When Mario + Rabbids creative director Davide Soliani first started working on Kingdom Battle, Ubisoft gave him clear direction.
“We had to earn the trust of Ubisoft as well as Nintendo,” says Soliani. “And Ubisoft told me ‘Rabbids don’t talk.’ That was the rule.
“But I wasn’t told Rabbids couldn’t sing, so I introduced the Phantom.”
The Phantom is one of Kingdom Battle’s most memorable moments, a musical about how much a giant Rabbid opera ghost hates Mario, interspersed with gags about Mario’s past appearance and personality quirks. Sing the entire number. Audiences loved it. And that positive response led Soliani to hire Ubisoft for breaking the rules with the sequel, Sparks of Hope.
That’s right, the Rabbids speak now.
“I have earned the trust of Ubisoft and am heading towards new horizons…everything we do is part of an evolutionary process that will lead us to another place. As a team, We love experimenting, and I think we will continue to do so with DLC, and who knows what will happen in the future?”
Rabbids have undergone some pretty drastic changes since Kingdom Battle, mostly thanks to how they’re treated in the game. When Kingdom Battle was first leaked ahead of his E3 show in 2017, the idea of a Mario and Rabbids collaboration seemed ridiculous. The Rabbids were unpleasant characters and generally relegated to children’s media. The Internet laughed at characters like Peach who are obsessed with cell phones, but not necessarily kindly. But over the course of the trailer, gameplay, review, and later playing it for yourself, viewers slowly came to understand that the Mario + Rabbids team put a lot of effort into making Rabbids. It was that
“When Rabbids started as a video game, [they were initially Rayman enemies back in 2006]they were kind of cute, which was a nice surprise for the first time,” Soriani says. may have been angry with her screaming.
“One of the rules we set as a team was, ‘Never scream in Kingdom Battle again.
The Rabbids in Kingdom Battle had a lot more to say, especially their signature ‘booer’ yell, but in Kingdom Battle they were given more room to express themselves. They kept much of their physical slapstick comedy, but by introducing a roster of playable Rabbids heroes, Ubisoft was able to give them a range of emotions. Even a little complicated. Like the aforementioned Phantom song, there are also different types of humor, all a hilarious and witty roast of Nintendo’s biggest mascot.
And now, with Sparks of Hope, Soriani wants to take that complexity even further. There are new Rabbids, both NPCs and heroes, and new emotions. Rabbid Rosalina embodies boredom, and Edge is (according to Soliani) a JRPG-inspired “female girlfriend Clint Eastwood.” And now they need words other than “bwah” to express those feelings.
“In the production of the voices…we believe we were able to present their psychological traits and emotions and bring them into the game in a way that was not possible in Kingdom Battle…we were able to bring the cosmology around the Rabbids to life. It’s evolving, and it also gives us the potential to create a different kind of humor than the classic slapstick.”
Soriani calls the decision to give Rabbids a voice “horrifying”, which is comparable to the drastic change in the combat system. The team was skeptical before internal testing, he says, but after hearing their story, everyone “fell in love.”
“For example, today my favorite character that wasn’t my favorite in Kingdom Battle is Rabid Mario. , this changes my mood and makes me happy.”
He adds that even though they were loved, the process still wasn’t easy. Finding a suitable voice for Rabbids was difficult. For these reasons, they chose to keep the hero’s voice somewhat low-key, allowing his NPCs in Beep-0, Jeanie, and Rabbid to do as much storytelling as possible.
For new characters in particular, it meant introducing a strong enough personality who could “stay on stage” with Rabbids’ speech. He went from being a derided figure during the first leak of Kingdom His Battle to becoming the franchise’s beloved mascot. In the preview, he played the almost deuterium Sparks of Hope for Mario himself. .
“Creating another strong character for her, who appeared in both Donkey Kong Adventure and Kingdom Battle, was no easy task,” says Soriani. “But I think we found the perfect recipe because Ravid Rosalina could be a show-stealer. In fact, a lot of people said, ‘I’m the same, she’s like me.'”
I ask Soriani if he thinks he created a moment that surpasses Kingdom Battle’s Phantom’s Song in a spark of hope. He’s not giving away spoilers, but it does imply that there could be different kinds of emotional uplifting on the horizon, though nothing can match that number.
“[In Sparks of Hope], I think we tried to expand the tactical possibilities and some of the combat situations… but there are other moments that in my opinion are more connected to the story and what’s going on. Because now each character also has a personal goal, which is the moment that made me very emotional in some parts of the game.
For more on Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, check out the final preview of the game, as well as the rest of our interview with Soliani about Sparks of Hope’s difficulty settings and upcoming Rayman DLC.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. you can find her on her twitter @duck valentine.
