This is a strange game.
A very strange game.
Rabbids Go Home is a game from the Ubisoft Montpiller studio, home of game design guru Michel Ancel. This game features the Rabbids of Rayman Raving Rabbids fame — specifically, more fame than Rayman — but with Ubisoft having heard the complaints over the Rabbids' spotlight stealing, this isn't a Rayman game anymore; Rayman himself is completely absent. It forgoes the semblance of Rayman's weird, dreamlike homeland and instead takes place in something resembling the "real" world (for certain values of "real").
The Rabbids live in a junkyard, where they spend their days "BWAAAAAAH!"-ing and, um, playing in a brass band. But they get it into their heads one day to "go home!" And where is their home? Well, since they're patently ridiculous, it must be the moon! (Which has some interesting implications from a mythological standpoint, but that could be accidental.) But the Rabbids aren't generally so good at flying spaceships. So, instead, they decide to reach the moon by... building a giant pile of stuff. Which will then allow them to jump off and land on the moon. It makes sense to them, at least. But where will they get all this stuff? Well, the humans sure have a lot of stuff. And their city is right nearby!
The game plays out like a...hmm. Well, that's actually a good question. Most publications viewed the game as some combination of a Platformer, a Racing Game, and an Adventure Game, so we'll go with that too. Oh, and if it can be considered a genre, Katamari Damacy. You control two Rabbids in a shopping cart. You have to collect stuff. And break things. And collect dogs. And literally scare the pants off humans. And collect their pants. And infiltrate hospitals to collect patients. And collect stuff. ...Did we mention this game was weird?
The DS version is vastly different as it plays out like a puzzle game where you have to place parts like slopes, spring-loaded boxing gloves, bulls and teleporting washing machines to guide an uncontrollable shopping cart with a Rabbid inside around a course to collect everything and land in a toilet. You then have to build the tower by shooting either toilet rolls or football helmets into containers to fill them. The game also changes the reason why the Rabbids want to go to the moon: They found out that they can tickle themselves with electricity thanks to a broken street lamp. Several hours later, they break every street lamp in the area and can't tickle themselves anymore. One Rabbid looks up at the moon and thinks that it's a giant lamp that provides endless electricity, so they come up with their giant pile plan.
This game contains examples of:
- A Winner Is You: So, you go through the trouble of collecting every single thing to collect in the game, including all the stuff in the different overworlds that you can miss if you don’t know how the overworld works, and from all the brutal levels, especially those with very few Sousaphone Rabbids, bringing the total height of the pile to 31,750ft, and what happens? The new star that appeared on the screen starts spinning. That's it.
- Abnormal Ammo: In addition to the two Rabbids in the shopping cart, there's also a third Rabbid, whose main function is to get launched out of the Wiimote and at both obstacles and breakable grates.
- Amusing Injuries: Shaking the Rabbids up "In Ze Wii Remote". Eventually their facial features and head will start to become deformed. They always snap right back to their previous state after letting you stare at their makeover for a few seconds.
- And There Was Much Rejoicing: Upon finally blasting the Rabbids into space, the humans celebrate in the dump.
- Anti-Villain: The Humans and the Verminators. They are simply reacting to all the mayhem the Rabbids are causing and want to protect their stuff and their city.
- Asian Speekee Engrish: One of the adult male NPCs you can encounter talks like this, saying things like "Me gonna go now!" and reciting Confucius quotes, despite this being a Wii game that came out in 2009.
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: The Rabbids, in the ending... As well a cow, an octopus and a pacient too, that manage to be launched with the rest of the stuff to space.
- Big Brother Is Watching: "Smile and be happy! You're on camera. We're watching over you."
- Blackout Basement: The mission "Atomic Rabbid Blast."
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Moreso than usual for an interactive video game. In this game, you supposedly actually have a Rabbid inside the Wii remote with which you can interact. At certain places in the game, you can also "fire" this Rabbid from the remote in order to destroy hazards, open secret areas, and generally annoy people.
- Butt-Monkey: Everybody is subject to abuse here. The Rabbids are too stupid to care, but the humans... not so much. Some honourable mentions include:
- The Funny Background Event characters one can trigger by yelling, to the point of Black Comedy, with people typically falling from scaffolds and down elevator shafts.
