Ubisoft discusses what Nintendo wanted out of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle

A portion of a Nintendo Life interview with producer Xavier Manzanares...

Was Nintendo open and happy for you to ‘go crazy’, or were they more reserved in some areas than you would have been for a purely Ubisoft project?

I remember at the first meeting you could see it in Miyamoto-san’s eyes, or in his designer’s eyes, the importance of having something that is different. Their idea of the Rabbids concept was that “those guys surprise, that’s in the DNA”. From the very start it was a true cross-over project, Nintendo wanted to see the two truly together and not just one more than the other.
So at one time early in development maybe a Rabbid could do something with more craziness like a super attack, and only they could do that while the Mario characters could only do something else, in terms of super attacks, animations and so on. First of all I was putting the two in silos and it didn’t work that well, and also on Nintendo’s side that wasn’t what they wanted to see. If it was ‘too Mario’ it would be something Nintendo would do itself, if it was ‘too Rabbids’ they would not have said to us to combine them with Mario.

It’s true that with artistic direction, animation, design, everything, it was a case of how do we balance each set of rules and elements for these characters, and how that makes sense for the players. We knew that if it felt like a recipe that is weird no-one will play the game, if each element was in silos that wouldn’t be uniting but more like two universes colliding. That’s not what we wanted, as it’s not Mario Vs Rabbids, it’s Mario + Rabbids.

So from the very beginning finding the right balance was mandatory, something Nintendo, Davide and myself said from the beginning would be important.