A continuing thread that has annoyed many gamers and myself is when good games get released after the dev team put everything they have into them, and they sell well, but the publishers or higher-ups put such terrible expectations on them that they are considered “disappointments,” even though they’re far from that. There have been many examples of this over the years, and one that has continually stuck in Nintendo fans’ craws is Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope. This was the second entry in the unique Nintendo/Ubisoft collaboration that was headed up by Davide Soliani.
You’ll remember him from the E3 2017 presentation when the first entry, Kingdom Battle, was debuted, and he was spotted crying on camera because he loved the game he made so much. Soliani has moved on from Ubisoft and has come together with some of his former teammates to make a new studio. However, in a chat with VGC, he did discuss what it meant to hear that Ubisoft considered Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope a “disappointment” despite all they put into it:
“With the first game, nobody was really trying to stop me. Because nobody was expecting anything from Kingdom Battle, I had a lot of freedom. But because the first one was a big success, Sparks of Hope was way harder to develop than Kingdom Battle. There was too much overthinking about it all around me. It was also critically well received. I cannot share the sales number, but it’s still growing, it’s still selling. The message that we received about how the game was faring was a bit hurtful for the morale of the team. Because we just finished working for three and a half years and were super committed to creating a very good game. So, of course, it was not the kind of message that we wanted to receive back in those days.”
As my review will happily point out, they DID make a good game, a great one, even! Soliani even noted that he loved working with Nintendo and that if they called his new team to work on something, they’d answer. Let’s hope that happens so he can continue making titles he loves.
