STACK #216 October 2022

GAMING FEATURE

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YOWSAH, IT’S BOWSER!

The hero roster gets a shakeup this time out, with Bowser now playable – teaming up with Mario and friends! Still, it’s a marriage of convenience, as Nava explains… “Bowser is usually Mario's greatest enemy. But this time, since we’re going cosmic and Cursa, who is even more evil, is controlling Bowser’s army, what can Bowser do but team up with our heroes and try to gain his army back? He’s a bit unwilling to do that, but, as you’ll see on the battlefield, he's a very explosive character and so having him playable, and the fact that he can unleash Rabbid Mechakoopa, makes him a formidable hero for the roster.”

IN A GALAXY BWAH, BWAH AWAY…

go back to super-serious red – and crazy - crossovers

Just when you thought it was safe to strategy games, one of the most inspi

.We had

• Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is out on Oct 20

of all time is returning in Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope

ciate producer Cristina Nava

a fab chat with the game’s senior asso

… erm, bar.

Nintendo game. Not surprisingly, the team at Ubisoft are huge Mario fans. “We’re a weird and wild bunch of Nintendo fans, so even at the beginning of conceiving the previous game, when we knew that we had the honour to develop something that was never possible before, it really was a dream come true. We all grew up playing Super Mario games, so being big Nintendo fans helped put those extra layers of passion, creativity, love and fun.” Not surprisingly, the relationship forged via Kingdom Battles led to a greater air of trust between and Ubisoft and Nintendo. “We built further on the trust that we had earned,” explains Nava. “Of course, we wanted and needed to stay true not only to the Nintendo characters and lore, but also the entire world, and we tried to experiment even more. We hope those experiments will be enjoyed by the players.” One part of that trust involved weaponry, because Nintendo are famously very full-on about their characters depicting violence. “Well, thank you for mentioning it,” says Nava, “because putting weapons in the hands of Nintendo characters was tricky at the beginning. But by giving this idea that it’s a playful thing, the idea that we had was imagining a group of kids playing in the backyard with water and things like that. So, this is still the vibe in Sparks of Hope . We kept the playful idea and, by adding the Sparks - which provide additional powers for the heroes and their gadgets - we kept this very fun and playful vibe.”

to learn how they’re raising the BWAH

Words Amy Flower

W hen news of Mario + Rabbids was met with surprising hostility. But then people played it, and the rest is history. With the initial shock of Ubisoft’s manic Rabbids crashing the Mushroom Kingdom gone, it’s now freed the developers to go bigger. Kingdom Battle leaked before its official announcement, the concept “The situation we were in after the release of Kingdom Battle and then the Donkey Kong Adventure DLC was very different, because we knew that players were really enjoying the game and they wanted more,” Nava tells us. “We knew that this weird mashup was working, so we wanted to give players something more. It would have been very easy to just build on that previous game, just changing the setting, maybe adding some characters but keeping the same gameplay. We couldn't surprise the players with this twisted world because they already knew that Mario was paired with the Rabbids, so we decided to innovate even more on the gameplay.” This aim to give players more has led to some quite radical changes for the strategic genre, as Nava explains.

“We’ve added real-time movement and action into the tactical based game, which is quite an innovation. We’re also going on an epic scale story-wise by having the heroes travel through the galaxy, to deliver the cosmos from the evil empress Cursa.” This journey into space introduces some cool Super Mario Galaxy vibes. This includes the Sparks, which are basically Lumas with Rabbid eyes. Should we look out for any other nods to SMG ? “Well, we don't want

to spoil anything, but while there are Galaxy vibes, we want to make it clear that this is not a Super Mario Galaxy game,” says Nava with a smile. “Of course, it remains a Mario + Rabbids IP, but since we decided to

go into space, including Galaxy references came quite easily.

These strange Sparks creatures are really very important, not only on the narrative side, but also on the gameplay side, because they aid the heroes.” One thing that the first game really nailed was that quality look and feel of a first-party

12 OCTOBER 2022

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