- Characters who appear more than once, such as Barney and the Corporate boss, who gets stolen, or have their money stolen respectively.
- The Intercom lady, who spends most of the game unseen, but announcing the rules and reminders of the human world, is also stolen like Barney, but during a level where the Rabbids infiltrate the Verminator factory, she acknowledges the Rabbids and gets particularly annoyed that they are ignoring her announcements.
- Cassandra Truth: The intercom guy from 'Atomic Rabbid Blast' tries to convince his coworker Bob that two deformed rabbits in a shopping cart are inside the reactor. Predictably, Bob tries to test him for radiation poisoning.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Each Verminator variant is equipped with uniquely-coloured hazmat suits which differentiate their abilities; Vermijumpers wear green, Vermipenguins wear beige and lack a gasmask, Vermitorches wear blue and Vermitops wear black. Vermitanks also wear green that is mostly obscured by their grey, spiked armour, while the proto-Verminator wears a yellow suit with the head fully exposed.
- Comedic Sociopathy: BWAAAAAAAAH!
- Even the automated voice can fall under this. On the construction site, she seems to be encouraging workers to protect their protective equipment over their own lives.
- Cosmetic Award: When you beat the game, the Pile of Stuff screen has a grey star at the top and a total that shows how many items are in the entire game. Getting 100% Completion turns that star gold and makes it spin. That's it.
- Crapsack World: Subtly invoked. Although the city actually is clean and bright, the fact regular automated announcements remind people that they are being watched and "if in doubt, don't" is the order of the day, suggests the Rabbids' universe isn't the best place to live.
- Critical Annoyance: When you're down to one lightbulb, the icon flashes and you hear a not-so-annoying tone every two seconds, which fades away in about a minute.
- Did I Mention It's Christmas?: Late November/early December, from the looks of the security cam dates.
- There is even a Christmas level where the Rabbids steal a Christmas Tree from an office building.
- The automated voice in the "City" junction level clearly indicates that it's in late November.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: After gathering a lot of stuff throughout the game, the Rabbids finally make it to the moon courtesy of the humans blasting them there.
- The Elevator from Ipanema: 9 times out of 10 when you enter an elevator, the song playing will be "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M..
- Elvis Impersonator: One of the last levels in the game, "Till Rabbids Do Us Cart", features a wedding in a Vegas-esque wedding chapel, complete with a giant statue of Elvis Presley.
- Epic Fail: Referenced by name in one of the Rabbids' attempts to go to the moon in an ad: the propeller drills one down instead of into the air.
- It's mentioned again in an ad where a catapult slams the Rabbid in it into the ground, then lashes backwards and knocks one off in the other direction.
- Fastball Special: One of the attacks that can be done in this game is shooting the Rabbid in your Wii Remote like a Rabbid cannonball at objects and humans.
- Gas Mask Mooks: The Verminators wear gas masks and hazmat suits. This isn't because Rabbids are toxic, but because the Verminators (like most humans in the game by the looks of it) are germaphobic and obsessive-compulsive. Even some of the civilians wear gas masks after a while.
- Genre-Busting: Is it a platformer, a racing game, an adventure game, or a collectathon? Yes.
- Getting Crap Past the Radar: was rated 7 at launch, and swiftly withdrawn to be rated 12
due to "potentially offensive content". - Grievous Harm with a Body: One of your weapons is a Rabbid that you fire from your Wii Remote.
- Guide Dang It!: The overworld goes through several phases the further into the game you get, with the stuff changing alongside it. Collecting every single one in all the hubworlds is required to get 100%, something the game never hints at. And you can't try over and over in one phase to make up for all the stuff you missed, once you've collected something, it's only counted for that one time.
- Hair-Raising Hare: The Rabbids are rabbit-like villains.
- Heavily Armored Mook: The Vermitank wears a suit of armour that renders them immune to the Rabbids' Super-Scream, beyond a very noticeable red tank on their back.
- I Have a Family: Several of the humans plead this when the Rabbids start chasing them.
- Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: The verminators. They're still the cowardly, neurotic humans they always were. Best shown in their vignette short, where one is tricked into freaking out and entraps himself in his dressing room with his own inflatable barricades.
- Inexplicably Identical Individuals:
- All the Santa Joes of the world. Or maybe it's just one guy showing up in a ton of different areas, and he just has a lot of different Santa suits. Hard to say.
