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I don’t know the last time I really paid attention to a Google Doodle—the little
interactive panel found in the site’s logo that usually celebrates somebody’s life
or achievements, coinciding with some event or anniversary by way of a small movie or
slideshow or, in some cases, game akin to the little dinosaur thing Chrome greets you
with when your internet gives out. I don’t have anything against Doodles per se, I’m
sure a lot of work goes into them and they seem neat—I just don’t spend a lot of
my time on Google’s homepage now that address bars on browsers do more or less the same
job. Well, I guess that changed the other day when,
while researching another video, a Shinto shrine with a little pixel art cat standing
under it caught my attention in the corner of my screen. Clicking on it out of curiosity,
I was surprised to find this bombardment of colour and sound as this gloriously animated
little adventure began to play out, drawing liberally from the worlds of both anime and
video games to construct its visual palette; bringing to mind Zelda, Pokémon, Hunter x
Hunter and the works of Studio Ghibli in equal measure, as this anthropomorphic protagonist
finds themselves going up against a number of fantastical creatures and other animals
all… oddly taking part in sports that coincidentally happen to be Olympic in nature.
Turns out, to celebrate the opening of the Tokyo Games (and in line with the tributes
paid during the opening ceremony to Japan’s obviously rich history with the medium), Google
has created what, on the surface, looks like an old school JRPG, recruiting none other
than Studio 4C—the team behind a lot of pretty notable projects—to provide the animations
punctuating this gameplay. It’s apparently the biggest interactive
Doodle project ever produced by Google, and it shows—while the actual mechanics of navigating
this world and performing the numerous sport-adjacent activities found in each of its discreet areas
is far more arcade-y in feel than its looks would suggest (I mean, bear in mind this is
a Doodle, it’s not meant to take up vast amounts of your time), the world itself is
really very pretty and surprisingly detailed—with a wealth of interiors for you to enter and
denizens to chat to on your quest to master each of the seven sports and collect their
associated scroll for… some reason. Ya know, you’re not going to have your mind blown
by any of this, but it’s the detail of that island that makes everything feel bigger than
it actually is. The games themselves, on the other hand, are charitably more of a mixed
bag but in the spirit of the Olympic season, I thought it’d be fun to take a look at
them regardless. Table tennis is the first sport you’re presented
with, as a general tutorial for the basic mechanical framework of these games—which
is to say that you’re moving around and occasionally hitting the Action button to
activate some contextual event—in this case, a boost hit that will automatically win you
the point when you hit enough balls to build up the meter. Its inherent simplicity is only
very lightly abated when you take on the actual champion—where the score limit is set to
30 instead of 3 and suddenly the number of balls in play at any one time is greatly increased.
It makes for a slightly more chaotic visual—looking like the kind of frenzy you’d expect to
see in the Greed Island arc or something—but ultimately it seems like it would be extremely
difficult to actually lose at this thing, given that the automatic win found in the
boost button only has a greater impact on your score the more balls are on the table.
Skateboarding, found in the city area, continues this straightforward traversal, with a few
added caveats. For one, the low-poly look of everything means you’ll probably find
yourself squinting in order to line your skater up with the precision needed to hit grinds
found at the sides of the arena (your only guide being a small shadow that momentarily
appears as you come in to land). But it’s difficult to get too mad at this when you
can more or less flail around and rack up a whole bunch of points incredibly quickly—hell,
just bumping into a kettle that appears at random locations throughout the level (lifted,
as many visuals in this game are, from various elements of Japanese folklore and fairy tales)
nets you more points than doing the actual tricks. And what’s more, it isn’t entirely
clear how many points you actually need to progress—no matter how badly I did, I never
seemed to fall short of that imagined high score.
Conversely, the mountainous region where the rock climbing takes place was perhaps the
first time I found any kind of challenge in the game. Not a substantial one, by any means,
but a slight step up from struggling to find a way to lose. There’s a satisfying enough
click associated with grabbing onto these holds of varying stability—even if it’s
held back slightly by somewhat imprecise jumping controls and inconsistent checkpointing, exacerbated
by falling snowballs sending you tumbling into the ether. At the very least, it was
the first event that warranted a restart from me.
Going from the top of the mountain to submerging yourself in the water world, you have a Dance
Dance Revolution-esque rhythm game and, well, it’s actually remarkably solid for what
it is. You’d be surprised to think, given how plain this mechanical formula is, just
how many rhythm minigames end up completely falling flat due to imprecise inputs. Here
though, you have a jaunty little tune with super reliable controls. If there was any
game I was going to return to here by choice it’d probably be this one. I guess I’m
just kinda surprised that the developers went to the effort of creating this surprisingly
good rhythm game as opposed to going with something more basic, more immediately relatable
to a water world like more conventional swimming or something.
