The best Mario game on the Switch is not from Nintendo

A reader recommends what he thinks is the best Mario game for the Switch – with the added advantage of being extremely cheap.

It’s been seven years since Super Mario Odyssey, and with the impending release of Switch 2, you don’t need many rumors to suspect that a new 3D game will be a launch game, or at least coming soon. I like Odyssey, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best Mario-related game for the Switch.

There were plenty of others, most of them excellent, including Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Bowser’s Fury, Paper Mario: The Origami King, Super Mario Maker 2, two Mario Party games, and a bunch of others I’ve probably forgotten — plus Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, if you count that.

None of these are my favorite, though, and inspired by this week’s news of the director leaving Ubisoft, I’m here to tell you that Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is actually the best Mario game on Switch. Not only that, it’s also the best strategy game of the current generation.

Contrary to what many people assume, Nintendo does let other companies work with its characters from time to time. It’s always mostly smaller spin-offs and remasters, but Capcom famously made a few 2D Zelda games, and many smaller second-party studios have made Mario games before.

However, they are almost always Japanese, with one of the few exceptions: Luigi’s Mansion developer Next Level Games, which Nintendo bought shortly afterwards.

Therefore, giving Ubisoft the keys to the Mushroom Kingdom was a pretty big deal, which explains why the director in question is best known for his tears at E3 when he was mentioned by name by Shigeru Miyamoto.

The first game was called Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle and it was very good. Even if you hate Rabbids (which I think most people do), it was a very solid turn-based strategy game, similar to the combat in XCOM. It was always odd that Mario and co. used guns (though I’m not sure it was ever said what exactly they fired), but it was a fun, if somewhat unoriginal, strategy game.

All that aside, it was a very good game for anyone interested in the genre but put off by its complexity. For veterans, however, it was still quite challenging and not easy at all. The sequel is called Sparks Of Hope and that’s what I really want to talk about here.

Apparently it was a bit of a disappointment as people still bought the first one, but it’s better in every way, with a lot more variety and some amazingly clever boss fights. There’s also no grid system for movement, which gives a lot of freedom and almost makes you forget that the game is turn-based.

I would even go so far as to say that the combat is better than XCOM simply because it is so flexible. It’s kind of like the hero shooter version of the same concept, with all the different characters having very different abilities and weapons, as well as their own skill trees. It’s also a really hard game at normal level, which I appreciate.

On top of that, the graphics are fantastic and on par with the best Switch games. Without the Rabbids, you’d never guess it wasn’t a Nintendo game, and there’s no higher praise you can give a Mario game.

I don’t know if there will be more now that the director is gone, but the upside to it being a flop is that you can get it cheap at almost any store. I highly recommend you do that too, because not only is it a great game, but we may never see anything like it again.

By reader Grackle

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