- There is also only a limited number of NPC models, so it's not uncommon to see several of the same types in one area.
- Jive Turkey: The "teenager" type NPC kids are this, as are the ladies with afros.
- Karma Houdini: For all the perverted and destructive things the Rabbids have done they never ever get their comeuppance and even get what they were aiming for at the end.
- Letting the Air out of the Band: Throughout levels, you can find speakers that you can shoot with the Cannonball Rabbid. As soon as they break, the music will cut off until you pick up the pieces, at which point it will be replaced (temporarily) with the Rabbid's usual Balkan brass tunes.
- Looped Lyrics: The licensed music featured in the game appears to be edited in this fashion, as the same lyrics of songs like "Take Me Home, Country Roads" and "Leaving on a Jet Plane" - primarily the choruses - appear to always be playing, and the songs themselves never seen to actually end, as noticed if one is able to hang around an area (such as the city base levels) long enough without destroying a loudspeaker or moving on.
- Made of Iron: The Rabbids can endure incredible amounts of punishment, most likely because they're too crazed and stupid to know what actual pain is.
- Mall Santa: Each level has a Santa running around (Santa Joe, to be exact), who takes quite a few hits before he loses all his clothes and items which you can take. He will also shout things like that he will put you on the naughty list if you keep harassing him.
- Missing Secret: There is only one Rabbid figurine that isn't unlocked via code. How it's unlocked remains a mystery. Getting 100% Completion doesn't even unlock it. Speaking of, getting 100% Completion only makes the tier stars on the stage select spin.
- Mooks, but no Bosses: Save for the Proto-Verminator, most of the majority of the game you fight agaisnt the Verminator and the dogs that abound the levels, but there isn't any great threat to hinder your progress. At the last level "King of the Pile", rather than challenging a boss before arriving at the top, you get into a fight at the base of the pile agaisnt various Verminators and dogs on a 3-phase arena.
- Naked People Are Funny: They never get entirely naked, since this is a family game, but you can strip most humans down to little more than their undies.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: After the last group of verminators is defeated, they bombard the giant Stuff Pile with tons of explosives. However, this launches the Rabbids to the moon (their intended goal), while the stuff that the humans want back rain from the sky and are either destroyed or nearly injure them.
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Nintendo Hard: Trying to 100% this game. Good luck. Hope you enjoy restarting levels when you get a bunch of trash, then die before you get to the tuba rabbid, or miss something that you can't backtrack to. Especially during the last levels. - Not So Stoic: Some humans (such as female office workers in swivel chairs) will actually take some delight in the Rabbids' antics, laughing and asking to be spun again.
- The Nudifier: You can strip the humans of their clothes to use as items for the pile. When you defeat a Verminator, their suits begin to fill with air until they explode.
- Painting the Medium: When you design a Rabbid, they get "sucked into your Wii Remote," which includes a depiction of the inside of a Wii Remote. Which reacts to the real-life buttons pressesnote and waggling. Shake it around and watch the Rabbid in it react!
- Fridge Logic: There's a wire (inside the Wii remote) that you can interact with on the screen. (Using the Wii remote.) WHAT.
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- Product Placement: All over the place you can find Respect the Pouch billboards. Capri-Sun is even an object you can take, and you can even dress up your Rabbids in two Capri-Sun-themed outfits! To top it all off, there's a cutscene that plays out exactly like a Respect the Pouch commercial!
- Rewarding Vandalism: Breaking things often yields items to collect. Breaking muzak speakers specifically rewards you with five items and a catchy, chaotic polka song for a few seconds.
- Serial Escalation: Humanity's response to the Rabbids' antics gets more and more over the top the further you progress in the game. It begins with the creation of the "Verminators" and their attempts to exterminate the Rabbids. By the end of the game, barbed wire can be found all around cities, civilians wear gas masks everywhere they go, and they seem perfectly willing to shoot missiles at the Rabbids in a public area to get rid of them. Meanwhile, the Rabbids go from stealing cars, to planes, to quarantined patients.
- Shout-Out:
- The level that takes place in an atomic testing facility has a picture of Gordon Freeman on the wall and a prominently placed crowbar (Freeman's weapon of choice) to pick up.
- In the same vein, the dojo located at the beginning of "High Stakes Steak" contains a picture of Chuck Norris on the wall.
