

Children playing to get a general gist of the tale would likely understand the key points, and it’s an interesting theme to play around with. It doesn’t do an entirely terrible job of doing so either, even if some of the bigger deviations feel a little un-necessary. The single player portion attempts to tell the story to the best of its ability, tying together nicely-illustrated cut-scenes and text explanations of the general plot with short mini-games. Party of Legends, however, takes the central characters and plonks them into a Mario Party-esque party pack with a short single-player story and “50” minigames, each tentatively linked to the trials of Sun Wukong and his friends.

The novel itself has inspired a huge number of things over the years, with two notable examples being the character of Goku from Dragonball and the Pokémon Infernape. The main character Sun Wukong (the supernatural Monkey King,) fights various magical creatures and undertakes a number of trials set before him by Buddha throughout the story, before finally ascending to Buddhahood himself.

The novel details the journey of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to the west, but fictionalises it by adding various elements of Chinese folk religion, Taoism, mythology and Buddhist theology. In Party of Legends, the Rabbids travel through time and space and find themselves in the world of the legendary Chinese novel (and arguably the most popular work of East-Asian literary fiction,) Journey to the West.

Originally, if you wanted to take a look at this title you needed a Chinese Tencent Nintendo Switch – but no longer! The big question however is if it deserved to cross the pond or if it would have been better for only one country to have to endure it. Regardless, the Rabbids keep popping back up in different forms, and last year Rabbids: Party of Legends released exclusively in China. Personally, I’ve always found them to be more endearing than annoying – even if I generally prefer the series they originated from – Rayman. Some compare them to Minions, with their obnoxious voices and endless energy whilst others praise the overall character and joy inherent to the creatures. Very few fictional creatures divide opinion quite like the Rabbids.
