A Review of Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

After sinking weeks into Stardew Valley, then sinking not as much time into Super Mario Odyssey, I ended sinking an intermediate amount of time into Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. Mario & Rabbids is a cross-over game created in a collaboration between Ubisoft who developed the game and Nintendo who actually made it marketable by putting Italians into it. All I know about Rabbids is that they’re something to do with the Rayman series; a series of platformers (I think) that I’ve never played, nor needed to.

That being said though, here’s what happened when I started a new game. I watched a cinematic of some guy sitting in his room talking to his sentient roomba whose name I don’t remember about his latest invention: a VR headset that can merge two objects together. Just then a washing machine materialises in his bedroom and out come a bunch of insane semi-anthropomorphic rabbits who promptly steal the headset device and start merging themselves with the inventor’s Mario action figures. The flying roomba and the rabbits then get transported to the Mushroom Kingdom for some reason where the action-figure rabbids team up with their Mushroom Kingdom counter-parts and OH GOD, THERE’S BEES IN MY EYES AND A BABY ON THE CEILING!!!!!!!! MY SKIN IS TURNING GREEN AND MY DESK IS MADE OF JELLY!!!!!!

Mario + Rabbids is a fucking fever dream. I still don’t know what the hell happened in the beginning. All I could figure out is the Mushroom Kingdom has been plunged into chaos and there are evil rabbit things running around, only some of the rabbits are good and help you beat the evil rabbits and liberate them from the evil that’s infection them, only every time you exorcise and evil rabbit, all the evil conglomerates into a giant moth of evil, except the evil is actually just data from the merger-thing and...  Oh, for god sake, this is helping at all!!

Okay, never mind about the story. What’s the game? It’s basically XCOM, but a Mario game; and even that makes no goddamn sense what-so-ever when you put it like that. Considering that the Rabbids part of Mario + Rabbids is not nearly as marketable as the Mario part is, I’m just going to ignore the fact that this is technically a cross-over and just call it a Mario game, and on that basis, XCOM but Mario is not the weirdest type of Mario game that’s ever been developed. Not even considering the sports games, racing games, and huge variety of puzzle games, such as Mario-themed Tetris; there was Yoshi’s Safari for the SNES which was a rail-shooter, but there was also I Am A Teacher: Super Mario no Sweater for the Famicom, which was a fucking sewing simulator. That’s not considering all the pre-Super Mario Bros. games such as Wrecking Crew and Pinball.

Anyway, Mario + Rabbids; the game is separated into four worlds, plus a hub world at Peach’s Castle. The four worlds are each one large open world... well, open pathway, split into 8 areas, plus a boss arena and a secret area you can only unlock after beating the boss. Each area has one to four battles that you must win in order to proceed. Your team consists of Mario, and then a choice of two out of Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, and rabbid versions of all four, although you must have at least one rabbid character on your team for reasons best known to the developers. The battles are fought with XCOM-style turn-based combat with each character having the chance to move, attack, and use their special skill during each turn. Objectives are either defeat all, reach the area, or escort Toad. Throughout the worlds you can collect coins to buy better weapons which you slowly unlock as you progress through the game and you are also rewarded coins for winning battles, which also rewards you powerup orbs which you can use to upgrade the characters themselves.

Right, that’s enough about the actual game, the story is incomprehensible, so the only thing left is to answer the question “is the game good?”

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: yes, that’s why it was the third of three games that completely sucked me in over the past few weeks. Like Stardew Valley, it sucked me in enough for the 100% completionist in me to wake up and start rattling his cage, but unlike Stardew Valley and Super Mario Odyssey, getting 100% completion wasn’t at all a chore and I got everything with about 2 weeks of playing maybe five hours a day, including Christmas day. But that’s the advantage of having a Switch, you can play alone in your troglodyte cave of a room, or you can play while socialising with your family, admittedly with a much smaller screen, but the handheld mode of the switch is big enough and the technology is advanced enough for there to be no real difference between playing in docked mode or playing in handheld; so there’s my brief review of the Switch, back to Mario + Rabbids.

Unlike Stardew Valley, which has me trembling in fear of ever going back to it, now that there’s been a huge content patch that basically undoes all the achievements I obtained during the last week of my playthrough; and unlike Super Mario Odyssey which if there is DLC for it, I really think it unnecessary because I can see myself going back to the same save file for years to come without reaching 100% completion; Mario + Rabbids was just long enough and had just about enough content in the vanilla game, that gaining 100% completion not only took no time at all, but also left wanting more rather than hoping I never clap eyes on the bloody thing again, leading me to purchase the DLC a few days after completing it. So despite Stardew Valley becoming my sole waking output of achievement for three weeks and Super Mario Odyssey being the far more comprehensible game, I think Mario + Rabbids has to be my favourite of the three. Not that I actually mean to compare the three games, because comparing a turn-based tactical strategy game to 3D collect-athon platformer, and comparing both of those to a pixel-art grid-based farming simulator would be insane, but of the three distinctly different games I’ve really enjoyed lately, Mario + Rabbids is probably my favourite.

Now that I’ve finally reviewed the three games that I sold my sanity to over the past month and a half, I can finally get back to... well, selling my sanity other games, but hopefully with more time dedicated to other pursuits... like this blog populated by vast quantities of tumbleweed.