Many fans loved the announcement of Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope at E3 2021. Today, we learned why the people behind the game decided to create a sequel to the first game.
In a recent meeting with ScreenRant, they shared their thoughts on what led them to make a new game in the series after the success of the first one. Here’s what Xavier Manzanares, lead producer of the title, shared:
Xavier Manzanares: We started working on Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle in 2014 and we shipped the game in 2017, then it took us a year to make the Donkey Kong Adventure DLC which was released in 2018.
So I would say the work really started in mid-2018 on Mario + Rabbids: Sparks Of Hope. But it started earlier, because when we made the previous game, we had so many ideas that we couldn’t fit into the game; we didn’t have time to do it, or we wanted to focus on different kinds of elements. But going into space, for example, or changing the combat system to test and see how it could be done with more action and fluidity, that came very early in 2017 and 2018.
At the beginning we didn’t know the outcome and how people would react. We saw that they were super surprised in 2017, and since then, a lot of players are playing and having fun. And obviously, this is really important for us when we started thinking about Sparks of Hope.
Maybe one last thing I could say about it is that we didn’t want the typical sequel. Even though people loved the first one, we wanted to make sure we came back with surprises and didn’t go down the same path. We think it’s important that every new game in the Mario + Rabbids franchise really takes that down and brings it to the table, which is why we’ve made so many changes to the combat, and even the way we work with exploration. That was really our intention from the beginning.