Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle
This was originally posted on the 16th of March, 2024, in this Twitter thread.
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| Nintendo | Ubisoft |
My brain is now mush after playing this game for a total of 70 hours over the last few weeks.
I thought this game was pretty fun. I wanna save most of my comparisons for another time, but I wanna mention now that I thought this game was a decent bit harder than the sequel.
The difficulty is also scaled pretty well I'd say.
Since I haven't played very many other tactical RPG's, I don't really know what other positives to highlight about the raw gameplay other than the movement. Just being able to jump off of teammates adds a lot to the decision making.
There's this slow motion thing that happens sometimes that's kinda cool, but oftentimes I wish I could just skip it.
The mission design in general is pretty good. I can think of maybe one or two that stood out as underwhelming. For reference, (including DLC) there's 100+ missions/challenges.
I thought it was pretty interesting how a lot of Chapters would have you go through multiple missions in a row without healing. The game doesn't actually commit very hard to that idea though. A lot of Chapters had mushrooms that you could collect in-between missions to heal which really lessened the impact of damage carrying over between missions, and none of the Challenges have this feature at all. I'm a little disappointed that they rarely commit to the idea since I thought it did a good job at incentivising me to play safer and more calculated. Perhaps the devs wanted to play it safe and not risk making the game too punishing, which is a call I can respect.
I played through the co-op Challenges after doing all the main game solo Challenges, and I think I messed up my experience by doing so, because I was overpowered for most of them. I don't think I would've had that great of a time regardless though, since instead of actually playing with a second person, I just played by myself by constantly swapping between 2 controllers which was more cumbersome than I had expected. I was also annoyed by how you have to unlock Hard mode by first completing Challenges on Normal mode. I still had some fun with the co-op Challenges though.
I didn't play the Versus mode at all, since I don't have anyone to wrangle into playing with me.
The most obvious issue I noticed with the gameplay was how lines of fire just don't make sense sometimes.
Right outside of the raw gameplay, one gripe I had was how in order to reallocate skill points, you have to completely reset a character's skill tree. It made min-maxing far more tedious than I think was necessary.
I've heard a lot of people took issue with the team-building restrictions, but I didn't actually mind that much. I definitely still prefer how Sparks Of Hope handles team-building though. I actually just forgot about the restrictions a few times, which might show how little I care, or it might just show how bad my memory is.
I've also heard people were annoyed at how late into the game you unlock Yoshi (you unlock them like 7/8's into the game), but I was moreso disappointed that Yoshi just wasn't very interesting to play as. I found both Yoshi and Rabbid Yoshi to be underwhelming actually. Yoshi's Super Chance probably would've been a lot more helpful in the early game though, rather than late game when I already have 50/50 crit chances. With how much characters' toolkits overlap though, I was pretty much doomed to be disappointed by the last one.
Another thing that annoyed me a little bit was the weapon system. After completing and collecting everything but the weapons, I only had enough money for like half the weapons, and it probably would've taken dozens of hours to grind for the rest. It's not really a huge deal though, since you don't really need every weapon, but I was annoyed that they were the only thing standing in the way of me truly completing this game (the game doesn't even count weapons for 100% completion though, so this really isn't a big deal).
Outside the combat related stuff, I had some fun with the puzzle solving. I particularly liked the block pushing puzzles, and those were by far the most common type of puzzle. There were some puzzles I disliked though. None of them were particularly egregious if I remember correctly, but there were a few that were both too simple, and time consuming for my liking.
As for the exploration, I found the worlds to be a little cool to explore, there's some neat stuff off to the sides to look at, but to put it nicely the world designs tend to be much more function over form. Trying to find collectables sucks though since there's no way in-game to keep track of what sections of areas do or don't have collectables in them.
Graphically, the game looks fine for the most part, but there's some areas where the lighting makes things look way too shiny in my opinion. Maybe the shininess was intended to make the models look like plastic figurines in the model viewer, but intentionally or not, I'm not really a fan.
Some might consider this blasphemous or whatever considering who composed it, but I didn't really care for the music.
When it comes to the story, not much of note actually happens, but it was at least occasionally funny. Most of the characters felt pretty underutilized. Yoshi in particular has this remarkably unceremonious introduction. I think it's neat though how Bowser Jr. takes the role of main antagonist. I don't think the Megabug was very well set up, so story wise, the climax felt underwhelming. The final boss was fun though.
This game also does something similar to what I complained about for the sequel, where there's inexplicably lore for things that only just recently came into existence. It's less emphasized in this game though, and besides, I've come to accept the lore being a little illogical.
Donkey Kong Adventure
I wanna talk about the Donkey Kong Adventure DLC here at the end, since it feels pretty separated from the rest of the game. Overall, I enjoyed it more than the base game.
I liked the visuals in general a lot more than the base game.
I found more of the cutscenes to be funny.
I thought the story was more engaging.
I enjoyed the music a lot more.
I think the hubworld is much better (the base game's hub world has this big circular design that's just really tedious to walk around).
I don't know if it was because of the weapons being really cheap, or if it was because there's just less weapons in general, but I was able to actually buy all the weapons without grinding.
The skill trees are reworked a little bit, in ways I think are for the better. The universal Golden Shot skill is completely replaced with a far more useful Range Up skill. Skill point numbers are also drastically reduced in general, so you get less, but everything is also cheaper, which just helps make a lot of the math simpler which I appreciated.
One thing I was a little disappointed by was how Donkey Kong Adventure completely forgoes the damage carrying over between missions mechanic. It's especially weird here since after every Chapter, it still presents missions in a list format, but there's only ever one mission per Chapter.
The mission felt EXTREMELY well put together. I think it's because you only have 3 characters, so they were able to be much more specifically designed. The level gimmicks are pretty varied which keeps things feeling pretty fresh, although I do think some of them felt a little underutilized.
The 2 new characters, Donkey Kong and Rabbid Cranky Kong, were both pretty fun to use. They synergize pretty well with each other.
I prefer how the Challenges are all saved for after you've beaten the Story mode. It keeps them from breaking up the pacing, plus it's cool that they all get to be balanced around you having a lot of skill points.
To conclude, I really enjoyed Donkey Kong Adventure, and Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, and I can now declare myself a fan of Mario + Rabbids as a series, or subseries or whatever.
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