Rabbid Peach is the game character of the century. One of Ubisoft's madcap, bug-eyed mascots dressed in Princess Peach cosplay, she fuses the anarchic irreverence of the former with the queenly preening of the latter in a squat, sassy bundle of diva delight. Beat a boss and she frantically fires off selfies, attempting to catch its demise in the background. Watch her animations closely: the defiant tweaks of her wig, or the way she doesn't crouch against cover but lounges, checking her phone or skewering her foes with nonchalant side-eye. She doesn't speak a word of dialogue, but reminds me strongly of that other heroically fatuous It Girl of our time, Adventure Time's Lumpy Space Princess. She's a creature of satire, a meta-commentary on the self-referential fandom of the ridiculous game she stars in - but also an authentically hilarious badass.
Not everything in the bizarre crossover that is Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle makes such a harmonious synthesis of its two clashing franchises. In fact, almost nothing does. (Although I do have a lot of time for the way Rabbid Mario produces a mandolin and pulls off a quick trill on the victory screen - which, incidentally, made me wonder: is this the first Mario game to actually be made in Italy?) Thematically, Mario + Rabbids is a hodgepodge and a bit of a mess, but it gleefully owns up to this, and the scattershot nonsense of the raving Rabbids excuses a lot. There's quite a lot that needs excusing, such as an erratic script that veers between funny, corny and oddly literate, a needless backstory, and a cheap-looking placeholder interface that is the clearest sign that you are playing a Ubisoft game and not a Nintendo one.
Then there's the even more dissonant clash of the cute characters with the gameplay, because this is, believe it or not, a turn-based tactical combat game in the style of XCOM. It has cover and half-cover, line of sight, overwatch, chance to hit, crits and supers, skill trees, and mathematical budgets of movement and range to be spent across its grid layouts. And it has guns, lots of them. Fine, they look like chunky Nerf guns and shoot energy bolts that cause defeated heroes to get knocked out and enemies to harmlessly dissolve, but they are still guns. Luigi is a sniper. Peach, the original one, rocks an explosive shotgun. Did I mention that Luigi is a sniper?
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