Champion Island

Doodle Champion Island is an role-playing video game with elements of a sports game. The player controls a ninja cat named Lucky around an island with seven different regions that resembles different Japanese locations and geography, such as bamboo forests and mountains. In each region, there features of seven island champions that all specialises in a specific sport. The sports themselves are mini-games, where once Lucky beats the mini-game, they earn a Sacred Scroll. By beating all seven champions and earning their scrolls, the player is named “Island Champion”. The player can also join one of 4 teams that are all represented by a color and a creature from Japanese mythology. By competing in the mini-games, it will accumulate points that are tallied onto a Global Leaderboard, with the highest scoring team being rewarded the title of winner by the end of the Olympics.

All the mini-games cover different genres of video games. For example, the Artistic Swimming event takes the form of a Dance Dance Revolution style rhythm game, whilst the Skateboarding event features a trick system similar to Tony Hawk Pro Skater.

Additionally, each region holds plenty of side quests for the player to seek out. These side quests involve Lucky helping out the residents of the island in a variety of tasks such as item fetching and trade sequences. Some side quests can also unlock harder versions of the original mini-games. All these side quests can earn the player a trophy which can be viewed in a hut in the center of the island, with 22 to collect in total.

Lucky, a ninja cat, arrives by boat to Champion Island, a place where athletes from across the globe set out and compete with each other. Lucky is then confronted by two Komainu, who challenge her to match of Table Tennis to test her skills. Once Lucky beats the pair, they believe her to be The Chosen One, and tell her of the seven champions of the island and that beating them would restore order to the island and make her the Island Champion.

Lucky can then choose which order to compete against the champions and beating each champion will earn her one of seven Sacred Scrolls. There are:

• The Kijimuna, a tribe that hosts marathons along a beach.
• Daitengu, who masters table tennis in a village now abandoned in a bamboo forest.
• Princess Oto-hime, who competes in artistic swimming under the water.
• Yoichi, master of archery near the island’s lotus pond.
• The Oni, a group of trolls who are champions of the island’s rugby. In this event, Lucky is aided by Momotaro and his friends.
• Fukuro, an owl who sits at the top of the island’s mountain and observes the Climbing event.
• Tanuki, the master of the Skateboarding event, taking place in Tanooki City.

After obtaining all seven Sacred Scrolls and beating all the champions of the island, a large cherry blossom tree bursts into bloom in the center of the island, and falling petals rain over the island. The people of the island then congratulate Lucky on becoming the Island Champion.

If Lucky collects 21 of the 22 trophies, selecting the podium with no trophy reads the message “don’t trust the bird”, which activates the final side quest. Lucky is then tasked with finding the true trophy master, who is revealed to be Momo, the black cat from Magic Cat Academy, the Google Doodle for Halloween 2016 and 2020.

The Doodle team collaborated with Studio 4°C to animate the many anime styled cutscenes throughout the game as well as helped produce the game. On the early stages of the development, the team researched for several Japanese folk stories and legendary characters as well as mythical beings from Japanese folklore. As a result, the main character, Lucky, which is a calico cat was made because it depicts luckiness. Each sport champion also features a legendary or mythical character.

The game itself acts as an homage to 16-bit gaming on top of Japanese folklore. For example, some of the video game mechanics resemble old 16-bit video games, such as skateboarding, which resembles mechanics from Atari Games‘ arcade game 720°.

Art lead Google Doodle Nate Swinehart said “we wanted to make the Doodle for the Champion Island Games to really create an opportunity for the world to compete globally together and to learn Japanese culture at the same time.”