Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy-RPG

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: UbiSoft

.

Review:

(Note: This game is included in the physical-only bundle Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle / Sparks of Hope Double Pack, along with Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle.)

When UbiSoft announced Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle (or rather, when Nintendo unceremoniously leaked it early), pairing Nintendo’s mascot with UbiSoft’s screaming rabbit-like critters was odd enough, but putting the odd pairing in a family-friendly XCOM-style Strategy-RPG? Well, that’s just outright bizarre. Yet this proved to be one of the big early surprise success stories on the Nintendo Switch – a truly great Strategy-RPG for both casual players and veterans of the genre, with tons of polish and a presentation that somehow made this bizarre mix of elements work. When the game was announced to be getting a sequel, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, people were far less wary of returning to this formula. Yet perhaps paradoxically, they may have been underestimating this game just as much as its predecessor.

When you beat the odds and stumble onto a winning formula, the natural inclination in making a sequel is going to be playing it safe, not rocking the boat too much, and doing your best to recapture what people loved about the first game. Surprisingly, that’s not what happened here – Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is an ambitious sequel that builds on what the original game established, but also changes up the formula in a few meaningful ways, and in nearly every case, the result is a better game because of it.

.

Letting Your Party Cut Loose

This time around, each of the characters starts their turn with a circular area indicating where they can go. While the game’s cover system is still grid-based, character movement works within a radius of the character that gives them free range within that circle. For the most part, attacking will glue you to one spot, but virtually everything else gives players wiggle room – you can move a character in range of others to make use of a special move to buff your allies, then move them to slide through a set of enemies, then move them back to be in range of an area-of-effect heal, then move them again to make use of the returning “team jump” that can boost them past their normal range, float a distance before landing, and then continue to move within a smaller circle of the landing area, then hop behind cover and make an attack, all within that character’s turn… and that’s not even taking into account that you can swap back and forth between characters while in the middle of moving them. Your ability to move and use abilities how you please during battle is absurdly exploitable, and it is a delight figuring out the best ways to put this to use to truly demolish your opposition.

A part of this comes down to how you build your team, and here once again there are numerous improvements, the first and most obvious being… you are no longer stuck with Mario on your team. To be clear, Mario is an excellent character (his dual guns means he can target multiple characters in one turn or double the damage against one), but being free to assemble whatever team you want gives you even more freedom to find pairings that work well together. What’s more, the characters this time around are even more distinct – all of them have unique special abilities, but their unique skill trees also include unique innate abilities, and all of the characters have unique weapons as well.

As if that wasn’t enough customization, this time around players can not only upgrade their characters’ weapons, but they’ll get a growing number of the game’s titular Sparks (a combination of the Rabbids and Super Mario Galaxy’s Lumas), which bestow an additional active and passive ability to the character who equips them.

All this customizability can be put to the test as some encounters clearly favor one character or build. Thankfully, you’re not out of luck if, say, you’ve been benching Luigi for a while only to find that his ability as a sniper is absolutely vital in the newest mission – all characters level up the same after a battle, and points you spend in skill trees can be refunded and re-spent endlessly, so you’re never “locked in” by a bad choice you made earlier in the game.

.

A Bigger, Weirder World

One other area where Sparks of Hope is vastly improved over Kingdom Battle is its world design. Where Kingdom Battle had mostly-linear mazelike worlds for players to navigate, the worlds in Sparks of Hope actually feel closer to world in a more open-ended Mario game, giving players free reign to explore and multiple goals to accomplish. There is of course a story goal players need to complete to proceed onwards into the game, but players who feel like exploring will find themselves rewarded for doing so. What’s more, in having a difficulty selector that players can adjust at any time, the game also caters to both ends of the grind spectrum – if you fear that tackling every battle will power you up until nothing provides a challenge anymore, you can always turn up the heat. On the other hand, if you enjoy grinding until you’re a powerhouse, that’s an option that’s open to you as well.

