Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope dev on the Rabbids speaking for the first time

The Rabbids speak in Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, but they didn’t in the previous title – Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. As it turns out, the team was explicitly told by Ubisoft that the Rabbids don’t talk. To get around that a bit, the Phantom was included in Kingdom Battle with a music number.

Mario + Rabbids creative director Davide Soliani told IGN:

“I had to gain trust also from Ubisoft, not just Nintendo. And Ubisoft told me, ‘Rabbids are not speaking.’ That was a rule. But they never told me that the Rabbids couldn’t sing, so I introduced the Phantom.”

“I gained trust from Ubisoft to venture towards a new horizon… Everything we are doing, it’s part of a process of evolution that will lead us somewhere else. I think that as a team, we really love experimenting and we will keep doing it in the DLC. And then, who knows in the future what will happen?”

“I think that when Rabbids started as a video game [they were initially Rayman enemies back in 2006], they were kind of cute and a nice surprise the very first time. But then, afterwards we didn’t manage to not abuse some of their features. At some point, maybe people were annoyed of them screaming. One of the rules that we set ourselves as a team was, ‘Okay, they should never, never scream once again in Kingdom Battle,’ because that was absolutely annoying us.”

Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope now allows the Rabbids to speak properly, and Soliani said “that we have been able to announce their psychological trait and their emotion and to bring it in the game in a way that in Kingdom Battle was not possible.” This was a “scary” decision, but once the team heard them, everyone “fell in love.”

Fans might be surprised to hear that it wasn’t an easy task to find the right voices for each Rabbid in every spoken language. It’s because of this that the heroes’ voices are somewhat spare. Beep-0, Jeanie, and Rabbid NPCs tend to carry the storytelling wherever possible.