Currently Playing: Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle Is Having Multiple Identity Crises.
I've commented before on how I find Nintendo games to be, at times, a bit...peculiar. But Mario + Rabbids truly takes the biscuit in the weird-o-meter stakes. Even though I am enjoying the game, and I think the meshing of the Mario and Rabbids universes is really well done, I still do just want to put a giant neon flashing sign across this whole review that says:
THIS IS WEIRD AND FREAKY STUFF.
If the design leads on from XCOM got stratospherically high, and then were induced into a fever, they still couldn't come up with anything as bizarre as this. There is so much here that makes me uncomfortable:
Why does everything have a butt?
How do the Rabbids eat with their nasty gnarled up teeth? (Ewww.)
How does hair work in this universe? ...it looks solid???
Are the Rabbids evil? Can they make moral choices?
Are the Rabbids stupid, or mentally damaged in some way? Should we pity them!?
HOW THE HELL DO THEIR EYES STAY ON THEIR HEADS?
Mushrooms in the Mushroom Kingdom have faces. But you use them to regain health. But there is no eating animation, they just disappear. Has it been censored out? Is it some kind of vore?!! HELP. YUCK.
Do the Rabbids feel fear? They often look scared.
Have Mario and the gang been customising their guns? Who is decorating these weapons for them? Prettifying your pistols is the mark of a crazed pyscho-killer assasin, not a cheery plumber.
Just, urgh. A lot is coalescing around this point, in fairness. I'm listening to a podcast about the nature of fear, I have a Moral Philosophy degree that I need to ram into blog posts at regular intervals in order to make it seem like it was a good investment, and I have a deep, deep, dislike of things that sit in the uncanny valley. Dr Who TV shows used to freak me out as a child. Even remembering Don't Hug Me I'm Scared gives me PTSD-like symptoms. So the Rabbids are push all my personal buttons. The Mario universe, with it's sentient mushrooms and aggressive turtles, is already illogical enough, without chucking Rabbids into the mix as well.
...It's not innocent and child-friendly! It's effed up and I feel very strongly about this!
...Ahem...
Part of what makes all of this madness better/worse, is that it's plastered over the top of an extremely good, extremely logical, Turn Based Strategy game. Rabbids might be nuts, but in order to win, the player needs to be almost brutally logical. As many reviewers have pointed out, despite the cute graphics, Mario + Rabbids is not an easy game. You do need to put in the mental effort, and to be prepared to constantly rejig your roster of fighters and weapons in order to get optimum results. It's what makes it fun, and why, despite my protests, I do enjoy Mario + Rabbids a great deal, and would absolutely recommend it for your Switch game library if you like strategy games. A particular highlight is the Boss Battle at the end of the Ancient Gardens. Using Luigi's remote controlled device to antagonise a massive, manic gorilla-rabbit hybrid was both an entertaining spectacle and a satisfying puzzle.
There are some other incongruities too. I suspect, and this is only a hunch, that when Ubisoft got the brief for the game, the internal teams hadn't quite nailed down whether the Switch would be more like a console title, or a mobile one. The structure of the levels, some naming conventions, and the slightly shallow early levels, as well as more intangible things around screen layout and button mapping, all lead me to wonder if the team thought they were designing for a device more like an iPad. Though there is plenty of content, there are "only" four worlds, which seems like an odd number in itself, and perhaps points to a belief that things would be extended through DLC. Though there are a lot of weapons, when you look more closely, they are pretty much all reskins of one another, with upgraded stats, and the cost of purchase is often steep. A basic vital ability - the ability to move heavy blocks out the way - is suddenly gifted at the end of the first world and not explained in the narrative in any meaningful way, and this strengthens my hunch. Adding replayability padding by omitting essential mechanics strikes me as a cheap move.
There is also a slight unevenness of tone. Call me a snob, but I'm not sure the reference to Virgil's Aeneid is going to resonate with a core audience of children, (if that actually is the core audience at all.) And Browser Jnr's "Daddy Issues" comment, in such a mashed up universe, struck me as accidentally sinister. But then, I over-think things. You may have noticed.
Patricia Hernandez at Kotaku described Mario + Rabbids' dissonance as giving her "whiplash," and it struck me as an excellent choice of words. This is a fun game, but it's teetering right on the edge of falling apart completely. Due to that fact, rather that than in spite of it, is perhaps why we should be impressed by it all the more.
