 Hey everyone, welcome to Nintendo Prime and today I get to do something that I haven't done in quite some time. I will be reviewing a game for Nintendo Switch and this is by far and away the largest review I have ever done at the channel because it's for a major exclusive game. We're talking about Mario Plus Rabbids, Sparks of Hope. Yes folks, I have access to this game for about a week and I want to give a big shout out to Ubisoft for providing me a copy. I still can't really get review copies from Nintendo themselves but hey, you know what? Baby steps everyone. I want to do something a little different with this review. A lot of reviews out there are heavily scripted and well thought out and well typed out and everything and I originally had a 16 page review. I had handwritten that I was going to read off to you guys. It was going to be about a 30 to 40 minute review. I decided to scrap it even though I put so much effort into it because it just didn't feel like Nintendo Prime. It didn't feel like the kind of content we do. So I'm going to focus instead on what I like and don't like about Sparks of Hope and we'll start by me just giving a general thought out opinion on this compared to the only game I think it's fair to compare it to, Mario Plus Rabbids, Kingdom Battle and the associated DLC, right? This is a sequel but it's a sequel that doesn't really care that the first game exists and I find the fact that it doesn't care that the first game exists to be a little bit unfortunate. Not because the changes to the gameplay are negative and we'll get into that but because I'm not sold that Sparks of Hope is a better game than Mario Plus Rabbids, Kingdom Battle. Now that doesn't mean it's still not a very good game and not one that I didn't thoroughly enjoy but it definitely is a game that I might prefer the original more. That being said, let's talk about Sparks of Hope itself. So first off, it took me just over 20 hours or so to get through the main quest in the game. There is much more gameplay to do that. I would say if you are 100%ing this game, I think it says I'm somewhere around 60-67% completion. You guys see it on screen right now. I do think that this is probably about a 30 hour game. Now it can get even longer. There are three difficulty settings. I did about half the game on difficult, half the game on average and then I did the very ending on easy. I went back and replayed the ending since then. A more difficult setting just because I wanted to make sure that I actually saw the ending of the game and before I talked about it because I can already talk about how difficult the fights are. I can talk about the challenge. I can talk about some of the unique aspects. The final fight in the game in particular is absolutely wild and every single character is involved in that battle and it is insane. Now I will say I'm going to try my best not to spoil a whole lot about the game. I don't want to give you a whole much of deep dive story details, especially since a large chunk of the story really happens at the end of the game, which is kind of crazy how you can find out little bits and pieces about each planet that you visit. There are five total planets plus a bonus, well I want to say a bonus world, but it's a the final area. But in dealing with those stories, you just learn a lot about the individual stories of the characters that live on those worlds. You don't really learn a whole lot about the overarching story because I mean the game begins where a cursor just shows up and Rex face and people note hey where the heck is Rosalina? That's weird that Rosalina isn't there and again I'm not going to give any story spoilers because yeah Rosalina plays a pretty big role in the story as I think almost everyone suspects after all this is a game that's crossing over essentially with Mario Galaxy. Now to just note on a few things that I do want to just kind of draw attention to I do find the comedy in the game to be quite entertaining. Now look if you're not into the rabid style slapstick comedy maybe this isn't for you but I honestly thought it was hilarious from the little things you can find in the world to paintings you could find telling the stories of characters and more than that just the general comedy of when you complete things in the game. As an example on every planet you are collecting this thing called dark mess that provides energy to your ship to make it to the next planet and every time you unlock a dark mess depending on who was the lead character in your group of three and remember you can select any three that you want. What's funny is whoever the lead character is is the one that gets to do a little animation celebration when the dark mess is obtained and I will say so far no surprise rabid peach has my favorite dark mess obtained animation but I can't really speak much more than that since most of that was in the latter parts of the game and I don't want to dive too deep into the latter half of the game but when talking about sparks of hope I think it's important to recognize what the game is it's a tactical RPG it got it did away with the grid system that we used to see in Fire Emblem or we saw in the original Mario plus Rabbids