As if improvements to the gameplay weren’t enough, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope also manages to make its characters more interesting. No, not Mario, Luigi, and the rest of Nintendo’s crew – those guys are all pretty much true to form, as always. Interestingly, the characters that have gotten a whole heap of development here are the Rabbid versions of Mario characters. In the first game, Mario Luigi, Mario Peach, and the rest all had traits that were unique, but the core personality was largely the same between all of them – these were all just screaming Rabbids with a little something extra applied on top. Here, the Rabbid Mario characters all have a full-fledged personality of their own, with the silly screaming left to the more generic Rabbid characters (and even then, only sparingly). Now, all these Rabbid characters come across as unique in their own right, not only from one another, but from the Mario character they’re a half-Rabbid clone of.

Rabbid Mario is all about being macho and trying to impress everyone with his strength and courage, while Rabbid Luigi is a mischievous trickster. However, the character who constantly steals the show is Rabbid Peach, who takes the smartphone obsession the character had in Kingdom Battle and turns it into a whole digital media-obsessed personality that’s consistently hilarious. Oh, and that’s another thing, where Kingdom Battle consistently had charm and elicited chuckles from its Rabbid-y screams and antics, Sparks of Hope is a game that I frequently found to be hilarious due to its fantastic use of character.

And while the first game’s soundtrack was quite good, featuring Banjo-Kazooie composer Grant Kirkhope, this game’s soundtrack has Kirkhope joined by Super Mario RPG and Kingdom Hearts composer Yoko Shimomura and Ori series composer Gareth Coker, and the result is far more epic than anything featuring screaming rabbits has any right to be. Seriously, we’re talking about one of the best soundtracks of the year here – have a listen to Prologue Battle, Beacon Town: Battle, Sunrise Temple Depths: Battle, and A Light in the Darkmess, just to pick a few.

.

And Just to Show I’m Not Just Being a Rabbid Fanboy…

Okay, so I’m heaping praise on this game, but there’s got to be a downside, yes? Well, there are a few complaints I have. Firstly, while this game looks visually very nice, I don’t feel like it looks nearly as impressive as Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle did back in the day. This game still has some phenomenal animation for its 3D characters, and it’s overall a polished and colorful game, but there’s some intangible “wow” factor the first game had that I feel Sparks of Hope lacks.

Also, while I am quite pleased with the party and character customization, I feel like the game is glacially slow in handing out the currency you need to buy new weapons, and I would have liked to be able to outfit these characters as well. This game is so good about giving players the ability to customize their party, it seems odd that the game would drop the ball in this area. Finally, I have to mention that this game lacks the multiplayer co-op that was present in Kingdom Battle, though to be fair I kinda’ felt like that game’s co-op was an afterthought.

.

Sparks of Hopes and Dreams?

I think it’s pretty clear by this point that I am overjoyed with Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, which I strongly feel not only greatly improves well beyond the first game, but has easily catapulted to become one of my favorite games of 2022. And while I don’t feel like it’s quite as visually impressive as Kingdom Battle, and it’s missing some features I would have liked, it feels silly to complain about that when virtually every other area of this game feels massively improved. If you’re a Strategy-RPG fan, consider this game a must-have. If you’re a Mario fan or a Rabbids fan, consider this game a must-have. In fact, if you have a Nintendo Switch, you should definitely give this game a look. It is an absolute delight.

tl;dr – Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is a family-friendly Turn-Based Strategy-RPG that improves on its predecessor Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle in virtually every way. Players have plenty of ways to adapt and change their party, the combat is delightfully deep but also wonderfully accessible, the game is bursting with personality, has a killer soundtrack, a great sense of humor, and plenty of content to explore. This is just about everything you could hope for in a sequel, and then some.

Grade: A+

.

This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2022 Game Awards:

Winner:

Game of the Year – I liked the original Mario + Rabbids game, but I didn’t absolutely love it as many others seemed to. When the sequel was announced, I felt like it was a pretty safe bet that this game would be good, but didn’t expect my feelings to stray too far from how I felt about the original. I was wrong.

