The Ziggy enemies appear to be modeled after Ziggy Stardust, a stage persona created and portrayed by English rock musician David Bowie from 1972 to 1973. In addition to the identical names, the Garden Ziggy variety features brightly colored lightning bolts painted across each eye and a large yellow mohawk, with the results resembling the cover photo for Bowie's 1973 album Aladdin Sane (which depicts Bowie with a red lightning bolt on one eye and a large red mullet).

In the files of the Donkey Kong Adventure expansion, there are unused files for Rambi the Rhino as a party member, including a model; menu icons; and skills. He would have taken up two spaces on the board and been able to charge through any destructible terrain that enemies are using as cover and destroy it instantly. In the final DLC, Rambi would not appear physically in any form, but would have a gun made in his image. Rambi's model looks closer to his appearance in Rare's Donkey Kong games than his appearance in the Paon and Retro Studios Donkey Kong games, a design change that would also be carried over to Super Nintendo World's iteration of the character after Donkey Kong Adventure's release.

According to Grant Kirkhope. The Phantom Rabbid's song was originally conceived to have rap and heavy metal variations. It was later changed to only focus on opera because the team wasn't satisfied with how the other genre variations turned out.

Davide Soliani has stated that, when developing the game, one of the major influences for Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was the Mario Kart series.

“So, we started with the intention of saying we should renew the genre a little bit. We thought that tactical games are known to be slow paced and they tend to be a little niche, so why not try to have something very dynamic and colorful and fast paced. That’s why our first reference was Mario Kart. How cool would it be to try to translate that kind of action into the combat of our game?”


Soliani also explained that the team talked about adding Rayman to the game. It was decided best to leave him out of the game since The Rabbids and Rayman were now separate series.

“We discussed it, but honestly, we thought that the strength of the Rabbids is that they are a white canvas, so you can do pretty much whatever you want. You can come up with crazy ideas and they work. We tried to bring the same spirit into this game. Mr. Miyamoto kept saying, ‘Show me your colors. Show me your Rabbid’s humor even more. Show me how crazy you can be.’ Of course, Rayman was part of the Rabbids games in the past, but now those are two separate universes.”

According to Davide Soliani, the idea of a Mario and a Raving Rabbids crossover game went through over 13 ideas(two of them being a musical themed game and a FPS game) before the team decided to settle with the turn based tactical RPG game.

"We knew we needed to come up with a new idea, or a new visual or new mechanics. We started to scratch them out, one after the other. We went through a musical game, a first-person shooter game; but really the team is composed of mainly tactical fans''

Rabbid Princess Peach originally had a transformation sequence inspired by Sailor Moon. While the sequence was cut from the game, Davide Soliani stated that the test sequence was made by animators who were desperate to hit the 1000 character animation requirement for character combat.

"When you have to create 1000 animations per character just for the Combat Phase, animators started to go crazy. This was 2 years ago.."

During the intro, the Time Washing Machine that the Rabbids use lists key dates of Nintendo and Ubisoft history:
• September 23rd 1889: The date that Nintendo was founded.
• March 12th 1986: The date that Ubisoft was founded.
• September 24th 1988: The date that Ubisoft, Milan was founded.

When looking for the sorts of unconventional weapons to use in the game, the development team looked at other works of fiction with distorted weapons. One example being the 1997 SciFi hit The Fifth Element, which had a wide variety of Bizarre Weaponry.