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'Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle' tempers insanity with charm
When I first stumbled across the rumor that Nintendo and Ubisoft had teamed up to make a Super Mario Bros. and Raving Rabbids cross-over, I chose to live in denial. It just wasn't something I wanted to be real. The very idea of allowing the banal, annoying humor that defined Ubisoft's screaming mascots into the Mushroom Kingdom just felt wrong to me. I told myself it had to be a joke, because if it wasn't, I was either going to have to play a Rabbids game -- something I'd avoided for over a decade -- or skip the first original Mario title to release on the Nintendo Switch. I was wrong. It's real. And you know what's weird? Not only is Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle actually pretty good, but the mascots I primed myself to reject, completely steal the show.
'Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle' shouldn't work, but it does
Ubisoft's Rabbids are almost the antithesis of Nintendo's mascots. Sure, both sets of characters are family friendly and mostly mute, but Rabbids are uglier and lean on slightly more crass, juvenile humor. When I first heard Nintendo and Ubisoft were mixing the two together, I expected the worst -- and yet somehow, the mountain-sized toilet that scrolled past the background in my E3 demo of the game didn't feel out of place. In fact, the enormous commode is emblematic of my time with Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. Everything about the game feels a little out of place in Mushroom Kingdom, but it somehow works anyway.
