Mario + Rabbids Sparks Of Hope is easily one of the most-anticipated games of this year for the Nintendo Switch. The sequel to Kingdom Battle, the team of Mario Bros heroes and Rabbids are going to space in order to save a unique race of creatures known as Sparks from the vile forces of Kursa.
We recently got a look at the game and the team noted that the “final roster” had been shown. While it was cool, it also had some key omissions, including a character from last time via Yoshi. Producer Xavier Manzanares revealed the reason for the new characters, and the omission of ones like Yoshi:
“When we started to think about the team and the heroes, we didn’t want to go for, ‘Okay, we did it before, so we have to do the same thing again’ and trying to evolve what we had in Kingdom Battle. So it’s true as well for the heroes.
We decided early on to go for nine heroes. We didn’t know exactly which ones, and we didn’t want to go for ones that are in Kingdom Battle because that’s the rule. As it’s not a direct sequel, we talked and we still believe today that players would be more interested and think, ‘Okay, the choice they made for the heroes and what they put in the game are logical because of the architypes and what they do in battle, and it’s cool, and the synergy is super cool.’
So yeah, we opened up our minds. That’s when we started to come up with this character called Edge. I won’t be able to talk more about her past and what she’s doing in the storyline because it would be too spoilerish right now, but the same goes for Rabbid Rosalina. Then when we talked about Bowser, we thought that would be awesome.”
So it was more about having a game with all sorts of archetypes than just “playing to what came before”. Hopefully it’ll all work out when Mario + Rabbids Sparks Of Hope arrives on October 21st.
Source: Nintendo Everything