I think I could be forgiven my assumptions here, because where Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope could have easily rested on its laurels and given players “more of the same”, this game actually worked hard to innovate well beyond its predecessor in virtually every way. The strategy gameplay became both more nuanced and more accessible, allowing players to exploit its new free movement to devastated enemies. The new Sparks allowed players even greater malleability in outfitting their characters. The removal of the pointless requirement that Mario be in every party freed up players to create their perfect dream team. The new world design gave players a greater freedom to explore and discover. The more evolved characterization of the Rabbid-ized Mario characters actually made them unique and interesting in their own right. The new soundtrack lent the game a surprisingly epic tone that elevated the experience… in a year full of sequels that improved on prior games, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope truly stands out as a game that took something great and transformed it into something outstanding.

However, more than a few reviewers deliberately skipped over this game, and for good reason. By employee accounts, developer and publisher UbiSoft has failed to correct for the toxic culture of sexist and abusive treatment of its employees that we have all known about for years now. For many, they simply cannot in good conscience support a company that has knowingly allowed its own employees to suffer under such conditions.

I cannot judge those who have chosen to turn their back on this game for these reasons. You have to follow your own conscience, and if you cannot bear to know that your money has gone to a company that has caused such misery, no one should ever tell you that you are wrong for how you feel. However, my feelings on the matter are… well, a bit nuanced. The thing is, I know that countless employees worked on this game, poured their heart and soul into this game – you cannot create a game as good as this without it being a labor of love. And I know that the majority of those employees who worked on this game likely have nothing to do with the abusive actions of the management at UbiSoft, and may have in fact been the victims of said abuse. In my eyes, boycotting their work harms these employees just as much as it harms those responsible for the abuse.

As such, I’m taking a third option. Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is my choice for Nintendo Switch Game of the Year for 2022, and deservedly so in my opinion. And as such, my review for the game will have this award appended to the end of the review for all to see… including everything I have written here. Whenever anyone is curious to see the game I deem to be the year’s best, they will get to see my celebration of everything wonderful about the game… and they will also be reminded of the disgusting, barbaric practices at the company that produced the game (be sure to check out the Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page for UbiSoft for more details!). I won’t tell you to buy the game or boycott the game – that is a choice that only you can make for yourself. But I will make sure that no one forgets what UbiSoft has done.

Best Strategy Game / Simulation – While there were some strong contenders for this award this year, the winner is no contest in my mind. Mario + Rabbids gives players some wonderful flexibility in not only outfitting their team to try to craft the killer combination of party members, but also in taking advantage of different ways to exploit the battlefield to annihilate enemies. The amount of creativity on display here is only rivaled by how wonderfully accessible it all is. If you want to introduce new players to the Strategy-RPG genre, this is one of the best ways you’ll ever find to do so.

Best Music – There’s something very strange and even a bit magical going on when you’re playing a game that’s a crossover between Mario and a bunch of silly rabbits, and it somehow feels like one of the most epic things ever. This game’s soundtrack manages to elevate the entire experience to be something truly grand. Of course, it’s no wonder that this is the case when you see that its soundtrack was composed by a dream team of the three musicians collectively responsible for the soundtracks to Kingdom Hearts, Banjo-Kazooie, and Ori and the Blind Forest (among many many other great games).

Funniest Game – Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope makes a lot of smart choices, but perhaps one of its best decisions is to develop its Rabbid characters into something more than just one-note silly screaming bunnies. As a result, Mario and friends’ Rabbid allies now all feature their own unique silly personalities, with the real star being Rabbid Peach. While everyone else has joined the game’s quest to help others or to prove themselves, Rabbid Peach seems to be tagging along just to generate content for her socials. Just this one character’s oblivious, manic, vapid personality generated more chuckles out of me than virtually every other game this year combined. Oh, and the rest of the game has some funny moments as well.

Runner-Up: Best Graphics, Best New Character (Rabbid Peach)

.

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Andy Miller, Exlene, Johannes, Homer Simpin, Ilya Zverev, Eli Goodman, Kristoffer Wulff, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Francis Obst, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}