Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope

[Code for this game was provided by Ubisoft but there was no discussion, nor would I ever allow discussion, of content aside from embargo timing.]

The original Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle from 2017 is maybe the foremost example of a leak helping a video game. Had it been the E3 surprise at Ubisoft’s show that people expected, it might have been difficult for people to look past Rabbid Peach and the bwah-isms at the actual fun strategy RPG underneath it. But since it leaked early, people got the shock out of their systems in time to appreciate a game that released only two months after its official announcement.

But now the Mario + Rabbids formula is a known quantity, the sequel Sparks of Hope has to rely more on just novelty. It has to expand on the previous title without losing what made it good. Does Sparks of Hope accomplish that?

While there’s some pain points here and there, I think the latest Mario + Rabbids game is quite a lot of fun and a major improvement in most ways on the original title. It’s a much bigger game than that previous title, too, for better and for worse at times.

While I loved the strategy gameplay of Kingdom Battle, there was very little to do between those battles. You’d usually run in a straight line, solve a block-pushing puzzle or something of that nature, and earn some coins to get better weapons. Sparks of Hope massively expands the exploration portion between battles by giving you worlds to explore and sidequests to take. There is a critical path, but you’re generally encouraged to try and explore everything if possible.

The side quests usually have an assigning character who needs ice cubes to build their igloos or to traverse their lab to help remove the corruption. They often end with you fighting a battle and getting a planet-specific currency to spend on weapon skins since there's no more weapon upgrading. It’s not the best side quest writing I have ever seen, but it’s a Mario triple-jump over the previous title.

That said, it being an improvement should not dismiss any criticism of the side quest design here. There’s some quests, like “Destroy 3 [X] Enemies” wandering around the world that don’t activate until you talk to the quest giver, at which point you have already probably wiped out several of those enemies and have to reload the area to repopulate them to battle once again. The quests also pretty much repeat on every world, so their repetitiveness becomes apparent early.

Sparks of Hope moves from a grid-based tactical battle system to free movement, which I initially dismissed as an unnecessary change, but it really adjusts the planning and strategy required for battles. Since all characters can move until they make an attack, team jumps and positioning become far more critically important, meaning that you have to think long and hard about where you want everyone to be at the end of a turn. Kingdom Battle kind of begged you to go on the offense in comparison, but Sparks of Hope opens itself up to different kinds of solutions. The variety of “puzzle boxes” the battle systems can create here dwarf Kingdom Battle’s in number.

To that end, Sparks of Hope removes battle rankings, choosing not to punish or reward the player for beating the fight under a certain turn par. While this first felt like a step backward or the dreaded casualization, not having to worry about how many turns a strategy might take opens the design up to let you tackle battles in different ways. I could try to jump down a ledge and go tussle with six big enemies, or I could let them come to me and more cleverly use my skills and Lumas to take them out.

The aforementioned Lumas are also an interesting wrinkle added to the battle system. You can add multiple Lumas to a character, not only giving them skills like Electric Dash or Toxic Quake, but also changing their resistances. A character with a fire-based Luma can’t be burned and will take less damage from fire-based attacks, encouraging you to move Lumas around or move characters around and take advantage of your entire roster. If an ice enemy is ruining your day by casting Frostbite, which keeps you glued to your spot for the next turn, then having an ice Luma equipped really reverses their fortunes.

The hybrid Rabbid-Star creatures level up individually, but feeding them star bits does not have the same feeding animation from Super Mario Galaxy, which I think is a missed opportunity. No, really, I'm serious. That's the kind of thing that adds personality to a game and it's noticeable when it's missing.

Kingdom Battle rather famously, or perhaps infamously depending on how you felt about it, got pointedly difficult toward the end of the game. Sparks of Hope’s normal difficulty curve is somehow both more gentle and more steep. By the end of the first world, you can’t fuck around and do whatever anymore if you want to survive. Enemies will take advantage of every little mistake you make and you can end up losing a character a single turn into a fight if you’re not careful.

Healing is also no longer free, as it costs in-game coins to heal before a battle. Every character can use items like mushrooms, and Rabbid Peach is still a capable healer during combat, but just because you can scrape through a battle doesn’t mean it won’t bite you in the ass later. It is also another way the game encourages you to use every party member and not just your favorites.

That said, despite the game encouraging you to rotate through the entire cast, it’s kind of frustrating that Rabbid Peach is your only lifeline for most of the early game. I’m simultaneously being told to switch around while feeling obligated to keep this character in a permanent slot because the enemies can be brutal if given a chance.

We’re at a point in the Switch’s life where it’s hard to tell if a game was meant for better hardware that Nintendo isn’t releasing or if the games are just doing their best with aging hardware. There’s times where Sparks of Hopes runs like a champ and times where things look dire. Rabbid Luigi’s exhaustion skill has a cutscene that drops frames literally every single time and I am not sure why. Sometimes scanning a stage too fast results in slowdown.

The first world of the game, Beacon Beach, is also rainy and muddy by design, but it makes the entire game look like it’s stretching way beyond its capable resolution. Things eventually clear up, but man, I would not have started the game with that world because it sends a bad graphical impression.

Presentation is now a little strange as Rabbids talk this time, but not consistently. They all have some overworld barks or things to say in battle, but cutscenes are still largely silent tableaus. Talking to NPCs out in the world can elicit a similar feeling, as only a few main characters like Beep-O have full voice acting, some characters only say a few words of a dialogue box, and many just don’t have any voice acting at all. It leaves things coming off as weirdly inconsistent and they might have done better to do less overall with fewer voice clips.

The music — which is composed by Grant Kirkhope, Gareth Coker, and Yoko Shimomura — is round-the-table fantastic and you can definitely tell which composers touch which tracks. Whether it's an immediate recognition of Shimomura's strings and bells, Coker's swelling crescendos, or Kirkhope's actively jumpy tempos, you'll be bopping your head up and down to the whole soundtrack. It's almost a little annoying that the rest of the presentation is not as good as the music is.

But at some point all of that is nitpicking. Sparks of Hope is in almost every way an improvement upon Kingdom Battle. They sat and designed new ways to fix the flaws and issues with the first game and made some changes to accommodate their new solutions. Improved does not mean perfect, as there’s a lot of parts of the game that feel designed to annoy rather than challenge, but the space-faring sequel is the kind of leap forward more new series entries should be.

Verdict: Move aside Kingdom Battle, Sparks of Hope is the crown jewel of this series, which means something even when there's only two games competing.

8/10