Rabbids: Party of Legends (Xbox One)
Journey to the West has had elements appear in so much Japanese media it can be easy to forget the original novel is Chinese in origin. When French company Ubisoft was looking to make inroads into the Chinese gaming market though, it’s not too surprising they’d be drawn to a Chinese tale that has some cross-cultural appeal, but their choice of game utilizing the familiar characters and situations of the classic fantasy adventure is a bit stranger. The Rabbids are fairly flexible mascots, the goofy rabbit-shaped miscreants are happy to do most anything as long as it’s fun and loose, but making a minigame collection so strongly tied to a single piece of classic literature is definitely a different direction than broad time travel and world tour shenanigans. That may be why it was at first exclusively released in China, but three years after it’s Chinese debut, Rabbids: Party of Legends became available worldwide without a single change to its very specific theming.
A party game for four players allowing any mix of humans and computer controlled opponents, Rabbids: Party of Legends opens with the Rabbids learning the setup for Journey to the West along with the viewer. Certain aspects of the tale are simplified and condensed, but generally the quest the monk Tripitaka undertakes in search of ancient scriptures is still in tact, at least until the Rabbids intervene. The heroes of the classic tale receive an unexpected interruption when the Rabbids utilize their time-traveling washing machine and slam right down in heaven in front of the Enlightened One and scatter the collected scriptures back across the land. As punishment, the Rabbids’ washing machine is trapped in a massive bell that won’t move until the little rapscallions head down from heaven and retrieve every lost book, the minigames you play rewarding you with books based on your performance. Many of the games will have some connection to characters and situations from Journey to the West such as trying to escape the Red Boy and Bone Queen or gradually meeting Tripitaka’s traveling companions like Pigsy and the Monkey King, although how things are adapted can feel very strange. The White Dragon, a seemingly rich source for some sort of amusing game, is instead brushed over in a single paragraph between the Adventure mode’s levels, but you will get to play a newly invented campfire scene where the Rabbids just decide to dance. There are plenty of thematic and silly costumes for your Rabbids to wear that tie into the tale and what plot there is mostly seems to exist to introduce something that the silliness of the Rabbids then twists away into something absurd. It hardly feels like you’re meant to be paying too closely to the narrative, the focus more on delighting in the strange turns things take.
This is perhaps best expressed in a few moments that do hinge on the tale being told but in a kooky way. Rabbids: Party of Legends splits its adventure into 4 acts where you earn sacred books by winning minigames, although you can still earn a few at times by getting second or third place. Beyond an end-of-act minigame worth double though, the other source for a quick shift in fortune are a few sections where the Rabbids all need to make a choice. An unusual situation like being asked to marry a strange woman, infiltrate a cabin, or convince the Monkey King to aid you arise and you’ll be presented with three wheels aligned with the choices. Once you’ve made your choice, you spin the wheel, each one having different layouts. You can try a wheel that can pay out high or take away a lot of books if you need to make up ground quickly or you can play it safe with a choice where the wheel will barely impact your book total, but perhaps the best part of these segments is just hearing how the wheel spin impacted the little event. In one scene your ally Pigsy is standing next to an identical imposter, and with one of the responses being to also impersonate Pigsy, it’s entertaining to learn the ways it could work or fail based on where the wheel lands.
Of course, much more of your time will be spent playing the quick minigames, almost 50 on offer although oddly enough not all are available in Party Mode from the get-go. Adventure mode will allow you to play most of them one after the other, but Party Mode keeps a considerable amount locked, only continued play eventually unlocking them and even then, it could take many multiplayer sessions or runs through the Adventure to finally be able to select them all. Rabbids: Party of Legends already features a wide range of unlockable costumes for the Rabbids so the fairly slow process to earn every minigame seems more likely to discourage repeat multiplayer sessions than motivate them, but before any enforced repetition gets in the way, Rabbids: Party of Legends does have some minigame ideas that are definitely worth experiencing.
Minigames can be either four player free-for-alls or involve two teams of two competing for points, the game allowing you to have pre-set teams or just get thrown together into one when the team games arise. One team game, Ain’t Scared of Spicy Food, shows off where team games can feel pretty distinct, one teammate needing to quickly sort chili peppers and rocks to hurl the food to their ally and the rocks at their foe while the teammate down on the ground is trying to dodge danger and catch the chilis for their half of the point total. Unfortunately, you also have games like The Horse Master, a game where you need to grab hay and feed it to a Rabbid in a horse costume, but the arena is full of holes and it’s far too easy to tackle others into the holes, meaning it’s incredibly easy for one team to get an early lead and bully the opposition so they get no points. Most minigames are pretty decent and easy to instantly understand, Sneaking Up On Lady Iron Fan a fairly simple adaptation of the schoolyard game Red Light Green Light for example, but fairly simple adaptations are also a repeating theme across the minigames on offer.
