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Welp, I guess it wasn’t a one night stand after all. Mario and Rabbids, sitting in a tree. Pay exorbitant licensing fees. So we start that little dance again, shall we, in which Ubisoft’s proto-Minions distinguished primarily by their resemblance to half-melted ice cream from Spongebob Squarepants attempt to maintain their long, redundant existence by clinging to coattails of one of the few video game franchises with an even more over-the-top shtick, making the combined fatigue of this hacked sequel somewhere on the level of a truck whore the morning after the dispatch of viagra HOPE. You snatched it from me, you bastards. I hope you’re happy. I liked a mainstream thing. Now when I go to meet sarcastic impossible to please Youtube critics, I have to wear the stupid hat and sit in the wheelie bin of shame. You see, Nintendo has two models that benefit Mario and Rabbids: Snarks of Hope. First of all, Nintendo doing something doesn’t mean much. Nintendo does a lot of things. They participate a lot in the thing-based economy. But it’s worth paying attention to whenever Nintendo does something TWICE. That’s how we got Majora’s Mask and Paper Mario 2.
Once they’ve set the bar and run through the moves, Old Man Nintendo turns its back for five seconds and the core creatives can start pissing with the concept. And the second model is that the quality of a Mario RPG-style spinoff is always, with zero exceptions, enhanced by Bowser being a playable character or party member. When he’s not just dutifully sticking his head in the “insert handy antagonist here” cutout and can act like himself off-clock, some sort of divorced blue-collar father figure and grumpy insecure guy who works hard but always shows up to his kids football games and gets into it a bit too much. Either way, Mario and Rabbids: Bars of Soap kicks off with surprisingly little fanfare. I know it’s the sequel, but still, I’d expect some kind of cutscene to set things right, maybe showing Princess Peach unveiling a statue for the Cupcake Unknown’s grave or whatever either she does all day, but no. We jump straight into gameplay with Mario, Luigi, and Peach hanging out in a meadow with Rabbid versions of themselves, which is an instantly weird dynamic. It’s like celebrities are still hanging out with their terminally ill fans the day after the Make-A-Wish Foundation photoshoot.
Seconds later this week’s inhabitant of the “insert handy antagonist here” slot appears as a giant manta ray made out of darkness which was very terrifying because I thought we were back in this damn Mario Sunshine level, and the appearance of Rabbidified Lumas from Super Mario Galaxy implies that shit is going on in space city and the whole crew is piling into their spaceship which they conveniently have to and mysteriously see if Princess Rosalina is okay. I said of the first game that it didn’t seem like Mario’s involvement added much to the concept beyond big star power and that’s even more the case here now that there isn’t. has no obligation to keep Mario as a permanent party member or maintain a certain demographic representation of the Mushroom Kingdom and Rabbids. You could easily drag Mario and Luigi into the background comparing mustache dynamism for the entire game if their unique scouting abilities weren’t so useful. History barely records them once things got started. It’s Rabbids’ world, now Mario lives there. Hopefully in a well soundproofed apartment.
So we travel through the requisite linear sequence of themed hubworlds helping the local Bunnies weirdos fend off the evil dark goo excreted by the evil dark antagonist. I wonder if all the black goo shedding generic evil forces in video games ever hang out together. I wonder if they trade stickiness tips on r-slash-purpleisthenewblack. A handful of mandatory combat missions to unlock the next hubworld and a scattering of optional ones if you’re the kind of asshole who stands in line at McDonalds for five minutes trying to decide if you want to supersize it. But I see you crawling on your side there, reasonable horse, you want to know why Mario and the Rabbids snuck up kinda liked anything. Well, for starters, the movement in combat is modeled after a promiscuous waterfowl in that it’s much looser. Rather than the XCOM-style “click on the spot within range and our dude sprints straight in like a teacher’s pet being asked to pick up homework”, the game simply stakes out the entire area within range and you can browse it at your leisure. Hit a bomb in the nuts, carry it halfway across the map to throw it at someone else before it explodes, circle around all the other enemies and kiss everyone on the lips, then choose your point of cover, and this is all one more movement phase.
In short, the main improvement here is “flexibility”. You can strategically bounce the pad and partner boost all around the map in one turn, then change your mind and bounce the pad all the way back because you were waiting for a cover spot with an adjoining bathroom and a view of the sea. Hub worlds have more character and look much less like glorified menu screens. The addition of equipable Rabbid Lumas with different powers adds more choice to combat, and of course there’s the aforementioned fact that we can tell Mario to piss off the party and put his head in a bucket of dumplings for everything. the game if we want to make a hollow statement against the globalized media. Oops, don’t overload the pro side lest you lose your balance and fall into the bottomless pit of dismissive Youtube comments, let’s balance things out. The GUI menus are kind of crap. Especially when you go through the motions before a battle. Choosing your three guys and their lumas and packing their lunchboxes, the game has a bad habit of closing the whole menu just because I wanted to go back a page, like a car where the button on the ignition -cigar is right next to the ejection seat. And the upgrade trees are more like flimsy little upgrade trees, such unripe sour little bonuses that I really couldn’t be mad to handle.
Luckily there is an autofill button, but I wish it would do all the characters at once. I want to continue, not go around the class handing out cookies. But going back to the big picture, I think the main reason I kinda liked Mario and Rabbids: Farts a-Plenty is that it got a fucking personality, and that’s funnier because it relies less on extracting max mileage by falling and going bwah and gave the bunnies real dialogue and voices so the spirit could be displayed. I enjoyed how the returning AI support character and the AI running the ship kept getting mean to each other. I enjoyed how one of the new main characters is sort of a Rabbid version of a generic anime character with a sword and silly neon hair. Whose name is literally Edge. It offers a touch of satire by which I would feel quite attacked if I were one of the nine different characters in Sonic the Hedgehog. So I appreciated the generally smarter tone, I’m just afraid it’s lost on Rabbids’ target audience. “Why are you making caustic satirical jokes about the singing career of this Rabbid character? When will she fall down and go bwah? Please hurry up so I can stick these pencils up my nose and start campaigning for state governor again.
#Mario #Rabbids #Sparks #Hope #Punctuation
