Nintendo is typically pretty good at keeping secrets, but today it faceplanted pretty hard. As The Verge reports, the company went ahead and published a page on its website for Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope — a sequel to 2017’s Kingdom Battle — hours before it was likely to be announced at Ubisoft Forward.
The super spoiler of a page has since been taken down, with Nintendo now presenting a “Whoops” 404 page in its place. Sadly, there’s no putting this leak genie back in the bottle, as the news has already been reported on by a few other outlets.
As a fan first and foremost, this isn’t the way I wanted to find out that Kingdom Battle was getting a follow-up. With that said, I’m very happy it is! That sort of XCOM meets Super Mario experience is something I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy, but I did — greatly. It’s probably one of my favorite games on the Switch, particularly because it is so well-suited to being played on the go.
If Sparks of Hope can capture the same magic the first one had, and heck, add some versus multiplayer to the mix, I would be over the moon.
The since-removed page for Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope had the game targeting a 2022 release. It’s unclear when in 2022 the game might come out, though perhaps Ubisoft will narrow in on a more specific time period during today’s Forward event.
In any event, I’m happy to see that Mario + Rabbids is now a full-on franchise, and that we’ll once again see Mario characters teaming up with those pesky little Rabbids for a little turn-based strategy. We’ll probably be back later today to fill you in on more details about the game.
