Many gamers have commented on how Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle reminds them of XCOM, a sci-fi strategy turn based game. But for the team at Ubisoft, it was Advance Wars and Fire Emblem that triggered the spark.

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle producer Xavier Manzanares said inspirations came from all sorts of places, and he pinpointed two Nintendo strategy games as starting points for Mario + Rabbids.

“We have a lot of inspirations, we knew about Advance Wars—about Fire Emblem. So this crossover with Rabbids and Mario was pushing the limits of what we could do [with SRPGs]. You know, using weapons, and a lot of the thing syou saw today with super attacks… the discussion we had with Nintendo was that this is only something you could have done with Rabbids. Because you’re breaking the rules of what we’re potentially able to do with Mario.”

Besides inspirations, Xavier revealed Rabbid Peach was the first character they included inside the game, and shared how they flexed out her persona and character.

“Rabbid Peach was one of the very first characters we had in the game, but we wanted to proved it was more than costume. If it was just a costume it would just be visual, it would not be that interesting and it was not interesting for us. So we wanted to show Rabbid Peach as a hero, as an archetype, as a character with a strong persona.”

Nintendo even thought Rabbid Peach was really hilarious.

“We had some strong laughter so we thought, “Hey! This is the beginning of the concept so it should work.”‘