Super Princess Peach (DS)

Difficulty, despite being such a subjective idea, is one of the most important elements of a game’s DNA, with many games made or broken on how well they balance their elements to achieve it. Fair design that emphasizes player skill tends to lead the most satisfying difficulty levels, and some games are designed entirely around pushing that ethos to its limit by making the incredibly challenging gameplay the appeal of that title. There is, however, an odd inverse of that approach, with quite a few games existing in a sort of “mellow platformer” genre. Games like Yoshi’s Story and Kirby’s Epic Yarn both make things easy and accessible for younger players or adults just wishing to relax during their gaming time, and Super Princess Peach fits into this genre niche quite snugly with an approachable design meant to help it appeal to young girls who might not normally pick up a platform game.

Super Princess Peach is a spin-off of the Mario titles clearly meant to appeal to a different demographic, with saccharine visuals and a few ideas that stray from the Super Mario design approach. Taking the typical Mario platformer plot and reversing it, the Mushroom Kingdom’s hero Mario has been captured by the evil turtle king Bowser and Princess Peach is now saving her frequent savior. To help with the battles ahead, Peach is given a living umbrella by the name of Perry to serve as her weapon and companion, and Super Princess Peach actually tries to develop this partner a bit between the eight locations of Vibe Island. After a boss fight, Perry will have dreams as he remembers his past, learning why he’s a sentient umbrella and remembering characters he met before he joined up with Peach. While this side narrative does serve as an interesting motivation for beating the levels and bosses of each location, it never properly concludes, Perry’s tale left hanging by the end of the journey in favor of Peach wrapping up her own adventure.

Besides Perry, Princess Peach’s skills on Vibe Island all come from the factor that let Bowser kidnap Mario in the first place: the unusual Vibe Scepter. The Vibe Scepter has thrown the emotions of everyone on the island in disarray, with people’s happiness, sadness, anger, and even calmness amplified to the point it can even give them unusual new powers. Long standing Mario enemies like Goombas and Boos now have variants that change how you approach them. Sad enemies are usually fast as they rush at you with tears flowing out of their eyes, angry enemies get more aggressive, and in a cute touch, Calm enemies are often found sleeping, Peach able to slip past them if she walks slowly. The more interesting element the Vibes add to the game is that Peach can tap into these powers as she pleases, each one giving her different skills that can solve puzzles or beat enemies. When happy, Peach is almost literally on cloud nine, flying up into the air and spinning in swirls to push things around with the power of wind. Sadness comes with an incredible speed boost and the ability to use your streams of tears to water objects, and anger is almost the inverse as Peach moves slowly but is literally burning mad, her fire igniting objects and her stomps causing the ground to quake. Being calm is Peach’s only ability used more to help you than affect the environment, with it just serving as a way to heal up damage you’ve taken. All four Vibes draw on a special meter to ensure they aren’t overly abused, but it can be replenished with pick-ups or by scooping up enemies with your umbrella, so it is present when needed but limited to prevent you from breaking the level design wide open.

Whether or not you can invest yourself in Super Princess Peach will definitely depend on how much you feel a game needs to challenge you. The basic elements of getting to the end of the level are straightforward enough, Peach jumping across hazards and hitting enemies with her sentient parasol. For young players inexperienced with the genre, Super Princess Peach won’t just give them a win, putting in some aggressive enemies, mildly challenging jumping puzzles, and gameplay shifts like speed based zipline sections and boss battles, but this design is meant to try and hit that difficulty sweet spot for an audience not yet trained up on the core mechanics of video game genres in general. Peach has a generous health bar and plenty of ways to recover it, there are no lives so death is just a level reset, and nothing can instantly kill the adventuring princess so even falling to your doom down a pit just pops you back to some solid ground further back.

Were this all Super Princess Peach had going for it, it likely would be too easy for experienced gamers, but Super Princess Peach takes an approach that lets mellow platformers appeal to more audiences despite their forgiving and gentle difficulty design. The first and most obvious element is the fact most levels in the game have three mushroom-headed captives called Toads hidden in boxes that Peach must find to unlock the final boss battle and some post-game bonus levels. While getting to the end of the level usually entails just getting there, the Toads require the player to explore the environment, engaging with mechanics that test their platforming skill and ability to figure out small puzzles and navigational challenges. In some ways, it evokes the designs of games like Yoshi’s Island and The Legendary Starfy, especially since the creators of Starfy were the ones to work on this game. Peach will helpfully react on the bottom screen if there is a special collectible in the area, and while she has plenty of cute reactions down there based on her mood, this ensures that hunting for the optional items is an achievable task for a devoted player. Strangely enough, Super Princess Peach also emphasizes the collecting of coins in its level, and while most Mario games just have it as a way to earn extra lives or points, Peach spends the coins like actual money in a shop. The shop has a wide range of items to buy, and while some are just for fun like the music tracks, Peach can also purchase incredibly useful skills, upgrades to her health and vibe meters, and levels for minigames. This secondary layer to the gameplay gives Super Princess Peach a good amount of depth, and for those interested in 100%, it’s both an achievable task without guides and one that requires some skill to complete.

