed to promote-- being delayed out of 2020 year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the game itself released prior in the holiday 2019 period. As things stand, there is still some doubt on whether the Games will still be held this year, if at all.
- This game being the very first Mario & Sonic entry published in Japan by Sega themselves; all of the previous entries were published in Japan by Nintendo (with Sega usually handling publishing duties for some M&S games in Western regions). This would make it the best-selling Sonic(-branded) game published by Sega in Japan, after the aforementioned Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast, all the way back in 1998.

These results, among others (I'm not sure for how the game performed since its debut in NA and Europe) I imagine is why when Sega released their fourth quarter/full year results their 2020 fiscal year not too long ago, Tokyo 2020 was listed among the Sonic games they specifically credited (alongside Team Sonic Racing, Sonic Mania, and Sonic Generations) for good sales.

 

I guess this is worthy of a bump in light of the start of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics kicking off. (Even though there's no M&S tie-in game to go with it.)

Once again using the Game Data Library database as a basis; Tokyo 2020 seems to have topped out at 417,860 LTD units in Japan. For individual Sonic releases in the region, that leaves it as the best-selling Sonic game published by Sega and the second best-selling Sonic game overall, with only the original Mario & Sonic [Beijing 2008] game (which was published by Nintendo) selling more. It is worth noting though that when factoring in multiple versions/releases. Sonic Adventure is ahead of Tokyo 2020 by roughly 20K units, through the combined sales of the original release (which is otherwise behind Tokyo 2020 in both of the aforementioned individual categories) and the "Campaign Edition" released in 1999.

 

I doubt many people in Japan think of the M&S games as "Sonic games" - they're Mario games in the public's eye no matter who's publishing them, but I'd strongly suspect that Tokyo 2020's success (in Japan) has more to do with it being set in Japan than anything else. Though I suppose having the Olympic games themselves delayed for so long gave the video game a longer than usual shelf life in which to rack up sales.