Multiple games are based on Simon, where you see a pattern, need to repeat it back, and then a new action is added and you must repeat the extended sequence, the player who performs best wins. Multiple dance games are featured, the difference between them usually just being the song and a bit more inputs required to dance along. The dance game is at least made a touch more involved by the player needing to press directions with both sticks to pull them off, but the dances can feel like padding since if you can do well at one, you’ll likely breeze through them all. A few games are games of chicken where you want to be the last player to press a button before a timer runs out to earn more points, and others involve a character indicating which direction to press with some complication like one announcer being a liar whose instructions you must do the opposite of. Beyond the repeated dance games, there is at least usually one element that’s been changed enough that it’s not pure repetition, one game type has you carrying teetering bowls of peaches for example but one is a team game where you’re crossing a central bridge and bumping into each other while trying to reach their designated goal while the other has every Rabbid competing on their own and going for the same goal. This is definitely one reason why making you unlock more minigames feels like a limitation that only harms the experience, but thankfully while the number of minigames is definitely stretched through shared concepts, there are still a few that shine.
Sneak Your Way Into the Underworld has you needing to rapidly draw a line that matches the holes you’re falling towards, the increasing speed and complexity testing your reactiveness and performance under pressure. Pulling The “Gold Pillar” is about finding a rhythm as you lift the enormous mythical weapon out of the ground, players trying to be swift to come out on top but needing the right pacing and amount of force to do so. Some minigames definitely take inspiration from the likes of Mario Party and even the minigames from Pokémon Stadium, but trying to count the Rabbids and not the rabbits is still an entertaining challenge, especially since most every minigame on offer will have Rabbids who appear to distract you or interfere. The book shooting gallery games are very basic, but having a Rabbid pop up and wipe a smudge off the screen is the kind of kooky disruption that prevents things from being too straightforward each time you replay a game. Hatched From Stone Eggs even shows where it can improve on its inspiration, Mario Party’s Bumper Balls often leading to stalemates but Hatched From Stone Eggs makes it far more likely you’ll bounce your foes out of its arena, and if you don’t the arena starts crumbling to give you less safe room to avoid each other. This does make games like The Venomous Escape odd though, that minigame having two players infected and trying to pass their poison around but the arena is just a plain square and there’s not much to do besides run around. At times Rabbids: Party of Legends can make a seemingly mundane premise surprisingly exciting, Putting the Pieces Together being a little jigsaw challenge but you can run around and smack players to take their pieces while trying to find where they even fit.
Some minigames definitely work better in the broader competition, Out Of The Lion’s Mouth just about trying to press one of four buttons the other’s do not to avoid being bitten, but it gives a way to earn books to players who might not excel at games that reward aggression or quick reflexes. In Party Mode you can even pick the minigames you’ll tackle if you want to prune out the repeats or less loved ones, and even if you don’t have a group of human players to join in, the AI can be surprisingly competent even on the normal setting. For example, in the chicken games where it’s about being the last one to press the button, they can sometimes hang on until the tiniest fraction of a second is left and they’ll rarely come up short in a team game when it comes to performing their duties. Sometimes they can be incredibly dense when they’re only working to earn themselves points, but Rabbids: Party of Legends seems to understand that you shouldn’t need to set the computer players to hard for them to have a hope of winning.
THE VERDICT: Rabbids: Party of Legends definitely has some standout minigames that are enjoyable to return to and flexible in their outcomes, but there are also quite a few that have their concepts recycled or are surprisingly basic in their construction. While no game is complicated, the better ones utilize odd disruptions better or know how to test the players in a way that can’t be easily overcome once you understand them. Unfortunately, there are more weak and mediocre ones in the collection of minigames on offer, and while the Journey to the West theming and juvenile humor do their part in making things appealing, the repetition in ideas ends up draining away some of that fun and leaving the overall journey feeling a bit uninspired.
And so, I give Rabbids: Party of Legends for Xbox One…
An OKAY rating. A few quick plays of Party Mode might be a blast, especially if the luck of the draw gives you some of the more entertaining games first, but Rabbids: Party of Legends should have been more discerning in which games it included, even if that meant potentially trimming down their total number. Different songs for a dance game that barely gets tougher between iterations feels more like a setting than the most abundant type of game on offer, and more thought should have been put into diversifying any games that are built from the same base if such recycling was deemed necessary. Playing Simon but where you press buttons instead of directions won’t fool anyone into thinking this game has more on offer, and it’s a bit strange that the games Rabbids: Party of Legends borrows from other sources seem to have the right amount of thought into averting boring but effective strategies or stalemates. The disruptions from other Rabbids messing around really feel like they could have benefited more games too. A distracting Rabbid goofing around in the background could throw off a player’s rhythm in the dances or make them miss instructions in the Simon games, but the game seems reticent to whip them out when they’d be most effective. The minigames didn’t need to be complicated to be entertaining, but many feel like they need more complications to stand out or break out of ruts that the unlocking process will practically force on you if you want to see some of the Party Mode exclusive games.
Very few stinkers like The Horse Master found their way into the selection of minigames, but you’re much more likely to find decent retreads of familiar ideas here than novel concepts that will make Rabbids: Party of Legends your game of choice. Some of the minigames featured are even recycled from previous Rabbids games, which makes some of the repetition even more unusual since again it feels like they could have tried to iterate on their designs in more interesting ways. Perhaps because Rabbids: Party of Legends was originally meant for only a Chinese audience that wouldn’t have much experience with the party games that inspired it, Ubisoft felt they could retread such ground, but the problem is more the retreads found here. Almost all of the appeal of the Rabbids is in tact, the little chaotic creatures silly and strange and approaching Journey to the West with some wonderful weirdness, but the actual party game is not quite as lively as it should be considering this game was made to help a new market fall in love with the Rabbids.