I finished Princess Peach Showtime last night, and I came away with a resounding feeling of “that was all right”.
It was decent. It was fine. It was okay. I enjoyed it well enough. But it didn’t set my world alight. At the same time, it wasn’t bad. I didn’t hate it. I don’t feel the need to rant and rave about things it may or may not do “wrong”. It was just… fine.
That’s a bit of a shame, though, given that this was the first time Peach had taken the starring role in a game since 2005’s Super Princess Peach on Nintendo DS. I’m not entirely surprised that Princess Peach Showtime ended up being how it is, particularly after playing the demo, but I do feel like there could have been a bit more to it. So let’s talk about that!
Let’s cover the good points first, because I’ll reiterate: Princess Peach Showtime was fine. I don’t regret spending some time playing it. I wouldn’t discourage someone from buying it if they thought they might enjoy it.
Let’s start with the presentation, which is lovely, with a caveat. Unreal Engine does not run well on Nintendo Switch, and various developers appear to be increasingly unwilling to accept this. Because yes, Princess Peach Showtime is built on Unreal Engine, and consequently, it struggles to perform to the same standard of Nintendo’s own in-house engines, such as the fantastic one used by Super Mario Odyssey, for example. I’m not really a “frame rate guy” by any means, but you can tell Princess Peach Showtime was not developed by Nintendo themselves.
For the most part, this isn’t an issue for gameplay. It’s just a bit of a contrast from the incredible slickness you see in first-party Nintendo-developed games, and I feel like Peach deserved — and could have got — better. Plus Unreal Engine has a bunch of weird quirks that no-one ever seems to talk about, like the fact it appears to be completely incapable of proper transparencies, instead giving transparent objects a distinctly out-of-place looking “dithered” overlay, meaning anything that is supposed to be “transparent” (such as Ice Dancer Peach’s flowing… costume thing) just looks like it’s full of holes instead. But I digress. I was going to talk about good things.
And Princess Peach Showtime does indeed look lovely. Peach’s animation is gorgeous, with a ton of personality to it, and I absolutely love how each of the costumes she obtains over the course of the complete game changes the way she moves around. I’m particularly fond of the bouncy jog that Patissiere Peach moves around with, especially when coupled with the delightful way she sways and shuffles from foot to foot in time with the music while standing still. And the cakes she makes look delicious.
I will add to the above that Princess Peach Showtime in general does a good job with making each of Peach’s incarnations play very distinct from one another — even those that you might assume would be similar, such as the Ninja and Kung-Fu sequences. Every costume has its own unique mechanics and gimmicks, and there’s a satisfying sense of weight and purpose to everything Peach does, although very few require much in the way of what one might call “skill”, with a lot of Peach’s more impressive moves being pulled off either automatically or via button-mashing.
Each different “costume” is also accompanied by its own distinctive set design and soundtrack, giving each set of three stages per outfit a nice feeling of being its own little mini-game in its own right. Yes, it would have been nice to have a bit more of… everything, but one cannot fault Princess Peach Showtime for its efforts to provide a varied experience.
I particularly appreciated the levels that steered clear of platforming, such as the aforementioned Patissiere levels, along with the Mermaid and Ice Dancer stages. The Mermaid levels see you using Peach’s singing voice to direct fish around the screen, usually to either defeat enemies or open up closed things, while the Ice Dancer stages task you with jumping or spinning on special marks on the floor to perform particular “routines”.
The Detective Peach segments were also quite charming. While none of the “mysteries” she is presented with are particularly challenging, especially to anyone who has ever played an adventure game before, I do appreciate that at various points it tasks the player with figuring things out for themselves using some amusing clues scattered around the area — and that combat doesn’t enter into things in these stages.
I do not love the Theets. I know it’s customary for every Mario-adjacent game to have a resident species of annoying sidekick characters as a means of providing context, but the Theets really did very little for me. I’d go so far as to say I found their massive glowing conks, overly earnest nature and screechy voices to be actively irritating at times, though I’d be hard pressed to explain exactly why. What I do know is that I found it tough to care about their plight, and this led to probably my biggest issue with Princess Peach Showtime: the fact that it almost completely lacks a sense of peril.
On the one hand, this is appropriate; the whole point of the game is that Peach is participating in a variety of stage shows in which you know no-one is actually going to get hurt. But at the same time, we’re supposed to believe that the shows have been taken over by malevolent forces, who are doing this “for real”. But the villains themselves are just bumbling idiots who never seem to be the least bit threatening, and we’re given very little reason to care about them or why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s a simple case of “anything purple is a bad guy” and that’s about it.
The lack of a feeling of peril hurts the sense of drama that some stages are clearly going for. You’re presumably supposed to feel like you’re stepping into the role of Peach and saving the adorable little Theets from being exploited by Grape and the Sour Bunch, but couple the fact that I found the Theets a bit annoying with the rather forgettable nature of the enemies, and it was just hard to feel particularly emotionally engaged, even during the climactic and otherwise superficially spectacular final battle.
Part of the lack of peril comes from how easy the game is. I can’t be too harsh on it for this, because it was abundantly clear from the first appearance of this game that it was going to be a family-friendly title aimed at people who perhaps don’t have much video game experience. And I feel that outside of the score-based “rehearsal” challenges, which can be quite tricky, Princess Peach Showtime as a whole would be very accessible to a youngster playing it for the first time.
But I say this in full knowledge that your average Super Mario game manages to pull this off while also catering to more experienced players with tricky levels and optional challenges. The relatively recent Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a great example of this; the critical path through the game is pretty easy, but start hunting down secret levels and you’ll have some seriously fiendish challenges to deal with. It’s this latter part that Princess Peach Showtime lacks.
There’s some degree of replayability in the way that each stage has multiple “gems” to collect — and it’s possible to miss some in pretty much every stage — but the game kind of undermines itself by repeatedly forcing you to sit through hands-off, unskippable cutscenes you’ve seen before and not allowing you to quit out of a level after you’ve beaten it once and found the collectible you were after. For my first few hours with the game, I was replaying levels to get all the gems, but after a while I started to feel like it was more effort than it was worth — and indeed, the rewards for “100%ing” the game are pretty meagre; there’s no “true ending” or anything.
Consequently, once I rolled credits and the game unlocked specific challenges for each of the boss fights — which were actually a highlight of the whole thing, I have to say — along with a “hide and seek” minigame that demanded going back into each and every level again to find between one and three concealed ninjas, I felt very little desire to keep playing. I was done. I was content. I was satisfied. The game was fine. But I didn’t need an encore and I didn’t need a lengthy curtain call. I just wanted to go home.
Princess Peach Showtime is that pantomime you take your kids to, and everyone has a good time laughing at the silly jokes, but no-one is particularly sorry when its last night rolls around and the theatre company moves on to bigger and better things. It was an eminently acceptable way to spend a few hours, but I suspect that it will be forgotten about in a month or two — and years down the line, I doubt many people will still be talking about it all that much.
As I say, that’s a shame. Peach deserves a bit better. She’s a fun character and, judging by this game, has plenty of scope for interesting gameplay. It’s just that this particular show didn’t give her the opportunity to show her full range. Here’s hoping it’s not another twenty years before she gets the chance to take the limelight again.
More about Princess Peach Showtime
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