I suppose it’s because to just have a race in a pool, moving in a straight line from
a start to an end point, it would end up pretty much identical to the beach sprint. And while
the sports up until this point haven’t offered much in the way of difficulty, here you start
to see a rigidity of control mirrored by the strict path in front of you being positively
littered with crustaceans that greatly reduce your speed (bearing in mind that momentum
plays a massive part in gaining a lead here) meaning that the automatic nature of prior
events gives way to a minigame that doesn’t allow you many chances to mess up—more than
a couple of bites by an errant crab, or going off track even slightly and suddenly your
best bet is likely to just restart the race than spending the remaining minute or so hoping
in vein that you’ll be able to catch up. With obstacles so haphazardly strewn about,
it just feels a bit slapdash compared to the events seen so far.
And it’s here where unfortunately that feeling starts to become more prominent, where the
scrappy charm of the gameplay side of this package starts to wear a little thin. Rugby
will see you passing the ball to one of your new teammates as you cross this lava pitch
while avoiding the Oni, only for the ball to go to someone running into a rock—rocks,
mind you, whose hitboxes are maybe slightly larger than they should be, inadvertently
stopping you in your tracks when they really shouldn’t. It was definitely around this
point I started to wonder if my time could be better spent elsewhere, but we still aren’t
at the most frustrating part of this game just yet.
That would go to archery—the last of the sports to be played, and easily the one I
found myself having to restart the most. Scrolling horizontally along a beach, you’re trying
to hit a variety of targets for increasing point values while the current champion does
the same. Basic enough, except I’m fairly sure this dude can fire off more arrows than
you can, which as you might gather, is a pretty big advantage. You might think you’ve got
this nailed and suddenly in the final few seconds a projectile explosion sends their
score rocketing past yours. Don’t get me wrong here, this is far from what I’d consider
an actually difficult game, but like the sprint, it’s one where you really can’t afford
to stray off target much; a level of precision which goes against the speed at which you
need to operate in order to stay ahead. And while the bitesize amount of time you’ll
spend roaming this island and mastering these sports keeps any one of them or their quirks
from becoming outright annoying or anything, taken in isolation it’s hard not to feel,
at the very least, like a lot of these activities could and should have been more fleshed out.
After all that, you’re treated to one last celebratory cutscene and are left to explore
a now petal-covered world, ticking off the countless fetch quests you have at your disposal
and repeating previously events to better your score. After around half an hour with
the game though, I think most people will have gotten more than what they were looking
for out of it. At the end of the day, look, I don’t think
anyone was really expecting a Google Doodle to produce some hidden masterpiece of interactive
entertainment—the fact that these activities range from inoffensively basic to a little
frustrating shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s not really the gameplay that you’re here
for—my attention was grabbed by that unbelievably lush animation. For what it is, the pixel
world created here is really fun to look at. And hey, given the simplicity of the tasks
you’re presented, it could be fun to watch a speedrun of this daft little thing.
Most importantly though, I think what allows me to respect this game for what it is lies
in its ability to represent Japanese folklore in novel mechanical ways—the tengu’s fan
being used to create a barrage of table tennis balls, Momotaro heroically carrying his peach
into an Oni dwelling as a rugby game, the grace of princess Otohime as artistic swimming,
the mischievous kijimuna quickly dodging the dreaded octopi as a beach sprint—while the
games themselves might not be up to much, like the island they’re found on, it’s
these kinds of details that allowed me, anyway, to look past some of that and simply bask
in this wonderful, colourful celebration of culture.
As for its intended function as an advert… well, I guess I still care as much about the
Olympics as I do about Google Doodles generally, but examined more broadly you can view this
game in one of two ways—either as yet another marketing push planned months in advance for
Tokyo 2020, whose joie de vivre and love of competition reads as a little naïve, given
the vast array of logistical problems plaguing the event and leading many to question, right
up until the last minute, whether or not the games could even go ahead. Or more charitably,
you could see this Doodle as a small ray of hope illustrating that, despite all the challenges
leading up to this point, the games have begun—strength of will has overcome; that perhaps now it’s
actually here, the anxiety surrounding the lead up can give way to the excitement of
competition. Although it should absolutely be stated that
the IOC’s handling of all this—forcing Japan to push ahead with the games despite
the risk to athletes, organisers and the public, and very clearly going against the wishes
of the Japanese people, costing not millions but billions in taxpayer money—is decidedly
shady. Either way this all might seem like a little
much to read into a game as simple as this arcade island crawl, but ya know, I’m also
considering this in the grand (or not-so-grand) lineage of awful licensed Olympic tie-in shovelware.
And when put that way, the amount of effort jumping off the screen in Lucky’s adventure
is comparatively abundant—to the point that, despite its lack of true mechanical substance…
I’m really not sure there’s been a better interactive advert for the Olympics than this
little doodle. So I hope you all enjoyed the video! If you
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