- Soundtrack Dissonance:
- The humans are, both literally and figuratively, squares. When the humans are still "in control" of an area, so to speak, you hear soothing music that is being piped in over their speakers (almost exclusively of the late-60s folk/early-70 country-folk persuasion), while the Rabbids are causing mayhem. When the Rabbids really take over, frantic Balkan brass music takes over, and becomes more fitting.
- The track for the last level, "King of the Pile!", is even more dissonant. It starts out with nothing but silence in the junkyard, then goes into the typical Verminator songs for a fight, then afterwards goes into a very melancholy Spanish song that plays all throughout the level as the silliness is still there in tone... But then it goes back to the Balkan brass at the very end.
- Star-Crossed Lovers: Betty the nurse and Barney, her terminally ill patient. They eventually get married in Vegas, just before the Rabbids steal him from her....again.
- Star Scraper: The Rabbids want to build a tower of stuff that will let them reach the moon.
- Super Prototype: One of the first real enemies in the game is just a guy in a padded suit who decided to take a stand. This eventually evolved into the Verminators, who are only slightly more effective.
- Super-Scream: The Rabbids can yell at humans and scare them out of their clothes (which can then be collected). This is also the Rabbids' main method of attack and defence against Verminators.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Putting aside the ridiculous concept of the game as a whole, with deranged rabbit creatures stealing as much as they can to build a pile large enough to get to the moon, this ultimately isn't enough to get to the moon on its own. Discounting the fact that the moon here appears large enough to seem close, it's still hundreds of thousands of kilometres away that the Rabbids' efforts were all in vain. They did, however, get their pile blown up with enough force to send them rocketing to the moon.
- Surprise Santa Encounter: One of the recurring humans is a guy in a Santa suit. He drops hamburgers when you scare him. No, we don't get it either. He also eventually drops his clothes but unlike most NPCs he requires several "hits" for that. So-called "Santa Joe" can be found somewhere on most standard "walk around" (as opposed to, say, ride-an-inner-tube) levels.
- "Hey, HEY my name is JOE. I kid you not!"
- It turns out there are tons of them and they're all named Joe.
- Take That!: The whole game is one to the "Glorious 30", a French economic boom from 1945-1975 marked by an explosion in mass consumption. All depicted humans are very indulgent and encouraged to buy and value things to ridiculous extremes, which is challenged by the Rabbids' opposite extremes to have unbridled fun as they take things to meet their goals.
- Too Kinky to Torture: Replace "Kinky" with "Dumb," and there are the Rabbids for you. You can smack them silly, blow up their facial features, feed them exploding candy, and repeatedly electrocute them, and they just laugh and grin like maniacs.
- Toy Time: The early "Mall" level has a "toy store" area with this theme.
- Truck Driver's Gear Change: The Balkan brass cover of "Bubamara" moves the key signature from C minor to D minor once the music starts getting faster.
- Unexpectedly Protective Hat: About halfway through the game, humans and dogs will eventually come equipped with large, yellow soundproof helmets that render them immune to the Rabbids' "BWAAAH!!" attack, necessitating a charge attack in order to attack/defeat them.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: If the hubworld changes without you collecting all the stuff in the last version of it, you will be locked out from reaching 100% Completion because all the stuff in the different versions are needed and only count as one each, meaning you cannot recollect stuff over and over in the last phase. There's no way to reverse this, meaning you will have to start a new file if you want to fully complete the game. But to be honest, it's not really worth it.
- Videogame Cruelty Potential: The game actually invites you to be as abusive to the Rabbids as possible when you've got them in the Wiimote design mode. However, the Rabbids like it.
- Actual gameplay itself is like this. You go around causing tons of damage, you steal people's dogs from them, one of the rare items is a baby in a stroller which you can steal, and there are a couple of gags in the game where you can SCARE PEOPLE SO THEY FALL DOWN AN OPEN ELEVATOR SHAFT (or off the side of a building).
- Villain Protagonist: The Rabbids. Granted, they're more Chaotic Stupid than evil, but nevertheless, they're the ones holding the Conflict Ball, breaking havoc in the town and stealing the human's items. No wonder they get mad at you!
- Virtual Paper Doll: You can customize the three Rabbids you use to your liking, with accessories, paint, and more.