Kingdom Battle game and goes with the more open free running around sort of way and that changes combat in a few ways it makes it feel a bit more fluid they added some new abilities and new modes new characters obviously they announced Bowser's playable he's not playable from the beginning he's someone that you unlock later in the game and they obviously had these spark abilities which eventually you get to add two sparks to each character and they add different abilities electric attacks or AOE damage attacks area effect attacks they do a lot of different things fire electric water seem to be the big basis for all of these attacks but there's additional ones with extra defense extra moves extra things that happen like vamp dash where when you dash when you run up to a character and do a dash attack which is like a slide kick you end up getting some health back so there's a lot of interesting ways to build out your roster and yeah there's about nine playable characters and all of them have very different ways that they play some of them play very similar to how you felt in Kingdom Battle where obviously like rabid peach is a healer and peach herself is more of a defender type Mario's and all around Luigi's it really excels at the long-distance stuff but then you have obviously some new abilities with things like Bowser where he's you know blasting his cannon or he's got like the ability to summon minions which I think is a really really cool ability and one that I love so much that an abusing Bowser a lot in the second half of the game just because he was so fun to play with because he's so different from all of the other characters look sparks of hope is not the kind of game that's gonna be winning game of the year awards I could tell you that right now it it's probably won't even be the best game that came out on switch this year we have other masterpieces out there like Xenobreak Chronicles 3 with the upcoming Bayonetta 3 obviously we have Pokemon Pokemon legends Arceus earlier this year as well so I'm not sitting here gonna say that this game deserves to be up in the pantheon of the almighty games but overall I had a really damn good time with sparks of hope and I think that's the general takeaway I want you guys to have is that this game is a lot of fun and it's not meant to be taken super serious and I'm not really sure what I expected because they mentioned they had a much larger team making this game so I really wasn't sure what that meant I wouldn't say the game is any longer for it but I would say there's a lot of polish as an example one thing that happens in this game that then never happens in the prior one are puzzles there are puzzles everywhere there's essentially dungeons all throughout the game it's crazy and you're a lot of them are block pushing puzzles some of them are just figure out things or find hidden objects but all of it is crazy there's even these riddle aspects in each one of the dungeons and I'm calling them dungeons because that's basically what they are the guys it adds an element of Zelda and if you're gonna tell me you're gonna mix Zelda with Mario plus Rabbids that obviously makes me pretty excited and I really enjoyed these puzzle aspects obviously in the context of making a review I was trying to slam through things as fast as I could and one thing that I don't think a lot of reviewers talk about when they're doing that is you're not playing the game the way you normally would guys I would normally not drop 30 hours into a game in a single week like this at least the way that I did it maybe I would have did it naturally but I went to been progressing at the pace that I was as I was concerned about getting through the game to make the review this is something that I think a lot of reviewers that get early copies aren't open about they don't let you know that this isn't actually the normal way you play it and so it affects your experience with the game and in this case a game that I feel is meant to be slower paced a lot of these puzzles a lot of these riddles a lot of 100% in the game and getting all the collectibles all of this is meant to be something that takes time that you enjoy at a leisurely pace and as I'm sit there trying to slam it it obviously creates a little bit of frustration where you're working against the game's mechanic to bum rush and and just get through everything as fast as possible and get enough experience in different aspects that it ends up painting a weird thought process of man that was kind of tedious man that was kind of annoying when in general when you slow it down which I have done today playing a little bit now that I've got all I needed done for the review I've noticed that I'm actually enjoying those aspects more now that I'm stepping away from that bubble of I need to slam through the game I need to slam through the game I need to slam through the game now that I'm stepping away from that I'm actually finding these aspects much more enjoyable than I did in my original written review so overall the big takeaways are the sparks of hope is really damn good it may or may not be better than the original game that's going to come down to a lot of personal preferences and taste it has a lot of