Super Princess Peach is a bit concerned about losing its younger audience though, so the game is perhaps too generous in giving tips to any puzzle element or boss fight you run into. By hitting a block with Perry’s face on it, the umbrella will tell you exactly what you need to do most of the time, and while it can seem a bit condescending or an element that potentially sabotages the idea of discovery, it’s not really impacting things too heavily. Sure, you could test out your Vibes to see which one works, but your skill set is fairly limited so that it wouldn’t be a long experimentation process and most are easy enough to figure out just on sight. Of course the hot-air balloon will use your anger Vibe’s fire to make it rise and the windmills will clearly turn with joy’s wind powers, so having a block tell you that if you touch it doesn’t really undermine them, especially since they game makes sure these small elements aren’t the only thing keeping you from collecting all the Toads. The boss fight hint blocks are a bit more of an issue though, telling you just how to fight them before you even meet the boss! You go in knowing just what you need to do, and while execution is still a factor, it would have been nice if the game was at least a bit more oblique about its hints. Admittedly, the block can feel necessary, in that one boss requires you to use your joy Vibe to fly to his head and spin it in circles despite his visual design not indicating that at all and the actual owl boss you fought earlier in the game not being effected by such a trick. Since the block tells you how to hurt him though, it’s instead about finding the opening and avoiding his attacks rather than doing a test run of each vibe.

Appealing to kids definitely leads to some of Super Princess Peach’s minigames and gameplay shifts, but unlike the overly helpful hint boxes, they are mostly a good addition. The opening cutscene gives you a little game to play so you don’t get bored during the exposition, and before each boss fight, you go through a little minigame challenge that involves the touch screen. Often simple but enough of a challenge to hold your attention, there are some dips in quality like the submarine areas of levels requiring you to blow into the DS microphone to launch attacks, but these moves away from the platforming core keep things fresh even for players who don’t want to look around for secrets. Unlockable minigames like the Toad Tote maze game and the Toad Shot target shooter both put up a good fight in their later levels. While the main game’s levels are short enough that they aren’t likely to wear out their welcome, the break to do something else does keep things from growing stale, but the level design in Super Princess Peach does shift enough to avoid being too familiar as well. Levels can have somewhat non-linear designs, with pipes and doors taking you forward and backward or into subsections for the optional challenges, and the different locales on Vibe Island usually swap in new enemies and Vibe uses to give them a more distinct identity in addition to matching setting themes like forests, beaches, and up in the clouds.

THE VERDICT: Super Princess Peach is an excellent example of how to design a mellow platformer, with an approachable design for novice gamers but enough meat for more practiced players to sink their teeth into. While the hint blocks are overly kind with their tips, the quest to collect Toads and coins opens up a second layer to seemingly simple level designs to ensure the game isn’t too easy for its own good. Super Princess Peach is a relaxing adventure that pushes back at the right parts to give you enough to engage with but not evoking frustration. Cute visuals and forgiving design choices might give the initial impression this game is too easy, but despite failing to provide closure on Perry’s story, Super Princess Peach’s mechanics make up for what might turn some players away, the emotion powers augmenting the exploratory level design to push it above even some of the earlier Mario platformers.

And so, I give Super Princess Peach for the Nintendo DS…

A GREAT rating. A great game for easing young gamers into the depth of the greater medium and still giving gaming veterans enough to do, Super Princess Peach is easy to recommend to anyone looking for an exploration platformer that angles to make sure you have a good time rather than risking player frustration. Secondary goals outside the basic victory conditions is a smart way to ensure low difficulty games can still be challenging, and it’s definitely nice to have a game that sits between straightforward platformers and ones that push too hard into testing your skills. The hint blocks being so open with answers is likely the biggest hitching point in the game design, but Vibe Island’s many levels are still structured well enough that having solutions given to you doesn’t doom this to being a game of going through the motions. You aren’t punished much for failure or inexperience, but you are certainly rewarded for getting down the game’s components.

Quite appropriately, Super Princess Peach is a game that does a good job of tapping into the emotions of calmness and happiness while avoiding frustration and sadness. Perry’s unfinished story keeps it from major emotional closure, but it is definitely delightful without completely sacrificing complexity.