Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope originally kept Kingdom Battle’s grid-based gameplay

You might remember that Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle locked movement during battles to a grid akin to what you’d see in most strategy titles. That element was removed from Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope in exchange for more open movement. In the sequel, players can move Mario and the gang around within the confines of a border.

In an interview with EDGE magazine, producer Xavier Manzanares revealed that the original plan for Sparks of Hope was to use the grid-based movement from the first game, but this idea was abandoned later on in development.

“We still had the grid in 2018. The whole year we were doing presentations to Nintendo and Ubisoft and the grid system was still there, the cursor was still there. But in March or April 2019, we decided to break that system, [partly] because we felt that we had enough trust from Nintendo to control the characters directly in combat, that we could do stuff that maybe in the past would not have been possible. So that’s why we went there.”

[Xavier Manzanares, producer]