polish has a lot of Zelda like puzzles that are really exciting each planet is utterly fantastic in fact tonight you know if you guys are watching this review the day it was published on October 17 we actually had a live stream at 8 p.m. central that is going to deal with a lot of aspects we're going to go through a giant Q&A you guys can ask any questions you want about this game I'm allowed to answer pretty much anything what I can't do is show you anything beyond world 3 we're still under an NDA so even in this review I couldn't show anything beyond world 3 that's why I had to be not careful about talking about the second half of the game besides spoilers but more so worried about showing aspects of it but I will be able to show you things from the first three planets tonight so you know we can go through some of the examples we're talking about here doing this review of some of the side quests and the Zelda stuff a lot of the story stuff I've already done so the good news for you guys is it's not going to really be a spoiler stream because all the story stuff pretty much already happened in these three worlds because I'm not going to start a new file for you guys I feel like there's a bit of a fluff at the beginning a bit of a slow start but it's a needed slow start as it slowly introduces how to play this game to new players and games have to do that right you have to consider new player bases but yeah I'm look the payoff for the story I will say is incredible expected in some regards but also surprising I again I can't spoil much because I don't want to ruin the game and ruin the experience or those of you that are going to play but that final showdown with cursa and look we know it's cursa because curse has been in all the trailers my oh my oh my it might be my favorite battle in Mario plus Rapids ever between either of the games and that's saying something since I heavily enjoyed the musical battle in the first Mario plus Rapids Kingdom battle but to have something top that and top that in the way that this battle does it is utterly incredible and I highly suggest when you're doing this battle please don't skimp out and do it on easy mode I would say play it on the difficult setting or average if you're having a problem with it look this game is intended to be played on the average difficulty and you can tell because there were even some battles I struggled here in average but when you're playing on difficult look guys it's a strategy game and it's going to require the right team in every battle it's going to require the right strategy in every battle and expect to fail a lot when you're playing on the difficult setting because while you might plow through the first couple of worlds once you get to world 3 4 and 5 things get so much more difficult that you can't just pick your favorite party members and go you're actually gonna have to pay attention to what sparks you have and to pay attention what level your sparks are because you can level them up by feeding them little star bits that were from Mario Galaxy dude this is this is a lot of fun and it is something that I'm going to be continuing to play at least for a little while here as I kind of want 100% this game and I wanted to do 100% for the review but it became pretty obvious early on plowing through something for a review wasn't gonna get me to the 100% status I wanted but my opinion isn't gonna change whether I 100% it or not because I get it I get what this game is I get how enjoyable it is as for any negative aspects to it look it's not gonna be a game for everyone I don't really have anything in particular negative to say there is one weird thing and I harp on this a lot and I'm probably the only one who cares the rabbits I have voice acting in this game which is very strange to me since the rabbits don't talk in any other medium and the voice acting isn't even full voice acting is partial voice acting and partial voice acting as you guys will know has always bothered me I don't like when partial voice acting is a thing but what are you gonna do I also think that the voice acting despite it feeling weird because the rabbits don't talk in any other medium actually works I like the voice acting I will say there are two fully voiced characters that being Bipo your little robot commanding and Gini which is a robot companion that Bipo created that's supposed to be an AI for your ship and they have a lot of banter throughout that's utterly hilarious as they start to form human emotions and do these weird things it it's honestly very clever and whoever wrote the script and did the voice acting for those characters did an utterly fantastic job there's some of the more entertaining aspects of the game just listening to their banter it's it's really wild anyways guys you know I'm not gonna give this a rating I'm just gonna say should you buy this game if you enjoyed the first one absolutely if you thought the first one looked cool but you missed out on it and you think this one looks cool as well absolutely if you're not in the strategy RPGs then yeah probably not for you regardless anyways folks I am Nathaniel Ruffalo this is my review of sparks of hope and I'll catch you guys in the next video