The 2020 Olympic Games are finally here — after being postponed for the first time ever — due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The games started on July 23 and are currently ongoing in Tokyo, Japan, and will go on until August 8, 2021. To celebrate Japanese culture and sports in general, Google rolled out a new interactive Doodle called Doodle Champion Island Games.
Doodle Champion Island Games is a playable Olympic-themed 16-bit RPG featuring art from Japanese animation house Studio 4°C. You can start playing the game by clicking on Google’s logo on the Google search homepage. The arrow keys and the spacebar are mainly used to navigate the game.
The game offers a series of mini-games each featuring sports that are included in the summer Olympic games. The game currently features seven different sports — skateboarding, artistic swimming, archery, climbing, rugby, table tennis, and marathon.
In the game you play as the calico athlete (cathlete?) Lucky the Ninja Cat, and your goal is to compete in the Champion Island Games and beat the Legendary Champions at the sports mini-games to win and collect the scrolls for each sport. The Legendary Champions are based on figures from Japanese folklore and history, like the Tengu (a legendary bird of prey), the Oni (a horned, ogre-like creature), and the Kijimuna (a wood spirit).
The player is encouraged to join one of the four teams — Blue, Red, Yellow, and Green — represented by Ushi (cow), Karasu (crow), Inari (fox), and Kappa (a turtle-like water spirit from Japanese folklore), respectively. When the player joins a team, their scores in the mini-games will contribute to that team’s score. Google keeps track of the scores of the four teams real-time on a global leaderboard.
Aside from the mini-games, the player can also navigate Lucky through the island and help the townspeople through completing side quests, much like an RPG. The game also includes cute cutscenes with art developed by Studio 4°C for the interactive Doodle.
Google created the interactive Doodle as an homage to classic Japanese 16-bit video games and to celebrate Japanese culture. According to Studio 4°C, the game draws inspiration from stories from different parts of Japan, from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south.
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