The annual E3 video game conference is reliably punctuated with surprise video game announcements. However, this year, one announcement won’t come as a shock for fans: Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. The game, which combines Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. with the screaming pseudo-Minions of Ubisoft’s Raving Rabbids brand, has been long rumored across a variety of publications. The trend continues today with leaked key art, providing the first look at the game’s visual direction.
A cropped version of the image originally circulated across social media this morning, leading Comicbook.com’s WWG to post a full-size version this afternoon. It is just as weird and dense as you’d expect from a video game titled Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle.
Now, friends, let me be clear: this is a fine image. It does its job, communicating in no uncertain terms that, yes, Mario and the Rabbids are at it again — this time together. But I argue — and I am not the first to notice this — that, for this image, the parts are greater than the whole.
Here is the full key art:
And here it is again, now broken into its individual components:
This is me.